The Shortage That Is Not There: Who Sets the Price When Supply Is Hidden

The price of a thing is set not by how much of it exists, but by how much of it can be seen.

This is not a figure of speech. It is a rule that different industries have rediscovered every twenty years or so, each time taking it for a misfortune of their own. It has a consequence that is usually left unsaid, because it is more disagreeable than the rule itself: whoever controls the display sets the price — and does so having produced nothing and destroyed nothing.

What follows is how this works with apartments, with airline tickets and with power. In all three cases the mechanism is the same, and that is not a metaphor: the arithmetic coincides.

Everything verifiable is linked at the end; assessments are marked as assessments.

Eight flights a day, reduced to none

Aviation is the best documented, because there it happened earliest and in front of Congress.

In late 1981 New York Air opened a route from LaGuardia to Detroit — a market served by American Airlines. Before long the new flights began appearing at the very bottom of the screen in Sabre, the reservation system American owned. Bookings dried up. Eight Detroit flights a day became none.

Stop here for a moment. No aircraft crashed. Tickets were on sale. The fare was competitive. One thing had changed: the agent typing in a query saw those flights last. The airline died on that route not because it was beaten in the air, but because it was pushed one line below the threshold of attention.

Around the same time Sabre withheld Continental’s discount fares on forty-nine routes where American competed. A staff member was directed to write a program that would automatically suppress any discount fare loaded into the system. Not “give priority to our own” — suppress the others.

In 1983 American’s president, Robert Crandall, explained the design to Congress with a frankness nobody has surpassed since:

“The preferential display of our flights, and the corresponding increase in our market share, is the competitive raison d’être for having created the system in the first place.”

That sentence is worth reading twice. A reservation system costing hundreds of millions was built neither for speed of calculation nor for the convenience of agents. It was built to decide what a person would see first. Everything else was a by-product.

The government disagreed. In 1984 biased display in Sabre and in the systems owned by United and TWA was outlawed. In 1985 the Department of Justice accused American and United of running a second screen that favoured the system’s owner. In 1986 Delta complained that American was feeding Sabre flight times shorter than the real ones so its own flights would sort higher. By 1987 a trade journal conceded that American systems were “about as close to neutrality as a system could reasonably be expected to get.”

And here is the ending that makes the whole story worth recalling. Once the screens stopped being weapons, their owners began selling access to them instead. The neutrality rules were repealed, or quietly allowed to expire, in 2010. Nobody argued. The reason to keep them had simply gone — and the rule went with it.

One detail explains the stakes better than any figure. Texas Air’s Frank Lorenzo bought the loss-making Eastern Air Lines — by several accounts to gain control of its SystemOne reservation system. The airline was not bought for its aircraft. It was bought for its screen.

The arithmetic of the middleman

Now to why this happens on its own, without a conspiracy.

An intermediary who lives on a percentage earns from the size of transactions, not their number. Add a second property: prices rise when supply appears scarce. The conclusion follows automatically and requires no malice — showing less pays better than showing everything.

A second income sits on top. If an object cannot be found except through the intermediary, the buyer pays twice: the seller for the thing, and the intermediary for the right to learn that the thing exists.

Sometimes this is put in writing. When the US Federal Trade Commission investigated the practices of regional property databases and offered settlements, Realcomp of Michigan refused to sign — asserting that it had the right to hide the listings of discount brokers, since such competition harmed the revenue of its members. That is not a leak and not an accusation. It is a position stated in an official reply to a regulator: showing the cheaper offer is unprofitable, and we consider ourselves entitled not to show it.

Here is the point for which this article was written.

In a system where the intermediary takes a percentage, wealth goes not to whoever produces but to whoever stands in the doorway. The builder builds, the tenant pays, and the largest earnings go to whoever decides which apartments will be visible. He created not a single square metre. His asset is not property but position: he is in between. The figure is older than any screen: the money changer at his table in the Temple of Jerusalem took four to eight per cent for nothing more than standing on a road that could not be gone around.

Remember that description. It will be needed later, and not for a conversation about real estate.

When the goods are not an apartment but a choice

Everything said about a market in things holds where there are no things at all.

Every choice has its screen — the list one is permitted to choose from. The choice of a government has several such screens: who was registered, who was admitted to the ballot, whose voice is heard in the outlets the money reaches. Each is a finite list, and each has someone who decides what will fit on it.

From there the arithmetic repeats word for word. Hidden supply raises the price. In housing that is the rent. In politics it is irreplaceability: the fewer alternatives are visible, the dearer the incumbent — not in money, but in the willingness to endure.

“Who else, if not him” is not a political judgement. It is a report on the state of the screen.

Today, 23 August 2026, Kazakhstan is electing its Kurultai — 145 deputies of the single-chamber parliament established by the constitution adopted at the referendum of 15 March with 87.15 percent in favour. The election runs entirely on party lists: there is no self-nomination and no deputies appointed by quota. On 23 July the Central Election Commission closed registration, admitting 545 candidates from seven parties.

Note the design rather than the outcome. The voter chooses not among those who wish to be elected, but from a list the commission drew up a month earlier. That is the screen. Whatever failed to reach it by 23 July does not exist for 23 August — as the New York Air flights, which went on flying perfectly well the whole time, did not exist for the agent.

Beside it stands a second screen, the one that explains what to vote for. For state information policy the ministry of culture and information budgeted 62.8 billion tenge in 2024 and around 66 billion for 2025. That is money for visibility: an outlet that receives it exists for the reader; an outlet that does not exists for itself.

And a third mechanism, the most direct. In February 2026, ahead of the referendum, an Astana entrepreneur, Kantemir Almyshev, was jailed for fifteen days. For several days running he had been publishing analyses of the coming vote on a social network, warning of a return to a super-presidential model and calling for a No. By his account, the city administration telephoned asking him to delete the posts; he refused, and police came to his workplace.

The man did not vanish. His arguments were not refuted. He was simply taken off the screen for two weeks — precisely during the period when the screen was deciding.

There are the three levels of one and the same operation: keep off the list, decline to pay for visibility, remove from display. At none of them is anything destroyed. Everything that exists goes on existing — out of sight.

Who collects the percentage

The political middleman has a commission too, and it is likewise reckoned on the sum rather than the number of transactions.

In a country where choice is bounded by a list, the income from a position grows with the durability of that position. Hence a regularity everyone in Kazakhstan knows but rarely calls a mechanism rather than a vice: the wealthiest people are those at the helm and the officials. Not inventors, not industrialists, not farmers. Those who stand in the doorway.

This is not an accusation against particular individuals; it is a description of a design. Where access to a resource, a licence, a plot of land, a contract or a column in a newspaper passes through a person’s decision rather than a rule, that person’s position is his capital. He produces nothing — he decides what will be visible, and to whom.

And this design has a property that explains its longevity better than any talk of national character: it reproduces itself. An intermediary living on a percentage has no interest in widening the display, because widening it lowers the price. Which means that any reform increasing transparency is a direct deduction from his income. Not from his convictions. From his income.

That is why an argument about transparency is never an argument about values, however faithfully it is conducted in those words.

The one-business-day rule

Against this mechanism humanity has devised exactly one remedy, and it is a dull one: require that whatever is offered publicly be placed in the shared record.

In 2005 the US Department of Justice sued the National Association of Realtors, whose rules let brokers withhold data from competitors that worked only online. The case ended in 2008: the databases were obliged to give online brokers the same access. In 2019 the association adopted its clear cooperation policy — a participant must submit a listing to the shared database within one business day of beginning to market the property publicly. No philosophy, only a deadline.

The sense of that deadline is this. While a property is shown to a chosen few, it is private. The moment it is advertised outwards it becomes part of the market — and the market is entitled to see it. One business day is the border between a private deal and a public offer.

In March 2024 the same association agreed to pay $418 million and to abolish its own rules on commissions. In 2025 the largest free platform announced a rule of its own: a property marketed publicly but not posted there within twenty-four hours would never appear on its site.

A political system has an exact analogue of such a deadline — the limit on the number of terms. It too is a technical norm without philosophy: it does not say who is good and who is bad, it says that after so many years the display is refreshed by force, whether or not anyone is pleased with it.

And it is here that the story of the reservation screens stops being an analogy and becomes a prediction.

Nobody repealed aviation’s neutrality rules in open battle. They expired in 2010, once they had become inconvenient and unnoticed. A term limit disappears the same way — not in argument but by a reset: the norm formally remains, but the counter is set to zero and it ceases to mean anything. On 15 March 2026 the new constitution was supported by 87.15 percent of those who voted; the president, casting his ballot, dismissed talk of a transfer of power and said elections would be held on schedule in 2029 — despite a possible reset of the term.

The difference between “the rule expired” and “the rule was reset” is only one of speed. The outcome is identical: the one device that forced the screen to refresh against the will of whoever holds it disappears. Why a ruler’s departure turns out to be an unsolvable problem at all is a separate story, but it comes down to the same counter.

The complaint filed in August

While one country resets the counter on terms, another goes to court over the counter on apartments — and it is the same dispute.

In August 2026 two renters in New York filed a class action. They allege that a brokerage which has been buying up competitors for more than a decade controls over 80 percent of Manhattan’s rental listings on 2025 data — and that by pulling them from free platforms it manufactured the appearance of a housing shortage.

The figures from the complaint. The number of rental units available across New York fell 40 percent in a year. Rents rose 3 percent in June, and in July the increase doubled to 6 percent. One plaintiff took a one-bedroom in downtown Manhattan at $5,270 a month — where a month earlier the average asking rent in that area had been $4,390.

These are one side’s claims in court rather than established facts; the defendant declined to comment. But the shape of the accusation matters more than the outcome of the case: the company is not accused of demolishing buildings or evicting tenants. It is accused of having stopped showing existing apartments in the place where people looked for them free of charge.

The senator behind one of the inquiries described the risk as “a two-tiered housing market where insiders pay for exclusive access to housing inventory and market data, while everyone else is shut out.”

Two-tiered access is the precise name for what results when the screen belongs to a private interest. Some have access to what exists. The rest have access to what is shown.

When the hiding is done by an algorithm

The latest stage differs in one respect: the person making the decision disappears from it.

Software for algorithmic rent setting is applied, on available estimates, to more than 24 million housing units worldwide. An investigation in 2022 described how the system recommends rents to owners and, its authors argued, nudges them to hold some apartments back rather than put them on the market. About 90 percent of managers accept the price proposed. In November 2022 the antitrust division of the US Department of Justice opened an investigation; in 2024 it sued, arguing that what stood before it was a price-fixing scheme; in August 2024 San Francisco banned algorithmic rent setting within the city.

Compare the three stages. The reservation screens had Crandall, who could explain the logic to Congress. The brokerage has a legal entity that can be summoned to court. The algorithm has nobody: no particular person decides to hold an apartment back — the system calculates that it will fetch more, and nine managers out of ten agree.

This stage has an exact political twin, and it is older than algorithms. It is called self-censorship.

Nobody telephones the editor. No instruction arrives that could be produced as evidence. He works out for himself that after a certain article the subscription will not be renewed — and he is right nine times out of ten. Collusion requires colluders; a recommendation engine requires only that its advice be followed. A state information order works as exactly such an engine: it forbids nothing, it makes one kind of behaviour dearer than another — and after that the newsrooms do the arithmetic themselves.

How to tell a real shortage from an assigned one

From all of the above follow tests that apply both to a market in things and to a market in choices.

Count the offers, not the prices. Price is a consequence, and a table will readily answer a question other than the one put to it. The primary question is how many objects are visible and how that number has moved. A real shortage is visible in the physical world: less is built, less is produced, deliveries take longer. An assigned one is visible only on a screen.

Watch how objects disappear. Sold and withdrawn are different events. So are defeated at an election and not admitted to it.

Compare screens. The same object present where access is paid for and absent where it is not is exactly that border between the private and the public.

Ask who is paid a percentage. An intermediary on a flat fee has an interest in the number of transactions. An intermediary on a percentage has an interest in their size. These are two different professions sharing one name. And if a country’s wealthiest people are those who allocate access rather than those who produce something, the question of what the economy rests on may be considered closed.

Look for the rule about the deadline. In every industry that has been through this argument, a norm appears of the form “publish to the shared record within so many hours.” In every state that has been through the same argument, a norm appears of the form “no more than two terms.” Whether such a norm exists says more about a system than everything its participants declare. So does its removal.

The forecast, and how to check me on it

Until now the subject has been how the thing is built. Now, what follows from the design. This is an assessment rather than a fact, and below I give the counters by which a reader can check me.

The starting rule is one: where income comes from position rather than production, the return on position exceeds the return on production. Everything else follows arithmetically.

First. Capable people go to the doorway, not to the workbench. If a plot of land, a licence, a contract and a newspaper column are distributed by decision rather than by rule, the most profitable career route is not to build a factory but to be where the deciding is done. The doorway does not widen: its value is its narrowness. So the number of places does not grow while the number of applicants does — and the price of entry rises. A rising price of entry to the doorway is called corruption, but in substance it is the ordinary market quotation of a scarce asset.

Second. The gap between economic growth and people’s incomes will widen. This is already visible in the national statistics, and it is a measurement rather than a prediction. In the first half of 2026 GDP grew 4.1 percent, manufacturing 9.8 percent, private investment 21.4 percent. In the same period real wages fell 2.3 percent in the first quarter — the worst result among the countries of the Eurasian Union — and retail trade halved its pace, from 6.3 to 2.8 percent. The economy grew. The people who grew it became poorer.

Such a divergence is impossible if the profit goes to the producer. It is a matter of course if the profit goes to whoever stands between the producer and the market.

Third. Fortunes will surface under the names of former officials rather than serving ones. There is a technical reason for this, not only a moral one. An office is a poor asset: it can be neither sold nor bequeathed, and it comes to an end. So while it lasts, it is converted into what can be sold and bequeathed: shares, land, licences, contracts, well-disposed partners. The conversion becomes visible not while the person is at the helm but afterwards — when he leaves the office already an owner. Hence the regularity mistaken for coincidence: in such a system the list of the wealthiest is replenished not by inventors but by graduates of power.

Fourth. Transparency reforms will be announced and left unfinished. Not out of hypocrisy. Widening the display lowers the price of the doorway, and those who must finish the reform are those whose income consists of that price. To demand principle here is to demand that a person voluntarily reduce his own income for the benefit of strangers. It happens, but not systematically and not at the scale of a country.

Fifth, and the most disagreeable. The number of the poor will grow while GDP grows. The country measures its summit, while the strength of an economy is decided at its floor. Not because too little is produced, but because what is produced passes through the doorway and leaves its share there. Every additional layer of intermediation is another percentage point, and it does not come out of the air: it comes out of the difference between what a person created and what he received.

Five counters by which this can be checked

So that the forecast is testable rather than convenient, here is what to watch over the next five to seven years.

1. The gap between GDP growth and real incomes. If it narrows, I am wrong. If it holds or widens while GDP is positive, the mechanism is working.
2. The origin of large fortunes. Count how many of the top hundred began with production and how many with access. The share of the second group is the measured price of the doorway.
3. The share of the budget distributed by decision rather than by rule. Direct procurement, tenders with a single bidder, grants with no public breakdown. The state information order is telling here: while it grows and its breakdown by outlet stays closed, the screen remains a paid one.
4. The direction of change in the rules of admission. Is the list of those who may be chosen widening: is self-nomination returning, is the threshold for registering a party falling, is access to the ballot becoming simpler. Movement towards narrowing is direct confirmation.
5. Where the qualified are going. The departure of an engineer, a doctor and an entrepreneur is a vote on where it pays to produce. What must be counted is not migration in general but the migration of those able to create value.

The forecast is refuted simply. If in the coming years real incomes begin to grow faster than GDP, if people with no biography in government appear on the list of the largest fortunes, if the budget comes to be distributed by rule, and if the list of those admitted to elections widens — then I was wrong, and the doorway has ceased to be the most profitable place in the country.

I contend that this will not happen until the design of the screen changes. Not the people on the screen — the design.

What remains

The story of the reservation screens ended in neither victory nor defeat. It ended with the neutrality rules ceasing to be of use to anyone, and in 2010 they were let go.

That, and not a tale about airlines, is the lesson. Neutrality of display is not a natural state. It does not arise from competition and is not sustained by good faith. It is infrastructure — like certified weights and standard measures of length: it is built once, because without it trade dissolves into a set of private arrangements, and then people forget why it was built and take it apart. It is always taken apart by those it obstructs, and always on the grounds that it has become outdated.

The difference between a market and a state is here only one of the size of the bill. When the screen of apartments belongs to a private interest, you overpay in rent. When the screen of choice belongs to those shown on it, you pay for everything else — and not in money.

Every new generation of technology rediscovers that whoever owns the order of the lines owns the price. Every time it feels like news. And every time the arithmetic turns out to be unchanged since eight flights a day became none without the loss of a single aircraft in the air.

Until that arithmetic is contested, everything else is a consequence. The economy will grow, incomes will lag, and the lists of the wealthiest will fill with people whose capital did not begin with a factory. This is not a verdict on a country and not a property of a people. It is what results when the screen belongs to those shown on it.

Sources: Ars Technica — the renters’ class action and hidden listings · The history of Sabre: display bias, the congressional inquiry, the 1984 rules and their expiry · NAR — the clear cooperation policy and its one-business-day requirement · NAR — what the $418 million settlement means · ProPublica — how a secret algorithm pushes rents higher · US Department of Justice — the case against RealPage · Kursiv — spending on state information policy: 62.8 billion tenge in 2024 · The referendum of 15 March 2026: the result, the arrest of Kantemir Almyshev, and the words about a possible term reset · The Kurultai election of 23 August 2026: 145 deputies, 545 candidates from seven parties