Alfred Joseph Kahn (February 8, 1919 – February 13, 2009) was an American expert on social policy, particularly as it related to child welfare. He was critical of problems at the local and federal governmental level in providing services related to child development and family support, arguing that a comprehensive system of social welfare provision should be made available to all Americans comparable to similar systems offered in Western Europe.
YouTube Encyclopedic
-
1/3Views:1 042 3871 714 44113 742
-
Law of demand | Supply, demand, and market equilibrium | Microeconomics | Khan Academy
-
How Does an Editor Think and Feel?
-
071 Jungle Surfer - Censorship – the Information War has started
Transcription
In this video, we're going to talk about the law of demand, which is one of the core ideas of microeconomics. And lucky for us, it's a fairly intuitive idea. It just tells us that if we raise the price of a product, that will lower the quantity demanded for the product. Quantity demanded will go down. And you could imagine the other side of that. If we lower the price of a product, that will raise the quantity demanded of that product. And the law of demand says this just kind of generally. What we'll see in a few videos from now is that there are some exceptions to this. But to make this little concrete, let's think about the demand for a certain product. And one thing I want to clear here, and I'm going to go through great pains to not mess this up, is that when we talk about the word demand in a formal economic sense, we're not talking about a quantity. We're actually going to talk, all else equal, ceteris paribus, the relationship between price and quantity demanded. If we talk about an actual quantity, we should say the quantity demanded. So demand versus quantity demanded. These are two different things. And if it's a little confusing to you right now, hopefully by the end of this video, the difference between demand and quantity demanded will become a little bit clearer. And definitely over the next few videos, because in this video, we're going to focus on how the quantity demanded changes relative to the price. In future videos, we'll talk about how the entire relationship, how demand changes based on different factors. But to make things concrete, let's say I'm about to release my science fiction book, Space Whatever. I don't know, the book that I want to release. So I'm going to release some ebook. And we've done some market study, or we just know how the demand is related to price or the price is related to demand. And we're going to show that in a demand schedule, which is really just a table that just shows how the price-- and, actually I just made my first mistake. I just said how price relates to demand. I should say how price relates to quantity demanded and how quantity demanded relates to price. So demand schedule, it shows a relationship between price and quantity demanded, all else equal. So we're going to have multiple scenarios here. So this column, let me do my scenarios. In this column, let me put my price. In this column, I put my quantity demanded. So scenario, let's call this scenario A. I could price my book at $2. And I'll get a ton of people downloading it at that price. So I will get 60,000 people download my book at that price, my ebook. Scenario B, I could raise the price by $2. So it's now $4. And that kills off a lot of the demand. Now the quantity demanded goes down to 40,000 people downloading it. Then I can go to scenario C, if I raise it by another $2. So now I'm at $6. Now that lowers the quantity demanded to 30,000. I'll do a couple more of these. Scenario D, I raise another $2. So I get to $8 now. Now the quantity demanded goes down to 25,000. And I'll do one more of these. Let me see, what color have I not used yet. I haven't used yellow yet. Scenario E, if I raise it to $10, now the quantity demanded, let's just say, is 23,000. So this relationship shows the law of demand right over here. And this table that shows how the quantity demanded relates to price and vice versa, this is what we call a demand schedule. Now we can also, based on this demand schedule, draw a demand curve. And really, we're just going to plot these points and draw the curve the connects them. Because these aren't the only scenarios. Anything in between is possible. We could charge $2.01 for the book. We could charge for $4.50 for the book. And so that's what the demand curve captures a little bit better, because it's a continuous curve, not just five points. So let's do that. Let's graph it. And this is one of those conventions of economics that I am not a fan of. Because people often talk about changing the price, and how the quantity demanded changes from that. And in traditional-- in most of math and science, the thing that you're changing, you normally put on the horizontal axis. So if I was in charge of the convention of economics, I would plot price on the horizontal axis right over here. But the way it's done typically is that price is done on the vertical axis. And so you're used to seeing it in kind of a traditional class environment. I'll do the same. So we'll put price in the vertical axis, and we'll put quantity demanded in the horizontal axis. And our quantity demanded goes all the up to 60,000. So let's see, that's 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60. So that's 10-- this is in thousands-- 20, 30, 40-- sorry, not 45-- 40, 50, and 60. And this is in thousands. And then the price goes up to $10, from $2 to $10. So let's say this is 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. So let's plot the scenarios. So scenario A, price is $2, 60,000 units are demanded. That is scenario A right over there. Scenario B, when the price is $4, 40,000 units are demanded. And that's right over there. That's scenario B. Scenario C, $6, 30,000 units. Right over there, scenario C. Scenario D, $8, 25,000 units. $8, 25 is right about there. That looks like 25,000, right in between. That's close enough. So that right over there is scenario D. And then finally scenario E, $10, 23,000 units. So it might be something like that. That is scenario E. And so we could actually have prices anywhere in between that. And maybe we could even go further. So this right over here. So if I were to draw the demand curve, it could look something like this. The demand curve would look something-- I'm trying to do my best to draw it as a straight continuous line-- could look something like that. And it could keep going on and on. And so these are two ways to show demand. So just going back to what I said earlier, the quantity demanded is, all else equal for a given price, how many units people are willing to download or buy of my ebook. When we talk about the demand itself, we're talking about this entire relationship. So this demand itself is this entire demand schedule. Or another way to think of it is this entire demand curve. If demand were to change, we would actually have a different curve. This curve would shift, or the entries in this table would shift. If the quantity of demand changes-- so we move along this curve when you hold everything else equal and you only change price. So hopefully that makes it clear. When everything else is equal, and you're only changing price, you're not changing demand, you're changing the quantity demanded. The demand, because everything else is equal, is this relationship. In the next few videos, we'll think about what does happen when you do change some of those other factors.
Birth and education
Born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to a Jewish family, Kahn was raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. After moving with his family to the Bronx, he attended DeWitt Clinton High School. He attended the City College of New York, graduating in 1939, and then attended the Seminary College of Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary where he earned a degree in Hebrew letters.[1]
Service in the USAF
Serving in the United States Army Air Forces (now the USAF) during World War II, Kahn served at Drew Field near Tampa, Florida, where he participated in that branch's first mental-hygiene unit, studying the connections between childhood experiences of soldiers and their propensity to experience battlefield stress or go AWOL.[1]
After military service
After leaving military service, his experiences in the Air Force led him to pursue a master's degree in social work and Kahn was hired by Columbia University School of Social Work as an instructor in 1947.[1] In 1952, he was awarded the school's first doctorate granted in the field of social welfare, writing a dissertation on New York's Children's Court; He was appointed as Associate Professor of Social Work and Social Research at the school.[2]
Kahn's report on the Children's Court in New York, was based on a three-year study he performed under the auspices of the Citizens' Committee on Children and with the cooperation of Presiding Justice John Warren Hill. An editorial in The New York Times about the report cited the work as an unprecedented look behind the scenes of Children's Court, which is normally closed to the public and the press. Kahn was able to examine records, interview staff and to observe cases as they were being decided. While complimentary of some aspects of the court's operation, Kahn called the system "a dream still unrealized" that needed to focus more on rehabilitation than punishment.[3]
He began with work on childhood development and delinquency, later branching out to include research on the underlying causes of poverty. He argued that social services provide by local, state and federal governments should be treated as a "social utility", similar to fire departments and post offices, rather than being derogated as "welfare" and that these services should be offered to all, not just the poor. Starting in the 1970s, he developed numerous studies comparing how social welfare services are provided in the U.S. and Europe. During his 57 years teaching at the Columbia University School of Social Work, he provided oversight of social services provided New York, writing numerous reports for the Citizens' Committee for Children on subjects such as child-guidance programs, juvenile courts and truancy. In a 1965 interview with the New York Post he stated that "I represent a concern for what is being accomplished, rather than what is being done", noting that "'Services rendered' are not enough. I want to know what's going on."[1]
A 109-page report titled "For Children in Trouble" written by Kahn and released in 1957 by the Citizens' Committee for Children argued that the city's efforts for children "does not deal adequately with children in trouble". Kahn's recommendations included a new City Children's Bureau, or a strengthened existing one, that would oversee programs on a more systematic basis to address the issue that "inadequate measures are often taken because of community self-deception" that the institutions and resources available are capable of meeting a child's need. The report cited lengthy waiting lists and overcrowding at institutions intended to serve children and a 50-60% recidivism rate by age 21 for children released from State Training Schools.[4]
A 1960 report prepared by Kahn for the Citizens' Committee for Children showed that most juvenile delinquents sent to state facilities come out with their antisocial tendencies reinforced and these training schools focus too much stress on punishment than rehabilitation. In the face of public pressure to do something about the growing delinquency problem, judges were deemed to ready to send youths to institutions despite knowing that these facilities have "so many negative features as to render [them] little more than a place to hold a child in custody". Kahn recommended follow-up care following release among a list of other recommendations that included segregating children under 12 from older children, special facilities for disturbed delinquents and halfway houses for those released from facilities.[5]
He served as chairman of the Committee on Child Development Research and Public Policy of the United States National Academy of Sciences in the early 1980s. He was the author of some 25 books and hundreds of articles on a variety of social issues.[1]
Honors and awards
- The International Society for Child Indicators (ISCI)[6]
- 1998 inducted into Columbia University School of Social Work Hall of Fame [7]
Death
A resident of Cliffside Park, New Jersey, Kahn died on February 13, 2009, in Hackensack, New Jersey, five days after his 90th birthday. He was survived by a daughter, a brother and a sister.[1]
References
- ^ a b c d e f Grimes, William. "Alfred J. Kahn, Specialist in Child Welfare Issues, Dies at 90", The New York Times, February 21, 2009. Accessed February 21, 2009.
- ^ Staff. "Doctorate at Columbia First of Its Kind in State", The New York Times, June 5, 1952. Accessed February 21, 2009.
- ^ Editorial. "CHILDREN'S COURT", The New York Times, October 17, 1953. Accessed February 2, 2009.
- ^ Staff. "'CHILD IN TROUBLE' FOUND NEGLECTED; Social Work Report Urges New or Reorganized City Unit to Give Better Aid RISE IN ARRESTS NOTED Among Reforms Suggested Are a Bed-Space Register and More Residences", The New York Times, June 3, 1957. Accessed February 22, 2009.
- ^ Staff. "INSTITUTIONS SEEN HARMING YOUTHS; Committee for Children Say Most Delinquents Return With Antisocial Views", The New York Times, June 5, 1960. Accessed February 22, 2009.
- ^ ISCI Award in Honor of Alfred J. Kahn and Sheila B. Kamerman
- ^ "CSSW HALL OF FAME and PIONEER INDUCTEES" (PDF). Columbia University School of Social Work. Retrieved 20 March 2023.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| People | |
| Other | |
This page was last edited on 15 December 2023, at 15:42