Price Gouging

Art Carden, assistant professor at Rhodes in Memphis, breaks price gouging down for us, showing it's based on faulty reasoning (the criticism of it I mean).

Writing articles like these must feel like tilting at windmills. Every time there is a natural disaster and prices rise, there is a chorus of voices saying it's price gouging. What drives, therefore, economists like Art Carden, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell and so many others to write these pieces again and again? It's not simple cost-benefit calculation, you can bet on that. These op-ed pieces are expensive to write, in terms of one's opportunity costs, and they hardly persuade anyone at the margin if I had to guess. But maybe they filter through the chain of social networks and get good reasoning into the hands of people who can tell their parents or siblings or co-workers exactly why the price needs to go up. Still, if you write for the purpose of changing people's minds, it must feel an awful lot like tilting at windmills since the world is going to still be as confused an economically illiterate after you write your piece as it was before.