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In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. In 1972 she launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, breaking another political barrier.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
In economics, market clearing is the process by which, in an economic market, the supply of whatever is traded is equated to the demand so that there is no excess supply or demand, ensuring that there is neither a surplus nor a shortage. The new classical economics assumes that in any given market, assuming that all buyers and sellers have access to information and that there is no "friction" impeding price changes, prices constantly adjust up or down to ensure market clearing.[1]
A market-clearing price is the price of a good or service at which the quantity supplied equals the quantity demanded, also called the equilibrium price.[2] The theory claims that markets tend to move toward this price. Supply is fixed for a one-time sale of goods, so the market-clearing price is simply the maximum price at which all items can be sold. In a market where goods are produced and sold on an ongoing basis, the theory predicts that the market will move toward a price where the quantity supplied in a broad period of time will equal the quantity demanded. This might be measured over a week, month, or year to smooth out irregularities caused by manufacturing batches and delivery schedules; some sellers may maintain inventory buffers to ensure that products are always available for retail sale and to smooth out irregularities caused by manufacturing and delivery schedules, others employ Just-in-time manufacturing to increase profits in normal operations with the trade-off being greater disruption when irregularities do inevitably occur (eg. drastic market fluctuations, natural disasters, pandemics, power outages, etc...).
The market clears when the price reaches a point where demand and supply are in equilibrium, enabling individuals to buy or sell whatever they desire at that cost. When supply and demand are equal, a market clearing takes place. The market must experience a shortage or a surplus to reach this state. A shortage indicates that buyers are interested in purchasing something, but need help to afford to do so at current prices. Conversely, a surplus occurs when there is an excess product beyond the quantity that buyers are willing to purchase at current prices. New classical economics does not assume perfect information in the short run, but markets may approach efficient outcomes as information is discovered.[3]
If the sale price exceeds the market-clearing price, supply will exceed demand, and a surplus inventory will build up over the long run. If the sale price is lower than the market-clearing price, then demand will exceed supply, and in the long run, shortages will result, where buyers sometimes find no products for sale at any price.
The market-clearing theory states that prices in a free market tend towards equilibrium, where the quantity of goods or services supplied equals the quantity demanded. The theory assumes that prices adjust quickly to any changes in supply or demand, meaning that markets can reach equilibrium instantaneously. For example, consider a scenario where a community experiences an earthquake that destroys all houses and apartments. The sudden demand for new housing will create a temporary shortage of houses and apartments in the market. However, if prices are free to change, construction companies will build new houses in the short run, while new companies will enter the house and apartment construction market in the longer run. As a result, the housing supply will increase, eventually reaching a point where it equals the new demand. This adjustment mechanism clears the shortage from the market, establishing a new equilibrium where the market is in balance. This adjustment process is critical in ensuring that markets operate efficiently, promoting economic growth and stability. This increase in production brings supply into harmony with the new demand. The adjustment mechanism has cleared the shortage from the market and established a new equilibrium. A similar mechanism is believed to operate when there is a market surplus (glut), where prices fall until all the excess supply is sold. An example of excess supply is Christmas decorations that are still in stores several days after Christmas; the stores that still have boxes of decorations view these products as excess supply, so prices are discounted until shoppers buy all the decorations (to keep them until next Christmas).
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For 150 years (from approximately 1785 to 1935), most economists took the smooth operation of this market-clearing mechanism as inevitable and inviolable, based mainly on belief in Say's law. But the Great Depression of the 1930s caused many economists, including John Maynard Keynes, to doubt their classical faith. If markets were supposed to clear, how could ruinously high unemployment rates persist for so many painful years? Was the market mechanism not supposed to eliminate such surpluses? In one interpretation, Keynes identified imperfections in the adjustment mechanism that, if present, could introduce rigidities and make prices sticky. In another interpretation, price adjustment could worsen matters, causing what Irving Fisher called "debt deflation". Not all economists accept these theories. They attribute what appears to be imperfect clearing to factors like labor unions or government policy, thereby exonerating the clearing mechanism.
Most economists see the assumption of continuous market clearing as unrealistic. However, many see the concept of flexible prices as useful in the long-run analysis since prices are not stuck forever: market-clearing models describe the equilibrium economy gravitates towards. Therefore, many macro-economists feel that price flexibility is a reasonable assumption for studying long-run issues, such as growth in real GDP. Other economists argue that price adjustment may take so much time that the process of calibration may change the underlying conditions that determine long-run equilibrium. There may be path dependence, as when a long depression changes the nature of the "full employment" period that follows.
In the short run (and possibly in the long run), markets may find a temporary equilibrium at a price and quantity that does not correspond with the long-term market-clearing balance. For example, in the theory of "efficiency wages", a labor market can be in equilibrium above the market-clearing wage since each employer has the incentive to pay wages above market-clearing to motivate their employees. In this case, equilibrium wages (where there is no endogenous tendency for wages to change) would not be the same as market-clearing wages (where there is no classical unemployment).
In an unregulated and perfect market both labor market wages and product market prices are fully flexible and can change rapidly based on supply and demand. This flexibility ensures that neither the product nor the labor markets will experience an oversupply. If there is an oversupply of a product, its price will drop until buyers find it affordable, and in the case of a labor surplus, wages will decrease until employers can offer jobs to all willing workers. This mechanism ensures that every market tends towards equilibrium where supply meets demand. For instance, retailers may offer discounts on old cell phones and computers to sell them quickly and balance their inventory. The flexible pricing allows more people to buy these items, achieving market equilibrium.
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In economics, market clearing is the process by which, in an economic market, the supply of whatever is traded is equated to the demand so that there is no excess supply or demand, ensuring that there is neither a surplus nor a shortage. The new classical economics assumes that in any given market, assuming that all buyers and sellers have access to information and that there is no "friction" impeding price changes, prices constantly adjust up or down to ensure market clearing.
In neoclassical economics, a market distortion is any event in which a market reaches a market clearing price for an item that is substantially different from the price that a market would achieve while operating under conditions of perfect competition and state enforcement of legal contracts and the ownership of private property. In other words, a distortion is "any departure from the ideal of perfect competition that therefore interferes with economic agents maximizing social welfare when they maximize their own". A proportional wage-income tax, for instance, is distortionary, whereas a lump-sum tax is not. In a competitive equilibrium, a proportional wage income tax discourages work. In perfect competition with no externalities, there is zero distortion at market equilibrium of supply and demand where price equals marginal cost for each firm and product. More generally, a measure of distortion is the deviation between the market price of a good and its marginal social cost, that is, the difference between the marginal rate of substitution in consumption and the marginal rate of transformation in production. Such a deviation may result from government regulation, monopoly tariffs and import quotas, which in theory may give rise to rent seeking. Other sources of distortions are uncorrected externalities, different tax rates on goods or income, inflation, and incomplete information. Each of these may lead to a net loss in social surplus. Market distortions are events, decisions, or interventions taken by governments, companies, or other agents, often in order to influence the market. They are often the response on market failures, i.e., circumstances that prevent perfect competition and achieving an optimal equilibrium in the market. In the context of markets, "perfect competition" means: all participants have complete information, there are no entry or exit barriers to the market, there are no transaction costs or subsidies affecting the market, all firms have constant returns to scale, and all market participants are independent rational actors. Many different kinds of events, actions, policies, or beliefs can bring about a market distortion. For example: almost all types of taxes and subsidies, but especially excise or ad valorem taxes/subsidies, asymmetric information or uncertainty among market participants, any policy or action that restricts information critical to the market, monopoly, oligopoly, or monopsony powers of market participants, criminal coercion or subversion of legal contracts, illiquidity of the market (lack of buyers, sellers, product, or money), collusion among market participants, mass non-rational behavior by market participants, price supports or subsidies, failure of government to provide a stable currency, failure of government to enforce the Rule of Law, failure of government to protect property rights, failure of government to regulate non-competitive market behavior, stifling or corrupt government regulation. nonconvex consumer preference sets market externalities natural factors that impede competition between firms, such as occurs in land markets
A smart market is a periodic auction which is cleared by the operations research technique of mathematical optimization, such as linear programming. The smart market is operated by a market manager. Trades are not bilateral, between pairs of people, but rather to or from a pool. A smart market can assist market operation when trades would otherwise have significant transaction costs or externalities. Most other types of auctions can be cleared by a simple process of sorting bids from lowest to highest. Goods may be divisible, as with milk or flour, or indivisible, as with paintings or houses. Finding a market-clearing allocation corresponds to solution of a simple knapsack problem, and does not require much computation. By contrast, a smart market allows market clearing with arbitrary constraints. During market design, constraints are selected to match the relevant physics and economics of the allocation problem. A good overview is given in McCabe et al. (1991). Combinatorial auctions are smart markets in which goods are indivisible, but some smart markets allocate divisible goods such as electricity and natural gas. Compared to traditional market structures, a smart market substantially reduces transaction costs, allows competition which would not be possible otherwise, and can eliminate externalities. Despite complex constraints, a smart market allows the benefits of a modern financial exchange system. Fulfilment of the contract is backed by the exchange; parties are generally anonymous; the market manager enforces regulation to ensure fairness and transparency; and markets are orderly, especially during stressful conditions. A smart market may be a one-sided auction in which participants buy from the market manager, a one-sided procurement (reverse auction) in which participants sell to the market manager, or two-sided, in which the market manager balances supplying participants with demanding participants. In a two-sided smart market, the market manager may be a net seller, a net buyer, or simply a revenue-neutral broker. Smart markets are achievable due to an enabling confluence of technologies: the internet to transmit users’ bids and the resulting prices and quantities, increased computation power to run the simulation and linear program, and real time monitoring.
Wage compression (also known as salary compression and pay compression) refers to the empirical regularity that wages for low-skilled workers and wages for high-skilled workers tend toward one another. As a result, the prevailing wage for a low-skilled worker exceeds the market-clearing wage, resulting in unemployment for low-skilled workers. Meanwhile, the prevailing wage for high-skilled workers is below the market-clearing wage, creating a short supply of high-skilled workers (and thus no unemployment of high-skilled workers). Perfectly competitive labour markets can still exhibit a wage compression effect. In a perfectly competitive market, workers of different skill levels receive different wages and workers of the same skill level will receive the same wage no matter which firm they work in. However, the distribution of the skills of employees may be wider than the distribution of their wages. Akerlof and Yellen (1990) propose a model that uses the fair-wage hypothesis to explain wage compression. The fair-wage hypothesis suggests that the effort put forth by a worker is proportional to the fairness of her wage, as compared to other workers within the firm. Accordingly, if executives of a given firm are compensated much more highly than the firm's unskilled workers, the unskilled workers will exert a lower level of effort. In equilibrium, high-skilled wages tend downward, while low-skilled wages tend upward, which defines wage compression. Moene and Wallerstein (2006) argue that intentional wage compression led to a shift in favour of higher-productivity industries in Scandinavia, as it made low productivity industries less profitable and high productivity industries more profitable. Companies that experience salary compression are more likely to experience salary compression with less experienced new or existing employees than with more experienced tenured employees.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Mae Jemison, aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992.