So the modern “law of one price” in posted-price markets, also known as 
“marginalist pricing”, works as follows:

Everybody pays the same price, and the price is set wherever the market clears, 
with no further buyers left who are willing to pay more, and no further sellers 
left who are willing to accept less.

It gives us such outcomes as rich people using water on golf courses in 
Scottsdale while poor people may not have drinking water in other Phoenix 
neighborhoods, and AirBnB renters owning all the property in tourist-heavy 
neighborhoods while no wage-earners can afford houses there.

In the era when Private Equity is becoming a kind of singleton in the wealth 
distribution, PE will own all of everything at the posted price, and nobody 
else will own any of anything.  We will need surreal numbers to subdivide that 
delta-function, to characterize the intramural competitions of the PE firms 
with each other.

The argument “for” marginalist pricing is that it is the only “fair” system, by 
the criterion that whoever wants something the most, and is willing to push for 
it the most, should be the one to get it.  We put aside, of course, all the bad 
faith and nonsense in that argument, since in a system with vast asymmetries in 
access, information, risk buffering, legal and civil protections, etc., that 
reflect as asymmetries in purchasing power, all these measures of “force” are 
wildly artifacted and don’t correlate well with any sane measure of “need” or 
“want”.

The following paper gives a nice statistical breakdown and analysis of what 
marginalist pricing can look like for ideas (still early days):
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03337
2512
PDF Document · 11.8 MB

One probably doesn’t even need to “bias” the input of the ML system to produce 
skewed outputs; it can just be driven by the bulk of volume of noise in the 
available sources.  Whoever “wants” a position most, quantified by the noise 
level generated, can have the position.

Gonna get harder and harder to maintain a community of sanity and sense in the 
world rapidly being built up around us, and hoping to drown us all.

Eric


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