Seconded. When you talk to people you often find out that they are desperate to do something useful. They do not, partly because if they are not paid to do it, they can't afford it. But even more importantly they are all too often actively prevented from it by random rules (e.g. work safety rules in case of a factory). When there are no barriers people would often even work for free. For example, when personal computers became available in 80s, and rule-makers haven't yet realized that a new field has opened up, the open source movement emerged and built the entire software infrastructure for free.
Curated. I liked this for a few reasons:
They had more volunteers than they had space for.
What happened to the non-volunteers during these 4 weeks?
A similar thing happened during the February 2026 blizzard in New York City. The city raised pay for emergency snow shovelers from about $19.14/hour to $30/hour (with $45/hour overtime). These crews clear snow in places plows can’t reach (bus stops, crosswalks, fire hydrants), so staffing quickly during a major storm is essential.
It seems to illustrate a similar economic principle to the one in this post: when something becomes critically scarce in an emergency, raising compensation both signals urgency and rapidly mobilizes effort.
I really liked this post. It's heartwarming. I like adding things to my list of creative solutions. I also like to relate it to my own issues with... self-efficacy, I guess: there are so many things that I don't do, or don't even notice I can do, until someone makes the option available to me in neat packaged form.
While price gouging can quickly mobilize forces to satisfy the emergency demand, they can also have problematic second-order effects. If a price gouge is too high, then this allows certain agents to benefit from the disaster. This creates a perverse incentive that disincentivizes disaster prevention, and potentially even incentivizing artifically intensifying / creating disasters.
I have a lot of trouble seeing how this would work in practice. I'd expect the downsides of intentionally creating disasters to be high, and that the people in a position to cause them through negligence would generally not be the ones who could benefit by selling into a disaster.
I do see how this could happen when the seller is a monopoly, though, so I do think our normal approach of trying to avoid monopolies, and to the extent we allow them highly regulate what they can charge, is still good.
Enron would be one case study where they worked to create artificial scarcity of electricity and then profit from increased prices.
The largest harm of Enron was the massive accounting fraud, not the artificial scarcity (though that was also large and bad!). But even the artificial scarcity was mostly fraud (lying to CAISO in various ways).
The artificial scarcity was also only possible because of regulatory loopholes that have since been closed. Overall this looks to me like a situation where instead of "full regulated monopoly" or "full free market" we built something in between, and initially did a bad job of it.
Sure, but the same incentive applies to fire departments & hospitals. Many organizations get their funding exclusively from harmful events. And even if firefighters have a (weak) incentive against fire safety, they couldn't stop us from practising it anyway.
Hospitals make money from treating people not from people being ill. Their problematic incentives get them to treat people that don't really need hospital treatment more than they have an incentive to make people ill.
Given people a routine colonoscopy when there's no evidence that routine colonoscopies increase lifespan and then treating what's found, could be seen as creating disasters (positive test results) but thinking of the positive tests as a harmful event mistakes the dynamics.
Six years ago, as covid-19 was rapidly spreading through the US, my sister was working as a medical resident. One day she was handed an N95 and told to "guard it with her life", because there weren't any more coming.
N95s are made from meltblown polypropylene, produced from plastic pellets manufactured in a small number of chemical plants. Two of these plants were operated by Braskem America in Marcus Hook PA and Neal WV. If there were infections on site, the whole operation would need to shut down, and the factories that turned their pellets into mask fabric would stall.
Companies everywhere were figuring out how to deal with this risk. The standard approach was staggering shifts, social distancing, temperature checks, and lots of handwashing. This reduced risk, but each shift change was an opportunity for someone to bring in an infection from the community.
Someone had the idea: what if we never left? About eighty people, across both plants, volunteered to move in. The plan was four weeks, twelve-hour shifts with air mattresses on the floor each night and seeing their families only through screens. With full isolation no one would be exposed, and they could keep the polypropylene flowing.
The company would compensate them well: full wages for the whole time, even when sleeping, and a paid week off after. They had more volunteers than they had space for.
I've looked pretty hard, and as far as I can tell no other factories [1] did this. Companies retooled to make PPE. Ford and GM converted auto plants to make ventilators and masks. Distilleries made hand sanitizer. No one else volunteered to move into their factory.
And it wasn't emergency planners who came up with the idea, either. It was ordinary people, looking at their situation, and thinking creatively about how to do their part.
In those 28 days they produced 40M pounds of polypropylene, enough for maybe 500M N95s.
These workers were doing something critical that almost no one else could do. When people argue about higher pricing during emergencies, this is what the economics can look like: the work was needed, the plants could not run without them, and they were paid accordingly.
Notice, however, that Braskem made it possible for people to be heroes. If the workers had been expected to do this for normal wages, this wouldn't have happened. The number of volunteers is not independent of the offer. When someone figures out a creative way to fill a vital gap in an emergency, they should get paid like it matters, because that's how you get more gaps filled.
Their short-term impact was producing the materials for 500M masks, but I hope their long-term impact is larger: showing how in an emergency ordinary people thinking creatively about their specific situation can find solutions no one else would come up with for them.
[1] This does stretch it a little: while this is the only case I could find for a factory, there were several utilities that did things along these lines. Ex: 1, 2.
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