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No. It's to do the same thing that academic economists do for pirated movies, since that was the example you gave. They don't suddenly think that supply curves don't real.
That is not data which supports your claim. Your claim was that you have empirical data that they don't act as substitute goods (particularly, WRT the validity of using supply/demand curves).
I'm talking about a hypothetical that hasn't happened yet. Ergo, I have no claimed to have any empirical data on the question. You claimed that you did in fact have empirical data for something that you thought was relevant. It's apparent that you don't.
I didn't say they don't real. I said they may not be the clearest way to describe the situation in this case.
Also you're telling me that no economist has ever analyzed specifically pirated movies, not just movies in general? Really? Doesn't this entirely contradict all of your kvetching before about how of course economists have studied illegal goods, including non-physical ones, specifically?
No, my claim in full, not your snippet, was:
The relevance of supply/demand curves was a whole other issue.
But why hasn't it happened yet? If substitute good A being lower priced than substitute B creates a strong if not inevitable tendency for the price of substitute good B to also lower, as you've claimed many times, then why hasn't it happened yet in this case, in decades? Why haven't all of the costs you mentioned which are naturally baked into the price of real CP consumption/production lowered?
Has it merely not happened yet or is it unlikely to happen due to the distorting effects of policy on the market?
I even provided a link for you, dude.
Still not supported by any provided data.
Public choice theory probably holds the answer to why fake child porn is still illegal.
Like, I don't get what you're not understanding. The question is what would happen if, hypothetically, there was a change to the law that made a substitute (fake child porn) less costly (by making it legal). That hasn't happened yet. (The making it legal bit. You know, the premise bit.) What the hell are you on about not having happened yet?
Ah, I see it now... in a second separate reply on the same level of the subthread. (PS: A Google search is not evidence, even if it's Google Scholar.)
Do you not realize how different the notification system here is from Reddit? What made you think I'd magically see two words in a mountain of text I'd already be scrolling past to get the latest level of replies?
If you forgot to include everything in your reply before posting, edit your existing reply if it's quick enough or wait for the next round of replies. You don't get to sneak in new stuff into past rounds like you had presented it all along and your interlocutor is the dumb one for not responding to it.
Pretty ironic that you'd do this (multiple times in fact) while accusing me of having poor communication skills.
??? But it's not. Lolicon, etc. is completely legal* (in the US at least along with Japan and many other localities), mostly accessible, and far less taboo than the real thing. That's the whole point of our conversation, that it's legal and real CP isn't, as has been the case for decades. (Actually it has never been illegal other than in small stints before such prohibitions were overturned by the Supreme Court.) I've said this in the clearest possible terms dozens of times in our conversation. Are you actually functionally illiterate? (Based on the OP of this subthread, did you think that Pixiv, a mainstream corporation that operates in the US, was currently willingly hosting illegal content and just considering possibly removing it?)
Well, I think I finally get what you're not understanding. You realize you spent 50 posts arguing because of the equivalent of you not knowing that the Sun doesn't revolve around the Earth, right?
*It is not covered by the same laws as actual CP. It technically could count as obscenity, same as adult pornography, but obviously nobody describes adult pornography as being illegal given how rare prosecutions are for it. So a purely lolicon-only site is in the same boat as PornHub legally, that is, legal.
Section 1466A of Title 18, United States Code, makes it illegal for any person to knowingly produce, distribute, receive, or possess with intent to transfer or distribute visual representations, such as drawings, cartoons, or paintings that appear to depict minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and are deemed obscene.
And 18 U.S.C. § 1465 makes the same for essentially all pornography, including that of adults, illegal:
Is your next inane argument going to be that all pornography then is similarly illegal to real child pornography? It's well known that US obscenity laws, though still on the books, are not generally enforced. Or why hasn't Belle Delphine, for example, been arrested?
See the wiki for example cases of it actually being enforced.
Yes and that's happened to adult pornography too.
You will also note from your article:
(If something is prosecuted so rarely that it's four cases in decades, most of them as a tacked-on charge involving other crimes, and they all get detailed on Wikipedia because they're that rare, then it's basically legal. There have been tens of thousands of prosecutions of real CP in the same timeframe.)
You will also note that unlike with real child pornography, the law you cited does not make strict liability possession illegal (only possession with the intent to distribute) which is a big difference.
Sorry, but you're just plain and simple wrong here.
For example, nhentai, which openly hosts thousands of lolicon doujins and is so well-known that you may have seen the meme even on Reddit and Twitter of a string of numbers being used to refer to a doujin (which also happens to feature drawn underage sex) in its catalogue (which is so popular it even has merchandise), is more popular than BLACKED.com, Bang Bros, /r/GoneWild, 4chan (which also openly hosts lolicon on its /b/ board), popular anime blog Sankaku Complex (which also hosts lolicon), Truth Social, and Mastodon (other than during its recent post-Elon spike), and is close to the most popular legal anime streaming site Crunchyroll. (That is, it is not some obscure site nobody knows about and is actually quite popular.)
It's been legally registered in the US since 2014. So, no, a few prosecutions tacked on to other charges doesn't change much unless you can point out an equivalent to the above for IRL CP.
This thread is basically becoming unreadable/unusable, which kind of sucks, because we're finally getting back to economics: apparently, these things can also be complements. It's a shame we're not going to get some good econometrics for how strong these various effects are. As I said before, it's probably silly to think that we can flood the market with cheap prescription opioids and not end up with problem users; it's probably also silly to think that we can flood the market with cheap fake child porn and not end up with problem users.
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