{"id":59594,"date":"2021-09-30T08:03:14","date_gmt":"2021-09-30T13:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59594"},"modified":"2021-09-30T08:03:14","modified_gmt":"2021-09-30T13:03:14","slug":"a-crisis-of-affordability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59594","title":{"rendered":"A crisis of affordability"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A crisis of affordability<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Western capitalist economies don\u2019t really do shortages.\u00a0 There are a few stand alone exceptions such as a music festival or a sporting event, where demand so outstrips supply that queues form.\u00a0 But for the most part \u2013 as we saw last week with the eye-watering rise in wholesale gas prices \u2013 when something is in short supply the price increases; and when the price increases enough, the queues disappear.<\/p>\n

In economics, this is the difference between demand and desire.\u00a0 I might, for example,\u00a0desire<\/em>\u00a0a new sports car or a country mansion.\u00a0 But since I do not have anything like the discretionary income to buy these things, I do not contribute to the economic\u00a0demand<\/em>\u00a0for them.\u00a0 And unless someone is going to offer them for sale at a ridiculously low price, I doubt that we are going to see queues forming any time soon.\u00a0 As Tom Chivers at\u00a0UnHerd<\/a><\/em>\u00a0puts it:<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the long run, the market normally solves coordination problems like this, reasonably effectively. If lots of people want some resource, then the people selling that resource realise they can make more money if they raise the price. At the higher price, fewer people are willing to buy it, but the seller makes more money per unit sold. And, in theory, they can keep raising the price until the lost sales start to outweigh the gain per unit.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

When we witness queues piling up outside filling stations across the UK then, we might be correct in assuming that something \u2013 or most likely some\u00a0things<\/em> \u2013 are being done to artificially generate a shortage where none previously existed…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A crisis of affordability Western capitalist economies don\u2019t really do shortages.\u00a0 There are a few stand alone exceptions such as a music festival or a sporting event, where demand so outstrips supply that queues form.\u00a0 But for the most part \u2013 as we saw last week with the eye-watering rise in wholesale gas prices \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4059,111,506,7585,4053,3237,30640,31360],"class_list":["post-59594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-affordability","tag-capitalism","tag-markets","tag-price","tag-shortages","tag-supply-chains","tag-the-consciousness-of-sheep","tag-tim-watkins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59594"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59595,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59594\/revisions\/59595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}