Why London’s NYE Fireworks Display Broke Economics Textbooks (opens in new tab)

The article uses the term. If there is a star in the sky and I see it, I don’t consume it so that you can see it too.

But if I occupy a spot, I “consume” that so you can’t be there simultaneously.

So there is rivalry if we both want to be there.

Being in a place can be thought of as a rivalrous good because other people cannot simultaneously be in that place.

s/in/is

But how does this break economics textbooks? They took a public good and effectively privatized it, ostensibly for the public benefit (reducing infrastructure costs on NYE) but conceivably for private benefit (passing out VIP tickets as favors or steering a profitable security contract to an ally).

There's nothing in economics that says the optimal outcome will naturally emerge. There's the concept of equilibrium in price theory, but that only exists under conditions of perfect competition - zero exit/entry costs, absolute market transparency, and fungibility of what's traded. To parallel your firework example, that works quite well for commodities like oil or many ag products, but not for housing.

Check out this book, which provides a good explanation of why it is politically profitable to do things like privatizing public goods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook

Essentially, the authors' argument is that political power can easily be modeled as transactions in a political capital market where access to public goods is traded for political support (participatory or vote delivery blocs in rigged elections, or non-interference by military actors in more obvious dictatorships). The wiki article includes a link to their more rigorous academic exploration of the topic which is almost equally readable.

The state of economy as a science seems to be in much deeper trouble than I expected.

Ok, I'm going to just go with that idea. Let's create a public lottery for art, education, or lets say business funding. Since it's public funded of course it's worth more than the nominal fee (just there so proles don't fight over it) and we can hand out what... $100M (only 20x the fireworks) for a 100,000 people. That's $1000/person and only the scaled cost is only $200! If that's good, why not go bigger like $100B since it costs $10M to start a real business and hey, if you can't raise $2M for the ticket, what kind of entrepreneur are you?

So now we're distributing tickets from public funds worth 5x their purchase price only to the wealthy that can afford them? That sounds... fair? I mean proles get to work in the companies that are started so they benefit too (like watching the fireworks from behind the stands). Heck, even the "failed" entrepreneurs who just throw lavish parties and buy expensive cars support the economy! Life is good when you're born with privilege.

Large fireworks displays do scale sub linearly, just not all the way down to a single bottle rocket. The issue is large displays are viewed on a roughly flat surface aka the earth, but irradiate light into 3D space. To maintain a proper viewing angle fireworks need to be launched ever higher into the air as your showing them to more people.