Learning about the Economy

Mundane & Pointless Stuff I Must Share: The Off Topic Forum

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Username17
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Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Username17 »

Leress wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK2qHyF-8u8

This may help.
That's a good one. Although I think glossing over the fact that capital expenses are a barrier to entry regardless of what governments do or do not do is somewhat disingenuous (although unfortunately common in economics). To use his example: entering the airline business costs lots of money. You have to train pilots, buy new planes, yadda yadda yadda. Even if it there is a clear price mismatch in the cost of flying from Boston to Laguardia, I won't be able to enter that market without a huge investment and commitment to enter a lot of other markets simultaneously. Maybe I could make $100 a ticket by undercutting Big Air, but a single 747 costs $24million. So I'd need to commit to making $100 a ticket two hundred and forty thousand times just to pay off the initial capital investment in the plane.

What this means is that monopolies can and do exist in places and sectors where the government doesn't support them at all. Any time the required capital investment to enter a market is non-zero, barriers to entry exist.

-Username17
Korgan0
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Post by Korgan0 »

This is a bet of an off-topic necro, but I'm currently taking a class where we're reading Marx, Smith, and Keynes along with histories of the relevant time period, and the histories have actually been really helpful in terms of understanding the theories, and having a better understanding of economic history is a good thing in of itself. Specifically, we're reading Fernand Braudel's The Wheels of Commerce, Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, and Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand.
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