[uoaei]

Supply and demand is and always has been a useful first-order approximation. Reality is a lot more complicated.

Dear reader, never believe anyone who says a serious societal problem is "just" anything. Especially on the internet when they use merely a pesudonym to assert their authority.

Especially when the person behind the pseudonym is a one-time washed-out author desperately clinging to their housing stock in Atherton.

[WalterBright]

> Reality is a lot more complicated.

It's still the Law of Supply and Demand. Just like F=ma always applies, even if the results are complicated.

[uoaei]

No, it's not a law in the same way as physical laws. Most of the failures in economics of the past 50 years can be mostly directly attributed to a fatal overcommitment to the belief that these attributed relations are incontrivertible.

What really exists, closest to the limit we will call "hard science" or "physics", is the microcosmic focus on individuals interacting in a market. Everything else -- supply and demand as a theory definitely included -- is a statistical extrapolation from micro-scale interactions. Hence the label of "dismal science". It's dismal because every hardline assumption is inevitably contravened by real life physics.

[WalterBright]

The supply and demand curves are different for every person and every business. That makes it complicated - but not wrong.

[uoaei]

That's what makes it a model, not a law.

[WalterBright]

Governments are perpetually trying to repeal that law. All attempts have failed.

[danaris]

No, no, see, of course it's a law! Now, I'll explain it to you:

First, assume a spherical economy in a frictionless vacuum...

(/s)

[henrycrutcher]

Technically, the earth is a spherical economy in a frictionless vacuum

[WalterBright]

Yah, I'm old and I've heard that joke my entire life.

[danaris]

And yet, you still think that Econ 101 is as far as those courses go...perhaps it's true that you can't teach an old dog new tricks.