In this chapter, we learn about how government policies affect supply and demand. This is the book’s first venture into real-world policies instead of just teaching basic theoretical concepts and principles that would only occur in idealistic markets, such as perfectly competitive markets for laws of supply and demand (as well as their shifting tendencies). Here, we learn about how policies set by the government often have unintended consequences, which I find interesting because I thought that the government would have several economists plan ahead and think the effects before implementing it in the real-world economy. However, this is far from the reality because policies that aim to make goods and services more accessible to everyone in the population often try to control the market price, and thus, disrupt the “invisible hand”. Equilibrium prices are altered, and new inequities arise.
Overall the chapter was not as difficult conceptually as chapter 4 and 5, and the real world applications did a great job of clearing up the concepts. The concepts were not too hard to understand except for those near the end, and the vocabulary was not as challenging as in earlier chapters. I rate the difficulty of this chapter 1/3, since there is a lot more discussion to be had about it and there are many more applications into economics in policy making. I'm excited to learn more about this topic though, and other policies that had unintended results as well as those that executed exactly as expected
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