this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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It's funny that every econ course starts with the supply/demand curve, as though competition is ever perfect. Modern business is all about barriers to entry and cashing out way more than the joke that is the supply/demand curve.
Hell, fast food in the past few years has gone to tiered pricing roughly based on income (your willingness to use their app and jump through particular hoops). Tell me how the supply/demand curve accounts for charging some people $4 and others $8 for the same burger?
It’s the same reason that you learn physicist and basic engineering in frictionless environments that only consider the obvious forces on the obvious vectors, while most of the work of mechanical and civil engineering in real life is spent dealing with friction in systems and sheering forces.
Except in this case the simplified lesson is misleading and damaging. Students leave that lesson and, unlike physics, believe that's how the real world works.
It is how the world works, on a very basic level. And friction is just as much a part of real-world physical interactions as anything else. Hell, barrier to entry, second-to-market advantage, market inertia and similar concepts are less important to most people than friction and normal tensions are.