You want it more than you want not having any real estate, or having real estate in some place that isn't Boston, obviously! You want real estate in Boston - so do many other people, many more than who can physically own real estate in Boston. How is it decided who receives and who goes without?
Wants cannot be considered seriously independent of the reality of scarcity. The sum of the world's wants is greater than the sum of the world's resources, so we have to have some system of allocating those resources among those wants. There are many theories on how to do this, but free market trade is somewhat unique in that it is one of the only systems that acknowledges and allows for subjective value. So long as you are permitted to freely trade your time and resources, you are able of exchanging them for whatever you want most - which is not the same as being able to exchange them for all that you want.
>You want it more than you want not having any real estate, or having real estate in some place that isn't Boston, obviously!
Well, no. What I actually want is to live with my fiancee and not be homeless, and she's from Boston and needs to live near family right now, so here we are. Revealed-preference theory is one subgoal stomp after another.
Certainly, and if we dig deeper, it's not that you want to live with your fiancee, it's that you want human companionship and sex, and we eventually get down into Maslow, but the fact of the matter is that you are making the choice that having real estate in Boston is more valuable to you than not working long hours - your want is indeed to work long hours to live in Boston, rather than to not work long hours to not live in Boston.
Among the choices available to you, you are getting what you want. That's not to suggest that the choices you have available are the choices you want, but I would suggest that the blame for that lies with the fact that we do not live in a post-scarcity society rather than on the resource distribution model we use.
>and if we dig deeper, it's not that you want to live with your fiancee, it's that you want human companionship and sex,
No, actually. I want to live with my fiancee. I could perhaps come up with a supergoal for that if I tried, but it would still involve this specific fiancee.
Some things are terminally good, others instrumentally. The chain of reduction stops at things I want for their own sake, long before it hits "Maslow".
>Among the choices available to you, you are getting what you want.
This is vacuous. Firstly, there might be some superior option nobody told me about, or that I didn't think of. Secondly, defining "what I want" as "what was available to me" amounts to rationalizing economics backwards into psychology while ignoring the available empirical evidence. You don't get to tell me what I want based on what I did, because there are in fact many, many filters between what I want and what I do.
>but I would suggest that the blame for that lies with the fact that we do not live in a post-scarcity society rather than on the resource distribution model we use.
These are effectively the same statement. We have more than enough resources to put everyone in the realm of diminishing returns to additional economic resources -- we just have capitalism instead of happiness.
(This is another reason why revealed preferences theories are crap.)
Wants cannot be considered seriously independent of the reality of scarcity. The sum of the world's wants is greater than the sum of the world's resources, so we have to have some system of allocating those resources among those wants. There are many theories on how to do this, but free market trade is somewhat unique in that it is one of the only systems that acknowledges and allows for subjective value. So long as you are permitted to freely trade your time and resources, you are able of exchanging them for whatever you want most - which is not the same as being able to exchange them for all that you want.