A highly engineered market can improve resource allocation, but obviously there's no market force actually providing the food being allocated.

It’s a good thing they had central planning to come up with this system and well defined regulations to ensure it worked appropriately.

What absolute rubbish this article is from top to bottom.

A stupid system was replaced by a slightly more effective one... and it was 'markets and economists' that did it! Pure propaganda.

Heres a more efficient system. How much does the food box they give out cost? Say $50? Just give the customers $50 and let them spend it. No more admin

>The system operated in ignorance of what food banks needed.

Clearly the root of the problem. Straw Manning "central planning" is a perverted way to characterize the failure.

The article really wants to drive home how bad "central planning" is, but the problem, as per the article, originates from the fact that the food banks themselves are operating semi-independently from Feeding America. So actually the whole problem originates because you already have decentralization, which is the opposite of central planning. And this is a common situation with a lot of public services when they do a half-assed approach of providing the service publicly. Healthcare is a good example.

As per the article, the issue was that due to the food banks operating independently, the food banks were not relying information about their locally sourced food donations to Feeding America. Their solution is a fake currency, basically a way of rationing food from Feeding America. But of course they wouldn't put it in those terms, because of the socialist connotation of the word, "rationing". Instead they call it "market design". LOL. But the point is, Walmart which is more centralized than this operation, has no problem. So actually central planning isn't the issue here. The issue here is that you have a decentralized operation that necessitates a market mechanism.

Politics informed by ideological economists creates the problem. Economists informed by political ideologies create the solution to the problem that only exists because of their design.

Overall I thought the article was interesting!

I did find it funny that multiple times it cited the medical resident match making algorithm as a success. Anyone who has gone through this process knows how horrible of a system it is. You essentially open an envelop that tells your job and location for the next 3-6 years. Hospitals + government love the system because they can artificially reduce resident wages, applicants cannot negotiate job offers.

Perhaps we should adopt a system that doesn’t create, or rely on, poverty?

It's an interesting case study, and I'm glad it worked for them. But I feel there would have been many other ways to solve the problem.

In fact, one thing I'm confused about, and that's not very clear to me, it sounds like prior to this new system, each food bank would just receive a random selection of foods of a given weight. But with the new system, they can choose exactly what foods they want to receive.

If so, this is a huge difference that has nothing to do with the bidding. A lot of the inefficiencies were probably due to this alone. You'd be getting things you don't need and not those you do and it created waste.

Now food banks could pick and choose what they needed.

This even justifies the introduction of bidding. Because once you have a proper catalogue and food banks can choose what they want, you have the problem of what if they all want the same limited quantity items?

You can make it first come first served. Now food banks would compete on being the quickest to enter their order. Or you can do other things, they went with bidding.

From that angle, bidding actually can look a lot fairer and "socialist" than "first come first served".

Given how horribly structured the original system was, I'm pretty sure literally any change would be a massive improvement.

I don't suppose anyone took a look at how that original system came into effect, or why it remained in place for decades. Based on what little was presented in the article, it seems the organization, and likely others in the same camp, are unfamiliar with and/or reluctant to employ continuous improvement techniques.

This reads like straight propaganda.

An inefficient system is always going to be ineffective. The author tries to posit that anything that isn’t market based is inherently inefficient and that their Chicago School solution is a success because it’s market based.

None of this is supported with evidence outside the new system working better than the old one.

Militaries efficiently allocate nutrition without markets (it’s the most important work they do) as do grocers.

There are a lot of ways you could improve on this, many not requiring the complexity and overhead of market based solutions.