I must have met thousands of people whose job is to sell things. Right now, I can only think of one person I have met whose job is to buy things. Why that massive asymmetry?
Three possible explanations, off the top of my head:
1. Sample selection bias. I only sell one thing, my services as an economics professor; and I only sell it to one buyer, Carleton University. But I buy hundreds of different things from hundreds of different sellers every year. So there are far more times when I am the buyer meeting a new seller than when I am the seller meeting a new buyer. So the people I meet are a very biased sample of the population.
2. Micro/money/outsourcing. Money is fungible. Money is the commodity par excellence. One $20 bill is the same as any other $20 bill, and the same as two $10 bills. Just as long as it's not counterfeit, I don't care. If I buy clothes I have to check whether this particular sweater fits me, but if I sell clothes and so "buy" money I don't have to check whether this particular $20 bill fits my wallet. That makes it very easy for the producer of sweaters to outsource the selling of sweaters to a specialist, but very hard for the consumer of sweaters to outsource the buying of sweaters to a specialist. Compare "But if you buy a sweater for me for a $20 bill, how will you know if the sweater you choose fits me?" to "But if you buy a $20 bill for me for a sweater, how will you know if the $20 bill you choose fits me?"
Lots of people have jobs where they specialise in selling things, because it's a job that's easy to get someone else to do for you. But when it comes to buying things we can't get someone else to do the job for us, because it's hard to explain to them exactly what we want. So we have to do the job ourselves, rather than employing a specialist buyer.
3. Macro/monopolistic competition. Buying stuff is easy; selling stuff is hard. So there's always going to be more resources employed in selling things than in buying things. Most markets most of the time seem to be in a state of what looks like excess supply. And excess supply is just a limiting case of a search model, where it's very hard for a seller to find an additional willing buyer but very easy for a buyer to find an additional willing seller.
But why should markets for most goods usually be in a state of what looks like excess supply? Why shouldn't excess demand be equally common? Why should prices for most goods usually be above the competitive equilibrium? The answer is that most sellers are selling a good that is in some way unique, and so face a downward-sloping demand curve. So they set price as a markup above marginal cost, and will always wish to sell more at that price, if only they could sell more without lowering the price. And putting resources into selling is one way to do that. A monopolistically competitive firm in profit-maximising equilibrium will look like a perfectly competitive firm in excess supply because the market price is above the equilibrium.
Update: 2 and 3 really have a common root in the fungibility of money. It is the fungibility of money, and the non-fungibility of most other goods, that makes each seller's goods an mperfect substitute for other sellers' goods, and creates the downward-sloping demand curve. Each buyer's money is a perfect substitute for any other buyer's money.
And the labour market is a bit special for two reasons: when a worker accepts a job he doesn't just care about the money but about whether the job fits him; plus it's easy to interview a sweater without the owner of that sweater being there, but hard to interview labour without the owner of that labour being there.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
So let’s take an example of a farmer who produces a handful of crops, say wheat and canola. To produce these he must purchase literally thousands of inputs, from seed and fertilizer, to irrigation and harvesting equipment capital and maintenance, to general operations management of auxiliary equipment, to crop insurance and supply chain contracts, etc. The inputs are manifold but the outputs are few. This is the industrial economy, where participants are output specialists but input generalists.
True that money use introduces a fundamental difference between buying and selling.
But a mutton seller in medieval Slobovia still faced a different situation from the mutton buyer. Except in case of famine, buyers lives do not depend on the seller. Sellers livelihood always depend on the buyers. Even in medieval Slobovia, productive capacity already exceeded absorbtion, hence population growth. We temporarily escape the problem thanks to technical progress enabling us to make new resource-consuming goods ( net effect is to reduce supply) and having a marketing department to convince us we are bad parents if we do not build a second home and consume jet fuel to go to Disneyland.
Moreover, once we accept specialization-of-labor, and stop growing our own food, we are
in a race to buy money to buy food, even if food is abundant.
Monopolistic competittion and branding is away of reducing excess supply. You tried the rest, now try the best. My good is a substitute for the other guy’s good but his is not a substitute for mine.
“This is the industrial economy, where participants are output specialists but input generalists.”
And perhaps this is where some of the advantage of forming firms enters in. Large firms can afford to have input specialists for a larger share of their input spend. These people may specialize in buying commodities or finished goods (as in a retailer). I imagine only very large firms gain significant advantages from input specialization due to manifold inputs, so perhaps this is why we’d see fewer professional purchasers.
It probably still comes down to the fact that sellers have things other than money and buyers generally have money. Money is the ‘easiest sell’ of all, so sellers have to work harder than buyers. Two people trying to exchange goods (barter) are both sellers. If one of them has a good that is of more broad appeal, they become the buyer, to an extent, and money has the broadest appeal of all.
That reminds me of Robin Hanson musing on “Death of a Buyerman”
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/01/no_death_of_a_b.html
If your job is to sell things, you’ll probably meet a lot more people whose job is to buy things. Admittedly, there’s a lot more opportunity to sell to amateurs than to buy from amateurs – aside from fundraiser chocolates, I can’t think of another example of an amateur salesperson – but there are a lot of people employed in business whose primary function is to buy things.
Professionnal buyers are a breed apart.
They are not hunting for “meat for supper” or a” nice skirt to go with my blue shoes”, vast amorphous categories where anything goes but for ” 42.7 mm copper alloy #62 bithreaded nickel-plated fluoric-acid-resistant bi-sectionnal valve”. And they buy to resell. They are, once removed, in the selling business and have the same “Oh God I’ll starve tonight” urgency.
That’s one form of professional buyer. But I used to be in the business of buying crew equipment for an oilfield service company. Is buying fireproof coveralls so that I can sell a surveyor’s time different from a consumer buying pants so that he can sell his own time?
Another form of professional buyer is an HR recruiter.
There’s lots out there if you’re looking for them.
The fear of not buying enough is considered an OCD disorder in the DSM-IV. The fear of not selling enough is a basic description of the business world.
Consumer goods are bought for themselves ( forget for a time if you will Gary Becker idea that consumer goods are capital goods producing individual satisfaction. It was an interesting mathematical simplification and like a lot a Chicago maths ignored the basic facts.)
Only very remotely do I buy a suit exclusively for work. It a status symbol and a real italian silk tie is a pleasure to wear in itself.( /$% chalk that prevent me from wearing one to class…Pace Nick, I am not totally Ken Kesey and a nice tie goes well with the beard).
To repeat myself, you buy crew equipement only so that you can sell oil. Not because fireproof coverall are fun, unless you are a collector.
An HR recruiter buys so as to sell his services for money and then buy food.
Neil, you were a cog in the big oil-selling machine. As I am when I make my college buy a new management computer simulation that will increase my enrollment next fall so my Dept. head will not assign me the class on Political Systems that would need weeks of getting reacquainted with the litterature. Oh the FEAR. The fear of not selling, the fear of not selling enough…
And are you going to explain how this differentiates how this is relevant to the initial post? Of course buying for business purposes is different from buying for personal purposes (though your point about enjoyment of a suit is probably unusual to you. I despise suits and buy them solely because they increase my market value.) But the initial question was “why do I [being Nick] meet far more sellers than buyers.” And I’m answering in favour of option 1: sampling bias.
Noting the difference between consumer buying and corporate buying doesn’t negate or remove the existence of corporate buying.
For every buyer there is a seller — in what sense are there more buyers than sellers?
Professional buyers. Most buyers are ‘amateurs’.
Two thoughts:
1. With few buyers and many sellers, and the latter holding the fungible resource, buyers have a huge incentive to be collaborative and socially attuned to large numbers of people. That is the social welfare benefit of a free market.
2. Nick, I’d be interested in knowing how you see this applying to single-payer health care in Canada, the UK, or other countries, where you have many sellers, one buyer, many excluded buyers, and an even larger population of people who see themselves as consumers or quasi-buyers, but are really recipients of redistribution.
“most sellers are selling a good that is in some way unique, and so face a downward-sloping demand curve”
This is true for final goods, but becomes less accurate the further upstream in the supply chain you go.
Also, when most manufacturing is done overseas, it’s hardly surprising that most buyers are overseas as well, and presumably outside NR’s social circle.
Food is an example of many buyers and little sellers. As you move higher the Maslow’s pyramid you can expect to get less buyers. That is the reason it is a pyramid, isn’t it?