Demand Curve in Economics : Demand Curve Slope Downword
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Why demand curve slope downward? The demand curve demonstrates how much people are willing to buy at different prices?
Supply
and demand are fundamental concepts in economics. Usually, they're represented
by a graph like this. So what does this mean? Well, let's start with
the demand curve. In short, a demand curve shows how much of a good people
will want at different prices.
Well,
at a lower price, people buy more. More shirts, more pants, more video games,
and they do stuff like this. This is what happens on Black Friday
when
retailers lower their prices to get people to buy stuff for Christmas.
The
demand curve illustrates the intuition for why people go nuts on Black
Friday.
Price is shown
on the vertical axis, and quantity is shown on the horizontal. Here's the normal price, and
here's the Black Friday reduced price.
Simply
put, the quantity demanded increases as the price gets lower.
But
let's delve a little deeper. There's a different demand curve for every good
or
service out there, but the ideas are the same. So, let's look at the demand
curve
for
one of the most important products in the world -- oil. Oil is used in a wide
variety of products, from fueling cars and planes, to heating homes and making plastic
for rubber duckies. Looking at the demand curve for oil, we see a familiar
relationship between price and the quantity demanded. At a high price, $55 per
barrel, there's a relative low demand, let's say five million barrels. At $20
per barrel, 25 million barrels are demanded. As the price goes down, the demand
for oil increases. And at $5 per barrel, 50 million barrels of oil are
demanded. But, there's more to why the demand curve looks like this. As we
mentioned before, oil has many uses. Some of those are high-value uses. Uses
for which oil has few substitutes. An example would be jet fuel. Right now, you
can't fly jets on corn or natural gas. If you want planes that fly, you're
stuck with using oil.
Other
uses are low-value uses like making gasoline or plastic for these guys.
When
oil prices are relatively low, the oil that is being demanded is used for high
and low-value goods alike. As the price of oil goes up, so does the price of
making plastic and gasoline. And at some point, the cost of these value used
products will get high enough that some people might skip buying a rubber ducky
altogether or buy a substitute like a wooden bath toy. Same goes for gasoline,
as the price rises,
people
will economize. They'll buy more fuel efficient cars or forego that road trip
completely.
For
these consumers, the benefit of buying these products is too little to justify
the cost. At these high prices, the demanders that are left are the ones who
value oil the highest. For them, the benefit of, say, having planes that fly outweighs
the increased cost. They still demand oil. So, with a simple line, the demand
curve summarizes all the many and diverse ways that people respond to a change
in price. But, it doesn't stop here.
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