Facts about the Theory of Demand

Demand is the economic theory that explains a consumer’s desire and readiness to pay a price for a precise good or service. Normally, the price of commodities and services increase as their demand dwindles while the price decreases when there is a high demand for them. According to Taylor and Weerapana (53), the term demand is a relationship between two economic variables namely: the price of a particular good; and the quantity of that good that consumers are willing to buy at the price during a specific time period. It describes how much of a good consumers will purchase at each price and it can be represented by a numerical table or by a graph. As the price of goods and services rise, the quantity demand by consumers goes down. Siddiqui (35) further describes demand as that effective desire which can be satisfied meaning that desires are simply imaginations. It is required that the demand commodity should be available at a certain place, time, and price. Demand must satisfy the following requirements; desire for the specific commodity; sufficient resources to purchase the desired commodity; willingness to spend the resources; and the availability of the commodity.

Demand can also be used to measure or predict the quantity of commodities and services which the buyers would be motivated to buy in a market at a given time and at a given place. The changes in the price of the commodities that are related to that which a consumer uses affects the market demand for it and an example of this would be the price of margarine (which the consumer does not normally use) is much lower than the price of butter (which the consumer normally uses). Inevitably, the consumer will decide to go for the cheaper product although their preference lies with the more expensive one. The demand for certain commodities may also be affected by the changes of the income of potential buyers, for example, if the income of a buyer is reduced, then he will opt to purchase cheaper commodities in line with his diminished income; but if the income is increased, then the buyer’s demand for the same product at higher prices will increase significantly. The future expectations of buyers almost always have a tendency of influencing the market demand of a product and this is usually displayed by considering the income security of potential buyers. If a potential buyer is confident in his belief that his future income will be stable, the he is more likely to spend more in buying both the commodities that he needs and wants. If however his future income is very insecure, then he is most likely to keep most of his money in savings in anticipation of a bleak financial future than spending it on commodities.

The demand schedule is a table that shows the quantity of demand of a good at the various price levels and it is a very important feature within the market because it helps to predict the future trends in the demand of commodities. In this way, given the price level, it is easy to determine the expected quantity demanded. A demand schedule is normally used alongside a supply schedule and these show the amount of certain goods that can be supplied to a market or markets at given price levels at various times and it is used to indicate that there is an inverse relationship between the price and the quantity demanded. Lipsey and Chrystal (40) state that a demand schedule is one way of showing the relationship between quantity demand and price. It is a numerical table that is used to show the quantity of goods that will be demanded at some selected prices.

Hoag and Hoag (59) state that the law of demand shows an inverse relationship between the price of a good and the quantity demanded of that good. When the value of a commodity goes in a certain direction, the amount of the equal commodity that is in demand goes in the opposite direction. As the price rises, less is purchased and this is indicated by the quantity demanded decreasing. There is a clear evidence of the law of demand at work in our daily lives. For example, when postage rates increase, then fewer Christmas cards are sent because the quantity demanded has fallen as the price has risen. When retail stores advertise sales, then these sales serve to increase the quantity demanded by lowering the price. The buyer response to higher fuel and energy prices will lead to smaller and more energy efficient cars, and in the homes, cooler temperatures and sweaters because there is a lower quantity demanded of energy at the higher price.

One reason why a consumer buys more of a good as the price falls is that the good becomes an attractive substitute for other goods and this encourages the consumer buys more of the good and consequently less of the other goods related to it. As the price of a good goes down, the consumer is able to purchase more of this good than he could before the price fell. Therefore, the consumer appears to have more income but this is not the case because it should be noted that the amount of money that the consumer actually has remains unchanged yet the purchasing power of the money increases as the price falls. The law of demand tells us that people have a tendency to respond to the price changes of given commodities and learning this would be helpful for a trader in fixing the prices of his commodities because he knows how much the demand for that particular commodity will fall if the price is raised beyond a certain level. The law of demand also helps the government in the setting of taxes on various commodities by analyzing the effects of taxes on the demand of these commodities in the market and adjusting the tax rates so that they may be more to the government’s advantage. It is also a very important factor in the planning of when and where to sell commodities due to their demand.

There are however some exceptions to the law of demand and an example of this is the inability of this law to explain why when the price of some goods increases, their demand also increase, and when their prices fall, then their demand decreases with this fall. A good example of such goods are precious stones and metals whose demand will continue to be high when their prices are high and the demand for them falls when their prices fall. A lot of people out of ignorance consider goods of cheaper prices to be of low quality and they buy it less, but when the prices of such commodities become high, then there is a tendency among these buyers to buy more of this commodity.

The law of demand further does not work when in anticipation for the rise of the price of goods; consumers begin to buy more of these goods even after there is an increase in the price of these goods in the present time. Similarly, if the prices are expected to fall in the foreseeable future, the consumers will buy less of these goods even if the costs of these commodities have become even lower in the present. Moreover, the law of demand does not work during the times of war or emergencies because if there are fears of a food shortage, then consumers will buy more food commodities for the purpose of hoarding and building stock. On the other hand, under certain situations, during an economic depression when prices are continuously falling, people tend to postpone their demand and thus buy less at lower prices.

In order to define marginal utility, we shall first define what utility is. Utility is the way defined by market participants of measuring gratification or contentment and how these relate to the decisions that people make while purchasing goods and it measures the advantages or disadvantages of consuming certain goods or services. Lipsey and Harbury (39) state that marginal utility is defined as the difference in utility arising from a change in the rate of consumption per period of time. Marginal utility is the added fulfillment that consumers gain from consuming additional units of commodities or services. It is an essential economic concept because the economists make use of it to determine how much of an item potential consumers will buy. The marginal utility is positive when the consumption of a bonus item increases the total utility while marginal utility is considered to be negative when the consumption of the bonus item decreases the total utility.

Mishra (20) defines the demand curve as the graphic illustration of a demand schedule depicting the relationship between the price of certain commodities and the amount of these commodities that buyers are able and willing to but at a given price. Demand curves are used to approximate the conducts in the market and these are often combined with supply curves to approximate the price at which sellers are willing to put up for sale the equivalent quantity of goods as buyers are willing to buy. The demand curve represents the highest quantities for every unit of time that consumers will take at various prices. The demand curve is used to show the relationships between the diverse quantities demanded at diverse prices.

There are various factors which affect the demand of commodities in the market and this is elaborated by Siddiqui (43) who states that an increase in the number of buyers will increase the demand for the good, for example, the demand for land increases as the population increases. An increase in the price of a commodity expected in future increases the demand in the present while a decrease in the same decreases the current demand. For example, when a good is temporarily put on sale, the people stock up on the good with the expectation that the good will no longer be in the market in the near future. Demand can shift due to the changes in taste over time, for example, the demand for breakfast cereal may possibly be very high in the morning but its demand may turn out to be very low at night. Furthermore, changes in quality also affect demand, for example, CDs cost more than cassettes because the music in CDs is of a higher quality than that in cassettes.

Siddiqui (52) states that elasticity of demand is a measure of the relative change in the amount purchased in response to any change in price or a given demand curve. Price elasticity deals with how sensitive the demand for a certain commodity is to a change in the products own price and in relation to this, there are several factors which determine the elasticity of a product or service and some of these include the following: the more the number of close substitutes for a good in the market, the more elastic is the demand for a product because consumers can more easily switch their demand if the price of one product changes relative to others in the market. Furthermore, there may be significant transaction costs involved in switching between different goods and services and in this case, demand tends to be inelastic, for example, cell phone service providers may decide to include fine sections in contracts or may insist on twelve month contracts being taken out. Goods and services that are considered by consumers to be necessities tend to have a more elastic demand because the said consumers can still survive without luxuries when their financial plans are stretched to their limits. Demand has a tendency to be more price elastic the longer consumers are allowed to respond to a price change by varying their purchasing decisions because it takes time for consumers to notice and to respond to price fluctuations.

References

Hoag, Arleen J & Hoag, John H. Introductory Economic. Singapore: World Scientific, 2006.

Lipsey, Richard G. Economics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Mishra, Sasmita. Engineering Economics and Costing. New Delhi, India: PHI Learning, 2009.

Siddiqui, S.A. Managerial Economics and Financial Analysis. New Delhi, India: New Age International, 2006.

Taylor, John B. & Weerapana, Akila. Economics. Andover, United Kingdom: Cengage Learning, 2007.

The Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan is a racist, anti-Semitic society with a dedication to excessive violence to attain its goals of racial separation and white dominance. It first emerged in 1866 following the American Civil War and it is considered to be America’s first terrorist group. Its first target was African – Americans and the white people who supported them. Later incarnations of this group added more categories amongst its enemies including Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, and the various immigrant groups in the United States. In most of these cases, these recognized enemies of the Klan were marginal groups that came into direct financial competition with the working class whites that formed the core constituency of these groups. According to Newton (202) the activities were however surpassed by growing neo – Nazi organizations in the United States in the 1990s and in the early 2000s.

The Ku Klux Klan was basically based in the Southern states of America where they targeted the African Americans set free after the American Civil War. The Klan had never considered the former slaves as being free and they terrorized the African Americans to maintain their supremacy as well as to express their anger at the freedoms granted to these former slaves. The root cause for their actions was that although America experienced great economic prosperity after the Civil War, not much of the wealth generated filtered to the South and it was the racism, mixed with anger at their economic plight that inspired the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was a violent organization and they burnt the churches of the African American population, murdered, raped and castrated those who they targeted and they were rarely caught because most senior law enforcers in the South were also high ranking Klan members or were sympathetic to its aims.

According to Bullard (9) he earliest branch of the Ku Klux Klan was created in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1866 and most of its leaders had been previous members of the Confederate army in the Civil War. During the next two years after its founding, they tortured and killed African – Americans and those whites who were sympathetic to them. Immigrants, who the Klan blamed for the election of radical Republicans, were also targeted and between 1868 and 1870, the Ku Klux Klan was instrumental in the restoration of white rule in the states of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. West (110) states that the original objective of the Ku Klux Klan was to stop the African American people from voting so that white domination of the Southern states would be maintained. After all-white governments had been established in the South, this group continued to undermine the power of African Americans by attacking successful black businessmen and by stifling any attempt to form black protection groups such as trade unions. Since the Ku Klux Klan had achieved its main objective in the Southern states, by the end of 1871, the organization had practically disappeared.

It is claimed by Gitlin (133) that after its formation, the Klan quickly became a terrorist organization in the service of the Democratic Party and white supremacists and that its main goal was to destroy Congressional Reconstruction by murdering blacks and some whites who were either in active Republican politics or educating black children. They burned churches and schools and drove thousands of people out of their homes and because local law enforcement representatives were incapable or reluctant to stop them, Congress approved the Force Bill in 1871 giving the Federal government the authority to take legal action against the Klan. Dedicated prosecutors managed to win convictions and break up Klan activity and although relatively few people were punished, federal action did put an end to Klan activities, at least for a while.

Maclean (23) states that the Ku Klux Klan was reorganized in 1915 by William Simmons, a preacher who had been influenced by the book The Ku Klux Klan written in 1905 by Thomas Dixon and a film version of the book which glorified the past actions of this group. After World War One, the Ku Klux Klan became very antagonistic towards various religious and political groups and ideologies which they considered to be foreign to the United States. It was under the charismatic leadership of Hiram Evans, the group grew quickly and by the 1920s, Klansmen had been elected into positions of political authority and these included officials in Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Oregon, and Maine. By 1925, the Klan members had reached a record four million members and this gave them so much power that on the rare occasions when they were arrested for serious crimes, Klansmen were unlikely to be convicted by the local Southern juries. However, after the conviction of a senior Klan leader for murder and the revelation of evidence of corruption by other senior members of this group such as the then governor of Indiana and the mayor of Indianapolis, the membership of the Klan started falling and this trend went on through the Great Depression and the Second World War. Eventually, the organization was weakened by disagreements amongst its leadership and because of the public criticism of its violent activities and by 1944, the Klan had lost most of its influence and membership and it was disbanded.

Chalmers (16) states that the emergence of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s resulted in the revival of the Ku Klux Klan movement and it saw a surge of Klan activity which included terror attacks on black schools and churches. The various Klan groups put pressure on African Americans not to vote mostly through lynching which the Klan employed as a method of terrorizing the local African American population. The success of these Klan activities can be seen in the state of Mississippi in 1960 where although the African Americans formed 42% of the population, only 2% were registered to vote.

In conclusion, it can be said that the Ku Klux Klan movement, despite its violent history, is still a part and parcel of the general history of the South of the United States. It however only developed to a position of great power during what can only be considered as emergencies. For example, it came into existence as a result of the emancipation of the slaves after the Civil War, the influx of immigrants after the First World War, and the rise of the Civil Rights movement. The Klan’s existence has been very persistent since its founding and it is as yet not known what its next incarnation is going to be.

References

Bullard, Sara. The Klu Klux Klan: A History of Racism and Violence. Darby, Pennsylvania: Diane Publishing, 1998.

Chalmers, David Mark. Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement. Lanham, Maryland, 2003.

Gitlin, Marty. The Ku Klux Klan: A Guide to an American Subculture. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2009.

MacLean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Newton, Michael. The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: A History. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2010.

West, Jerry Lee. The Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan in York County, South Carolina, 1865 – 1877. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2002.

Menopause: The Symptoms

According to Fox-Spencer and Brown (2006), menopause is the point when a woman has her last period which happens when her ovaries stop releasing eggs, and for some women, it happens all at once but for many women, it is a gradual process. If a woman has not had a period in more than a year, is not pregnant, or does not have another illness, she may have most likely reached menopause and this typically, this happens when the woman is in her fifties.

Planned Parenthood, in their website state that perimenopause is the gradual change that leads to menopause which usually happens between the ages of 45 and 55 but it is not unknown to begin as early as 40, a time when menstrual periods usually become less predictable and they may become more or less frequent or may be heavier or lighter. Women who smoke have a higher possibility of going into perimenopause earlier than those women who do not smoke. Perimenopause is a process that can last for few months or can go on for up to 12 years depending on the physiological make up of the woman involved. If a woman has not had a period for more than a year or two, then this marks the end of the perimenopausal stage and the beginning of menopause.

Surgical menopause occurs with the removal of both ovaries in women who have yet to undergo menopause and this induces menopause because they suddenly experience the symptoms of menopause without the normal gradual changes that occur. Women with surgical menopause experience the following changes: hot flashes; sweating at night; the drying of the vagina; heart palpitations; frequent mood swings; unexplained depression; constant fatigue; and some changes in their sexual desire.

Stress menopause is caused by the constant stress experienced by a woman on many occasions which hastens the menopausal process. This type of stress can be caused by the various factors related to stress, for example, exposure to radiation, smoking, excessive alcohol intake or having a poor diet. Most of these factors result in stress or are the symptoms of a woman having stress.

Post menopause is the stage following menopause which normally starts between 24 and 36 months after the last period that a woman experiences. There is a reduction of menopausal symptoms as become less frequent. However, the reduction of menopausal symptoms during the postmenopausal stage is not uniform among all women and some may continue having them for a very long time after their last period while others have them for only a short time.

As a woman approaches menopause, her menstrual period starts to change and the time between periods can be shorter or longer and may vary from month to month and the defining feature of menopause taking place is the stopping of menstrual periods. However, it is difficult to determine whether a woman has experienced her last period or not unless she displays menopausal symptoms. The most common menopause symptoms are: changes in sexual desire, extreme sweating, frequent urinary tract infections, frequent urination, irritability, night sweats, sleep problems, and vaginal dryness.

Many life changes can occur during Perimenopause and menopause which can affect a woman. These changes can cause the increase of the symptoms of menopause and they include: anxiety about future loss of independence; anxiety about disability or loneliness; changes in social relationships; changes in identity or body image; children leaving home; getting divorced; and increased anxiety about illness, aging, or death among many others.

Osteoporosis is a disease that weakens bones, increasing the risk of sudden and unexpected fractures which results in the loss bone mass and strength and it progresses without any symptoms or pain. There is a relationship linking the deficiency of estrogen in women during perimenopause and menopause and the occurrence of osteoporosis because of early menopause and the prolonged periods in which hormone levels are low and menstrual periods are absent or infrequent which can cause loss of bone mass.

Wang-Cheng and Neuer (2007) state that some women opt for hormone therapy to treat their menopause symptoms and these therapy may include pills, patches, implants, rings, and vaginal creams whose main purpose is to replace hormones such as estrogen and progesterone that the body stops making during perimenopause and menopause. Some women concerned about the risks of hormone therapy choose alternative therapies including homeotherapy, herbal treatments and Chinese medicines but these therapies may also have undesired effects.

In conclusion, menopause is a very normal occurrence in women which has to happen during their lifetime and at different paces depending on the individual who is experiencing it. This period of gradual change in women should be met with understanding from their partners, family and co-workers because it is a very difficult time for them. By treating them with understanding, the process will be so much easier not only for them but also for those around them. It is important to recognize that whilst the menopause may cause some distressing symptoms, it is not an illness and it will happen to every woman who reaches menopausal age.  

Cited Works

Fox-Spencer, Rebecca & Brown, Pam. (2006). Menopause. Oxford, United Kingdom: CSF Medical Communications Limited.

Planned Parenthood. (2012). Menopause. Retrieved from http://www.plannedparenthood.org/health-topics/womens-health/menopause-4807.htm?__utma=1.1141080531.1343551155.1343553528.1343555843.3&__utmb=1.17.9.1343556410875&__utmc=1&__utmx=-&__utmz=1.1343551155.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)&__utmv=-&__utmk=19141048 .

Wang-Cheng, Rebekah & Neuer, Joan M. (2007). Menopause. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: ACP Press.