Supply and demand is and always has been a useful first-order approximation. Reality is a lot more complicated.

Dear reader, never believe anyone who says a serious societal problem is "just" anything. Especially on the internet when they use merely a pesudonym to assert their authority.

Especially when the person behind the pseudonym is a one-time washed-out author desperately clinging to their housing stock in Atherton.

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WalterBright 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Reality is a lot more complicated.

It's still the Law of Supply and Demand. Just like F=ma always applies, even if the results are complicated.

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uoaei 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No, it's not a law in the same way as physical laws. Most of the failures in economics of the past 50 years can be mostly directly attributed to a fatal overcommitment to the belief that these attributed relations are incontrivertible.

What really exists, closest to the limit we will call "hard science" or "physics", is the microcosmic focus on individuals interacting in a market. Everything else -- supply and demand as a theory definitely included -- is a statistical extrapolation from micro-scale interactions. Hence the label of "dismal science". It's dismal because every hardline assumption is inevitably contravened by real life physics.

	▲	WalterBright an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The supply and demand curves are different for every person and every business. That makes it complicated - but not wrong.
	▲	danaris an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No, no, see, of course it's a law! Now, I'll explain it to you: First, assume a spherical economy in a frictionless vacuum... (/s)