the.com/law of demand
Price goes up, desire looks elsewhere — humans want things more when they're cheaper.
means As the price of a good rises, the quantity people are willing to buy falls, all else being equal — and vice versa.
from 'Law' here borrows the 17th-century scientific sense of 'law of nature' — a regularity so reliable it deserves the same grand title as gravity or motion. 'Demand' traces back through French 'demander' to Latin 'demandare' (to entrust, commission), which drifted over centuries from 'asking for something formally' to simply 'wanting to buy it.' Economists like Alfred Marshall formalized the pairing with supply in the late 1800s, but the underlying observation — that people buy less of something as it gets pricier — is really just old market haggling dressed up in the language of physics.
- not a theory
- treated as near-universal, unlike most of economics
- the exception
- veblen goods get desired more as price rises
- the mechanism
- substitution plus shrinking purchasing power as price climbs
- the curve
- demand slopes downward, almost always, on every graph