Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Understanding elasticity of Demand
Understanding elasticity of Demand
Mar 21, 2026 5:48 AM

Note: This is the eighthpost in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics.

Prices can have an effect on the demand of goods and services. But how much does quantity demanded change when prices changes? By a lot or by a little? Elasticity can help us understand this question. This video covers determinants of elasticity such as availability of substitutes, time horizon, classification of goods, nature of goods (is it a necessity or a luxury?), and the size of the purchase relative to the consumer’s budget.

(If you find the pace of the videos too slow, I’d mend watching them at 1.5 to 2 times the speed. You can adjust the speed at which the video plays by clicking on “Settings” (the gear symbol) and changing “Speed” from normal to 1.25, 1.5 or 2.)

Previous in series:Does the equilibrium model work in the real world?

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Apples and oranges?
Here’s an interesting story–Apple Corps is suing Apple Computer for breach of contract. You probably recognize the first Apple as pany owned by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the widows of the other two Beatles. Since 1991, Apple Corps has had a deal with Apple Computer: in essence, the pany agrees to stay out of puter and munications business, and pany agrees to stay out of the music business–technically, each has agreed to keep its trademark out of the others...
Monasticism and the future of Europe
There’s a perceptive article by Christopher Levenick on the Weekly Standard’s site. It’s titled “Monkish: What the increase of monastic vocations in Italy could mean for European secularism”. First, the surpising data: Italy […] is often viewed as a case study in secularization. Yet across the peninsula, weekly attendance at Catholic Mass has been steadily climbing for two decades. In 1980, roughly 35 percent of Italians regularly attended the Mass; by 2000 that figure had climbed to nearly 50 percent....
Kudlow on immigration
“Immigration creates wealth,” says Larry Kudlow: Part of the immigration problem is simply Mexico’s inadequate growth and lack of economic opportunity. The country is growing at about 3 percent a year, but it ought to be growing at six to ten percent. Our southern neighbor ought to be the “Mexican Tiger,” but continues to be the “Mexican Chihuahua.” He also cites and explicates a column by Linda Chavez in The Washington Times, “illustrating what great entrepreneurs and small-business owners Hispanics...
Grand Rapids growth
It has been a bit of a mystery over the last few months, as an anonymous group of developers had been purchasing up a series of properties near downtown Grand Rapids. The investigative work of the local TV news turned up the plans for the group to end up with a 41-acre area that runs along the Grand River through the heart of downtown. Currently, the area is mostly made up of unused manufacturing facilities, abandoned buildings, and generally unproductive...
Mulling over malaria
Kofi Akosah in Accra, Ghana, writes in the latest Campaign for Fighting Diseases newsletter about the prospects for the use of DDT in fighting malaria in his home country. He first describes the devastation that the disease wreaks: “More than 17 million of Ghana’s 20 million people are infected by malaria every year, costing the nation a colossal 850 million cedis (US$94 million) for treatment alone.” He continues, “Those infected by malaria are in and out of hospital and unable...
Giving credit where credit is due
A snippet from Ecumenical News International: Presbyterians invest $1 million in church ‘bank’ that helps poor New York (ENI). The Presbyterian Church (USA) has invested US$1 million in Oikocredit, an organization established by the World Council of Churches that assists people in poor countries start small businesses. The investment is the largest in Oikocredit over more than a decade, the church announced earlier this week, making the 2.4-million-member US denomination the second-largest investor in the institution set up in 1975....
More on the faith-based initiative
mentary last week on the situation of the Silver Ring Thing has occasioned some conversation on the Blog (here, here, here, and here). The consensus on the faith-based initiative seems to be that, in the words of William L. Anderson, they “were pointing out at the beginning that this was a bad idea, and that taking the state’s money ultimately would mean that the state would be interfering with the larger mission of these religious groups.” Contrariwise, Joseph Knippenberg, who...
CEO paychecks
It was a major topic of discussion during the era of corporate scandals a couple years ago, but the issue of pensation still pops up in the news from time to time, and it remains a problem with which serious thinkers continue to grapple. Harvard’s Lucian Bebchuk and Berkeley’s Jesse Fried started one important strand of the discussion when they published Pay Without Performance in 2004. (Robert Kennedy reviewed it for Markets & Morality [available to subscribers]). In brief, Bebchuk...
I Am David
If you haven’t seen it yet, I mend the film I Am David with Jim Caviezel and Ben Tibber. It is about a young boy, David, who escapes from a Bulgarian Prison Camp and undertakes a journey northward to Denmark. It is based on the children’s novel North to Freedom by Ann Holm. The movie contrasts the horror munist prison camp life with daily life of people in free societies. Normal everyday interactions of young David with a wealthy Italian...
Faith in the faith-based initiative
Joe Knippenberg raises three issues with respect to my critique of the faith-based initiative (here and here). He writes first, “any activity that depends upon money is potentially corrupting, whether the source is governmental or private…. Why governmental money is different from private in this regard isn’t clear to me.” I agree that the potential for corruption is present in both cases, but the immediate constituency differs from private to public funds. For the former, the donors are the immediate...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved