Tuesday, October 02, 2012

Demand Supply Curve

We have two ways of looking at how prices impact demand. In case of price increase for a product,

  • People consume less of the product.
  • Number of people consuming that product goes down.
When rental prices go up, people just can't rent room for less hours. They become homeless. You can't buy half an apple from the market. Or have half the education, by attending few classes. You can't buy half a car or smaller seat in a bus for less price. 

I guess their is a big problem as well as a big opportunity here. How can we make most price changes impact only people consuming less instead of some people not consuming stuff at all. If nothing else, half an education is so much better than no education at all. 

Most measures of economy use money to represent growth. But may be if we start looking at units of things, the units that can be purchased and not abstract infinitely divided units, we will start making a better sense of how economy is doing. Are these units getting cheaper or costly because people can only buy them in units. 

The demand supply curve hides this important information from us. May be we should split it up.  Or may be other way is to make everything purchasable by making it infinitely dividable. That brings up whole new circus that I will explore in another post.

One way to do that is by sharing. We share the same roads, bridges, power plants, dams, hotel rooms, restaurants. Renting is also a form of sharing. May be people can share jobs. Instead of firing people, you make them work less and pay less. 15% less hours per day = 15% less pay = 100% employment which is better than 15% unemployment. People who work in shifts can share the same house - you sleep when I work and then I work when you sleep. May be schools for poor children where they can work half of the time to pay for their own education. 

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