> (The used book market actually drives up the price of texts – to see why, think of what would happen to car prices if used car sales were not permitted.)
My best guess is he is trying to argue that if you disallowed used car sales, you'd get better economies of scale on new cars, as more would need to be produced to fill the void left my used car sales. While it might drive the price of a new car/textbook down, I still think it would drive the average amount paid by drivers/students up, which is what we really care about (as students, at least; obviously the textbook companies would love to sell more books).
In fact, this seems to a case of the broken window fallacy[1] — a textbook case, one might say. ;-) (In that, if you essentially destroy the used text book's value by not using them, that this is somehow beneficial.)
My best guess is he is trying to argue that if you disallowed used car sales, you'd get better economies of scale on new cars, as more would need to be produced to fill the void left my used car sales. While it might drive the price of a new car/textbook down, I still think it would drive the average amount paid by drivers/students up, which is what we really care about (as students, at least; obviously the textbook companies would love to sell more books).
In fact, this seems to a case of the broken window fallacy[1] — a textbook case, one might say. ;-) (In that, if you essentially destroy the used text book's value by not using them, that this is somehow beneficial.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window