Perhaps we should eliminate the utilities guaranteed monopoly then! Monopolies are usually dysfunctional.

No, people who live in geography absolutely should not control the land surrounding them. That's effectively land hoarding, and incentivizes deeply counterproductive NIMBYism. People should primarily control the land they own.

Here's an example where the benefit is obvious:

Say I set up a desalination plant for a city with water shortages. I use a lot of electricity; this drives up electricity prices. But I also sell the more scarce water, lowering the price of water. If I make more selling the water, then to first order I'm helping people overall- they value the water more than the electricity. Perhaps I put other, less efficient desalination plants out of use, or simply other uses of electricity that people value less than the water I provide.

They repeatedly claim that previous approaches rely on factorization to reduce things to guessable chunks to avoid the 'blur problem'. This is a misunderstanding. Previous approaches solve this problem by modelling a distribution as output rather than a point. Factorization is one way of representing the distribution, but the key point is that even for the small chunks we predict an output distribution, not a point estimate.

Factored models have no issue producing TV static as an image. Each individual guess is impossible, and yet they don't produce a constant grey averaged image.

Normalizing flows, though not considered particularly efficient, are not factored at all, do not proceed in small steps, and yet still have no issues with blur because they predict a distribution.

Their approach appears to be a hard version of a latent variable model. It may be a good idea, but it isn't a fundamental change in the way they suggest.

Another example would be epipens. There is a competitor, but unlike most drugs, if the doctor prescribes you an epipen, the pharmacy can't give you a generic substitute, it must be name brand.

Tesla is being heavily protected from Chinese competitors by US auto tariffs.

Credit Ratings agencies (in large part responsible for 2008 crash) have direct government granted status.

Taxi medallions, Jones act, sugar tariffs.

These are the ones that come to mind right away, but there's a whole slew of stuff- any regulation that's easier for a big business to comply with than a small competitor, for example. Even worse if the big business manages to influence the regulation to enhance this effect. Personally I'd guess Boeing is an example of this; yes, aviation does have high capital costs but I suspect that FAA regulation + Boeing cozy relationship makes it much harder for new entrants. Of course, this isn't to say the FAA regulation isn't helpful or doesn't improve air safety, just that it also has this effect.

What do you mean by they are the wealthiest in the nation? None of the richest people in the world built their fortunes on groceries?

Price fixing is a phenomenon. Anti trust is a policy agenda. What entity would carry out the proposed agenda, when the parties supposedly fixing are in different countries?

How long did the fixing agreement last successfuly? DRAM has famously gone through booms and busts where supply outstripped demand and led to very cheap prices and no profits.

OPEC worked about as well as any cartel. Could you give an example of a cartel maintaining their position without heavy government help? Even the drug cartels in mexico, with extreme willingness to coerce, cannot maintain a monopoly and have competed drug prices in the US down heavily! If you consider memory a cartel, then it has only remained so by... drastically improving the quality and reducing the cost of its product? Hardly a problem.

More importantly, the raw number of corporations isn't how you measure a monopoly. Profit margins are the key sign of monopoly pricing- but in practice, corporate profit margins have been relatively stable in percentage terms over time. Prices for virtually all consumer goods are way down in real terms over the last 30 years.

In particular, trade might get you more competition with fewer corporations, but via competition with overseas producers. These might show up as a few importing corporations, representing a whole slew of competitors abroad.

The memory market is international, its not clear what anti trust even means here. Even so, look at the price of memory over time, say the last 20-30 years. Adjust for inflation and its even more extreme. Sure, it is up recently with AI demand, but the general trend is drastically reducing cost and increasing quality. Memory technologies are evolving quickly and it's a capital-intensive business, so its not surprising that there are a few leaders. There's no guarantee of instant competition in free markets.

Cartels rarely last long without enforcement. There's such a strong incentive to defect and secretly sell more under the table. Even OPEC could not maintain one. Memory right now is expensive simply because demand outstrips supply and there is significant capital investment and lead time to increasing supply.

Can you find true monopolies in the free market, in the last 100 years, that have lasted for at least 20 years, without some kind of government backing/suppression of competitors? I only know of one.

Things only count as monopolies if they have monopoly pricing power; Google is not a monopoly, they cannot even charge 1 cent per search.

In practice, despite economies of scale, large companies age and become bloated, inflexible, etc. So there's typically plenty of room for new companies to compete.

If a monopolist buys all upstarts, then that creates an even stronger incentive to make competing businesses! You don't even have to succeed in the market, you just have to get bought up! The more they buy out, there stronger incentive there will be to enter the market. No one can do this indefinitely- except with some kind of government support- say a regulation that makes it difficult to enter the market.

Nominally is exactly right! The treaties have been violated many times.

You're missing the 1959-61 famine in China! Sure, famines have happened for other causes. Typically 100+ years ago before technology advanced. Now, famines largely come from poor governance.

Thanks for the background info!

Yes, I agree it is a patchwork system- and its probably quite difficulty to analyze! I'm arguing that a private ownership model with trading would lead to better outcomes, and basically end for all practical purposes water shortages.

For example, the smaller mostly Hispanic farmers you described above wouldn't lose their water rights in a rights ownership system- they could hold them, rent them out, sell them etc. But they wouldn't lose them merely for being unable to farm. Of course, water rights are a resource rent and it might be desirable to tax them as well- effectively economically partially public ownership- but this doesn't change the core argument about the efficiency of tradable rights.

I am suggesting expanding their water right- instead of only the right to do X, Y, Z with the water, take whatever right to the water they do have, in terms of amount of water, and say "you can do whatever you want with this much water". How to allocate resource rents doesn't have much effect on the market structure itself.

A lot of vitriol against supply and demand without any evidence.

Food is life. Food is culture. Just as much as water. Which countries have had famine, those that allocate via some system of food rights, or those that had a free market in food? The largest examples of famine I am aware of, in the USSR and Maoist China, were driven by some central allocation of food rather than a market. Not a good record.

One of the great features of markets is that things don't need to be decided collectively. Perhaps 90% of people want to wear blue T shirts, but I want a red one. If we collectively decide, I get a blue T shirt. In the market, I buy a red T shirt- perhaps at a very slightly higher price due to less economy of scale.

We certainly know of areas where vanilla markets can fail- externalities etc, but these do not apply to the situation here. The existing system of water rights doesn't feel like a collective decision, but rather entrenched special interests and lobbyists.

If the Native Americans have water rights, they can also sell them. They can choose to use it inefficiently on subsistence farming, or they could sell at the going rate. A normal market itself doesn't imply any particular allocation of water rights, just that they should be as fungible and transferable as possible.

Why are the laws that govern the infrastructure particularly important? It only matters now because its a tangle of regulation. Yes, big users can often get bulk discounts or other special arrangements by committing to use. This happens in many areas.

There's no law governing what products my grocery store must carry. Yet, I can still choose a store with many things I like, at affordable prices. My store may (and frequently does) exclude all products containing some chemical considered harmful even if it isn't banned. Of course, water has more of a natural monopoly problem, but that's more for last mile infrastructure and not broader supply.

I don't understand the details of the riparian vs prior appropriation doctrine. How does this create an issue? If the water rights are defined somehow, in a usage-independent way, only in terms of the net water removal, to account for runoff from local use, and the water from them can be traded, then a market can work regardless of the specific nature of the right.

Any association holding the rights could allocate its water internally as it sees fit. Just like any other asset? Or it could decide to sell it and distribute the money instead- perhaps even better for fairness to it's members!