Who Were the Sea Peoples?

it's maddening, isn't it? For instance : "Mr. Yergin denigrated those warning of future imbalance between oil supply and demand as having no credibility and reassured all that to the contrary..." Well, anyone who talks about an in balance between "supply and demand" should be denigrated, Because supply and demand our curves, or schedules, and by definition cannot be "imbalanced." Nor does shifting the talk to "quantity supplied" and "quantity demanded" save it from being bladder. Those quantities are never in balance excepted the equilibrium price, and whatever the supply and demand conditions, they are in balance at the equilibrium price. What the authors ought to have contended is that they see the price of oil rising in the future, but that does not sound as scary as an "oil supply crisis." And they would have a tough time making their case that international central planning of energy production is necessa...

Let us imagine a place were oranges are the medium of exchange. Then, when we draw a supply and demand diagram for bananas, the price in oranges goes on the vertical axis and the quantity supplied of bananas on the horizontal one. (If you don't know where this is leading, it is worth drawing this.) The demand curve for bananas slopes downward, and the supply curve upwards, just as though the medium of exchange was dollars. But imagine that tomorrow, people decide bananas make a better medium of exchange. This will reverse our axes: the price in bananas now goes on the vertical axis, and the quantity supplied of oranges on the horizontal one. (Again, you might want to do this.) And now it ought to be clear: the supply curve for bananas in the first diagram just was the demand curve of banana buyers for oranges. And the demand curve for bananas was the orange producers' supply curve, in so far as they were supplying in order to get oranges. Making the medium of exchange gol...