I think this sounds like a paradox for those who don't realize that the driving force in the market is profit not quality.
Most of the options on the market are in a race to the bottom regarding price, with a tiny minority being in a race to the top regarding quality. In abundance competition makes cheap things get cheaper, and good things get better.
The majority of the market will gravitate towards lower "price" and most options will target that, pulling down the median compared to scarcity. The smaller percentage of the population will afford to target the high quality thus pushing the maximum achievable higher than in scarcity.
> I think this sounds like a paradox for those who don't realize that the driving force in the market is profit not quality.
Profit is the driving force in every rational market and the quality/price tradeoff is a huge factor in valuation of goods. A big problem is information asymmetry. Consumers must be experts on every product they buy while producers only have to be experts on the products they sell. Some consumers do not prioritize being experts on food and so undervalue nutritional/dietary properties and overvalue appearance, flavor, and convenience which require less expertise. A related effect is the paradox of choice making it difficult to judge the best value from a selection of seemingly identical products and this may also play a role in poor nutritional choices.
The problem is excaserbated by mass advertising that promises foods are healthy or meet certain dietary guidelines while eliding the fact that the products should be eaten sparingly and not as a staple, or by directly advertising that a cheap food is shiny and yummy.
You're right, the reason I said "price" in quotes is that it's usually both intellectual and financial. Very few can afford to be experts and make the right choice, then pay for that choice.
The confusion related to the driving force is that people imagine more choices means more competition, and this must bring lower price and higher quality. In reality profit is the driving force and profit can come just as well from low cost, low quality as from high cost, high quality. Abundance brings in a drift between these 2 ends of the spectrum, you get extreme low cost with low quality, and extreme high quality with high cost.
Most people have no intellectual budget to afford identifying the correct option, or the financial budget to acquire it. This gets compounded and has some network effects so the more low price, low quality choices they make, the lower their chances of gaining the necessary budget to recover.
I think a middle ground is observable in where retailers choose to focus- Walmart is targeting 'price first' customers, Costco is targeting 'quality with value' customers, Whole Foods is (or at least was, pre-acquisition) targeting 'quality first and sometimes only' customers.
Customers get to outsource the detailed choices to the retailers and the retailers enforces the desired quality/cost ratios on their suppliers.
Most of the options on the market are in a race to the bottom regarding price, with a tiny minority being in a race to the top regarding quality. In abundance competition makes cheap things get cheaper, and good things get better.
The majority of the market will gravitate towards lower "price" and most options will target that, pulling down the median compared to scarcity. The smaller percentage of the population will afford to target the high quality thus pushing the maximum achievable higher than in scarcity.