why are liberal places so expensive?

Started by hillbillyatheist, November 01, 2013, 08:08:37 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Mermaid

Quote from: "Plu"That graph doesn't make any sense... I know what it's supposed to mean because I know what the basic concept is, but the graph does not work at all if you try to actually read it. I mean; if you have a lot of quantity and a lot of supply, the price is high? What does it even mean to have lots of quantity and lots of supply? :/
It shows that the less the quantity, the higher the price and vice versa. As the supply goes up, the demand goes down. If you read the graph from the left to the right, it works. It seems like you are reading it from top to bottom?

Price and supply are inversely proportional. This is the one thing I gleaned from the economics 101 class I took as an undergrad.
A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities â€" all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. -TR

Mermaid

Quote from: "hillbillyatheist"if I can find a place that is safe, low cost, and liberal, I'll be quite hapy.
Check out SW Michigan.
A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities â€" all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. -TR

hillbillyatheist

like my posts and thoughts? then check out my new blog. you can subscribe via email too, so that when its updated, you\'ll get an email, letting you know.

just click here

.

the_antithesis

Quote from: "hillbillyatheist"I was looking today at what I pay to live here in denver vs back home in rural oklahoma. I also was curious about places like california and oregon.

I don't even know how regular people can live in places like san francisco and new york. you can get a nice two bedroom apartment in rural oklahoma for 500 a month.

in a place like new york you pay like 4000 a month for a friggin studio apartment in the gang infested part of town, living above the local crack house.

you'd think liberal places would be helping the common man keep things affordable. what's the deal here? anybody know?

Sounds less like liberal vs conservative than rural vs urban.

hillbillyatheist

Quote from: "the_antithesis"
Quote from: "hillbillyatheist"I was looking today at what I pay to live here in denver vs back home in rural oklahoma. I also was curious about places like california and oregon.

I don't even know how regular people can live in places like san francisco and new york. you can get a nice two bedroom apartment in rural oklahoma for 500 a month.

in a place like new york you pay like 4000 a month for a friggin studio apartment in the gang infested part of town, living above the local crack house.

you'd think liberal places would be helping the common man keep things affordable. what's the deal here? anybody know?

Sounds less like liberal vs conservative than rural vs urban.
well sorta, but no OKC is urban and they have low costs and shitty almost useless transit. by now both from posts in this thread and my own thoughts, I think supply and demand explains it. liberal places are nicer and everybody wants to live there. so it drives up costs. limited supply, lots of demand.

poor people don't have any choice but to settle for a cheap shitty crime ridden ratholes, or out in the sticks. Its all they can afford.

I kinda wish section 8 was well funded and that everybody had access to good safe housing near good transit, services, jobs, etc. and with priorities given to those who need it most.

of course we live in a country that just cut millions to food stamps for vets by politicians who in the same bill gave themselves huge checks. So I don't expect much from them anytime soon.
like my posts and thoughts? then check out my new blog. you can subscribe via email too, so that when its updated, you\'ll get an email, letting you know.

just click here

.

Mermaid

Quote from: "hillbillyatheist"any specific town?
Not really. Grand Rapids area.
A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities â€" all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. -TR

Plu

Quote from: "Mermaid"
Quote from: "Plu"That graph doesn't make any sense... I know what it's supposed to mean because I know what the basic concept is, but the graph does not work at all if you try to actually read it. I mean; if you have a lot of quantity and a lot of supply, the price is high? What does it even mean to have lots of quantity and lots of supply? :/
It shows that the less the quantity, the higher the price and vice versa. As the supply goes up, the demand goes down. If you read the graph from the left to the right, it works. It seems like you are reading it from top to bottom?

Price and supply are inversely proportional. This is the one thing I gleaned from the economics 101 class I took as an undergrad.

But that doesn't make sense. Having more or less of something doesn't influence the price, the demand compared to the supply determines the price. And as supply goes up, demand doesn't really go down... demand stays the same, price goes goes down. Unless you mean that demand goes down because people receive their goods, but in that case supply would go down by the same amount.

Anyway. I totally get what the graph wants to say. I took economics 101 as well. It's just that the graph is really weird as drawn.

Shiranu

Quote... Having more or less of something doesn't influence the price.

Er, pretty sure in economics they taught that the more of something you have (on the market anyways) the lower the price gets because it's more readily available, and vice-versa.
"A little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you nearer to Him." - Louis Pasteur

Plu

Yeah but when you have more of something on the market is what they call supply, and supply is one of the graph lines, so then why is one of the axes labeled "quantity"?

Why is there a datapoint at the top right that says "supply" where the price and the quantity are high? What does that mean? And why is demand at its lowest point when there is a lot of quantity and very little price?

If you want to make the graph actually readable, you should have supply and demand as the two axes and price as the line. That would actually make sense. Right now it's just a bunch of lines labeled "supply" and "demand" that rely on the person reading the graph already understanding exactly what the graph is about, but that anyone who does not get economics 101 would not be able to read. (Nor would anyone who did take economics 101 be able to read it; it's just that they immediately know what it should say so they don't really look at it.)

Eve

Quote from: "LikelyToBreak"I think it is because "liberals" see themselves as being elite, while just going along with the current political fad.  They just talk about helping the poor, without really doing anything to actually help the poor.  They complain about the big multinational corporations while wearing their Gucchi shoes and talking on their Blackberries.  Which they can afford by working for the corporations they complain about.

But, that is just my opinion.
BRAVO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! =D>

Mister Agenda

Quote from: "hillbillyatheist"I was looking today at what I pay to live here in denver vs back home in rural oklahoma. I also was curious about places like california and oregon.

I don't even know how regular people can live in places like san francisco and new york. you can get a nice two bedroom apartment in rural oklahoma for 500 a month.

in a place like new york you pay like 4000 a month for a friggin studio apartment in the gang infested part of town, living above the local crack house.

you'd think liberal places would be helping the common man keep things affordable. what's the deal here? anybody know?

One issue in NYC is rent control. It achieves the near opposite of its goals (affordable housing). About half the apartments are under rent regulation or public housing. That leaves all the market competition in the remaining half of the apartments. Too many people, too few apartments.

The perverse part is that the rent-regulation is tied to the apartment, not the person. The majority of people in rent-regulated apartments are far above the poverty level.

But the consequences for people in rent-controlled apartments if rent-control was given up would be so drastic that there is not political will to do it. Many of them would have to move to the outer boroughs, it would be a hardship.

San Francisco reduces housing a different way: they provide for so much green space, that they just don't have enough apartments to meet the demand.
Atheists are not anti-Christian. They are anti-stupid.--WitchSabrina

entropy

If you already get what the supply and demand graph is about then skip this post.



I think one of the confusing things about the supply-demand graph is what quantity the "quantity" label is referring to. When you are looking at the "supply" line on the graph, "quantity" represents the quantity of supply. When you are looking at the the "demand" line of the graph, "quantity" represents the quantity of demand.

Take a point on the far left side of "demand" line. The point is high on the graph which means that the price is high. Go straight vertically down from that point to the x-axis (bottom of the graph) and you see that the quantity of demand is low at that high price. Following the "demand" line to the left you see that as the price gets lower, the quantity of demand increases. Superficially, if you look at the "demand" line, it looks like the right side of the graph is showing low demand, but you have to remember that the y-axis (left side of the graph) represents price so a point being low on the graph means low price and the point on the "demand" line being far to the right of the graph indicates a high quantity of demand. IOW, it's just graphically showing that demand is lower at higher prices and that demand is higher at lower prices - or least that is usually the tendency.

You can analyze the "supply" line much the same way except that what the upward slope of the "supply" line as you go rightward on the graph shows is that as price increases the quantity of supply tends to increase.

The reason to put what could be two independent graphs on the same graph is to show the relationship between the two. Where the two lines cross is called "equilibrium". If market conditions are otherwise stable, then the equilibrium price is the price of a market good or service where supply and demand intersect. If the price goes above that amount then there tends to be more supply than demand which is called excess supply (surplus) because there is not enough demand for all of it to be sold in the market. People don't usually keep trying to supply excess stuff to the market because they tend to lose money doing so and that is why the supply tends to drift downward toward the equilibrium point when there is excess supply. If the price goes below the equilibrium price, then demand tends to outstrip supply - a shortage of that good or service. The people supplying the good or service to the market will start increasing prices because people will still buy the good or service even at the higher price, pushing to price toward the equilibrium point where quantity of supply is pretty much the same as the quantity of demand.

Anyway, that's the way I take the supply-demand graph. Economics is not one of my strong suits, though, so please let me know if I made any errors.

SilentFutility

HBA, perhaps you might be able to find a cheap, relatively nice and safe town that doesn't have much in the way of transit itself, but does have a rail link to a larger town or city? Some sort of commuter or satellite town that would be nothing much on its own but has the benefit of being near enough to a major city to get to?

I'm not sure if settlements like this exist in great numbers in the US.