The fact that sellers charge people different prices for what often appear to be similar products is related to a concept known as elasticity of demand,
Economics
Economics for the Citizen (Part 6)
Relative price is one price in terms of another price.
Economics for the Citizen (Part 5)
The cost of having or doing something is what had to be given up.
Economics for the Citizen (Part 4)
Specialization is said to occur when people produce more of a commodity than they consume or plan to consume.
Economics for the Citizen (Part 3)
There are four classes of behavior that can be called economic behavior. They are: production, consumption, exchange and specialization.
Economics for the Citizen (Part 2)
Economic theory can’t answer normative questions.
Economics for the Citizen (Part 1)
The first lesson in economic theory is that we live in a world of scarcity.
Good and Bad Economics
Here are a couple of newspaper headlines following Florida's bout with hurricane disasters: "Storms create lucrative times," St. Petersburg Times (Sept. 30, 2004), and "Economic growth from hurricanes could outweigh costs," USA Today (Sept. 27, 2004). The writers,...
The Economics of the Military Draft
Last year, Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-S.C.) and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) introduced bills calling for reinstatement of the military draft. A far more descriptive term for the military draft is government confiscation of labor services, but keeping with the spirit of...
Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America’s Schools
Although government schools maintain a monopoly on public funds, they’ve failed miserably by almost every conceivable benchmark.
In Defense of Supply-Side Economics
In a recent column, I defended supply-side economics from an attack by Princeton economist Paul Krugman in the New York Times Magazine. One of the rare civil criticisms I got came from my friends at TAPPED, the web log of the liberal American Prospect magazine. Their...
Politics & Ideas: The Battle Over Ideas (Lecture 6, Part 4 of 4)
In contrast, however, the interventionist ideas, the socialist ideas, the inflationist ideas of our time, have been concocted and formalized by writers and professors. And they are taught at colleges and universities. You may say: "Today's situation is much worse." I...
Politics & Ideas: The Rise and Decline of Civilization (Lecture 6, Part 3 of 4)
People say that every civilization must finally fall into ruin and disintegrate. There are eminent supporters of this idea. One was a German teacher, Spengler, and another one, much better known, was the English historian, Toynbee. They tell us that our civilization...
Politics & Ideas: The Philosophy of Interventionism (Lecture 6, Part 2 of 4)
Under interventionist ideas, it is the duty of the government to support, to subsidize, to give privileges to special groups. The idea of the eighteenth century statesmen was that the legislators had special ideas about the common good. But what we have today,...
Politics & Ideas: The Interdependence of Economics and Politics (Lecture 6, Part 1 of 4)
In the Age of Enlightenment in the years in which the North Americans founded their independence, and a few years later, when the Spanish and Portuguese colonies were transformed into independent nations, the prevailing mood in Western civilization was optimistic. At...
Economics Lesson in a Kit
Who'd have thought an inanimate object could teach a lesson in economics? Yet that's exactly what a first-aid kit did. Several kits, actually, wall-mounted cabinets in the buildings where I work. Now we're not just talking Band-Aids and iodine here. No, these babies...
Eco-nomics: What Everyone Should Know About Economics and the Environment
Disagreement with the world's environmentalist wackos doesn't mean that one is for dirty air and water, against conservation and for species extinction. Dr. Richard Stroup, Montana State University professor of economics and senior associate of the Center for Free...
In Defense of “Trade Deficits”
A nation isn’t harmed when it imports more than it exports, which is why the trade deficit is the most dangerous statistic collected by government.
Bad Economics in One Lesson
On Tuesday, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning Washington think tank, published a full-page ad in The New York Times condemning the proposed Bush tax cuts. This pro-tax statement is signed by more than 400 economists, including 10 Nobel laureates --...
Marxist Molly Ivins Flunks Economics
Upset with President Bush's tax cut plan, columnist Molly Ivins warns that America's more well-to-do taxpayers might go out and doing something unproductive if the government seizes a smaller portion of their incomes."There's no guarantee," Ivins writes, "that rich...
Economics vs. Politics
The familiar chorus of "tax cuts for the rich" has begun to ring out across the political landscape, in the wake of President Bush's proposals to boost the economy. The time is long overdue to expose some of the fallacies folded up inside that phrase. The dirty little...
Alan Greenspan: Ayn Rand’s Failed Student
As legend has it, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was once a member of Ayn Rand's 1960's salon. He was an invited guest at Rand's apartment and apparently was close enough to have read her epic Atlas Shrugged as it came off her typewriter. How lucky for him....
The Economics and Politics of “Affordable Housing” in California
While Senator Barbara Boxer is trying to get the federal government to declare more than two million acres in California off-limits to development, California's other Senator, Diane Feinstein, has already brokered a deal that takes 16,500 acres off-limits. That's...
Nobel Prize for Economics Rewards Voodoo and Not Science, Part 2
In The New York Times of October 11th , right next to the article on the latest Nobel Prize winners in economics, is another titled Expansive Role for Greenspan Brings Out Critics of Fed's Chief. The article recounts how Alan Greenspan has been called upon (and has...
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