Economics Lecture Two
Economics Lectures - [1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14]
In the last lecture we introduced the fundamental concepts of economics. Now we are ready to explore several issues in greater detail.
A focus of economics is on the purchase and sale of goods and services in free enterprise. By “free enterprise,” I mean business transactions that are "free of" interference by someone other than the buyer and seller, such as government. Free enterprise has little or no government interference in the setting of prices and selling of the goods or services. Assume that transactions discussed in this course are in free enterprise unless stated otherwise.
The first obvious question about the purchase and sale of goods is this: what determines the price and quantity of goods sold? In other words, how much must a buyer pay for the good (the price), and how many units of the good will the seller be able to sell at that price?
Let's take an example. Suppose you own a candy store, and you sell chocolate Hershey candy bars. What price should you use for those candy bars? If you sell them for $1 each, many people will buy them. But if you charge $5 per candy bar, fewer will buy them at that price. Your quantity of goods sold will be much less. If, on the other hand, you sell the candy bars for only 10 cents per bar, you'll sell out quickly as people rush to buy the bars at that low price. It might seem like you'd be happy at selling so many, but you make much less money at 10 cents per bar than at $1 per bar. So you're worse off if you set the price at only 10 cents per bar, because you receive too little for each bar, and you're worse off if you set the price at $5 per bar, because you sell too few bars. The best price for you to use for the candy bars is around $1 per bar.
The above analysis applies to the sale of a good (a candy bar), but the same analysis applies to the sale of services (such as a car mechanic selling his car repair services). People sell their time as much as they sell what they own. In this sense, "time is money" because time can be converted into money by spending that time working. You could take convert 8 hours of time a day into about $50 by working at McDonalds each day, for example.
We could spend the remainder of this course on pricing goods and services. Millions of businesses succeed or fail based on how they price their goods or services. Thousands of people and factors affect the pricing of a good or service, so this question is not as simple as it looks. Assumptions have to be made in order to draw conclusions. In some cases, price behavior baffles even the greatest experts in the field.
Price of Stocks
The price of a company’s stock reflects the price at which people are willing to sell it (the supply price) and the price at which other people are willing to buy it (the demand price). A "sale" of the stock occurs only when the supply price equals the demand price. The overall value of a company at any given time is the price per share of its stock, multiplied by the number of shares of stock. A company that has one billion shares of stock in the market, each valued at $15 per share, has a market value of $15 billion. Logic dictates that when a stock increases its value, then the company is increasing its overall value.
Note that stock values, like economics in general, reflects the future rather than the past. Often a company announces a profit for the year, and yet its stock value decreases on the news. That happens when people do not expect the company to be as profitable in the future as it has been. Past profits do not matter to the price of a stock today; profits in the future do. General Motors was once the most profitable company in the world; now it is worthless, because it cannot make any profits in the future.
During the internet “dot-com” boom of the late 1990s, stock prices surprisingly increased for companies that were losing money. That was because people expected the companies to be very profitable in the future. Sometimes it even seemed like the more a dot-com company lost money, the higher its stock would go! That was very unusual, but was based on expectations about the future. As it turned out, most of these companies went bankrupt, and the internet became profitable for only a few companies like Google.
Stock prices on the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ (the stock exchange for new and often high-tech companies) are determined entirely by “bid” and “ask” prices of the buyers and sellers. Someone will “bid” a certain amount to buy a stock, and a seller will “ask” for a certain price. When the bid and ask amounts equal, then a sales transaction occurs. Prices can move very quickly and unpredictably when millions of people are involved.
As explained above, the price that a stock trades on the exchange is where the “supply” by sellers equals the “demand” by buyers. When a seller of stock asks too high a price, then there are no buyers and the stock does not trade. When a buyer of stock offers too little a price, then there are no sellers and the stock does not trade. The transaction only occurs when SUPPLY EQUALS DEMAND.
This important principle of "supply and demand" is the most basic concept in all of economics, and next we explain it further.
Supply and Demand
The supply of a good is how much of it, and at what price, is provided by a seller of the good. Grocery stores, factories, malls, amazon.com, and candy stores all supply goods. Services, like entertainment, are supplied by Hollywood, Major League Baseball, the NFL and also doctors, lawyers, accountants, and so on. The supply side is made up of the producers, providers and sellers of goods and services.
The demand for a good is how much of it, and at what price, is wanted by the public seeking to buy it. Shoppers, moviegoers, baseball and football fans, and people needing medical care are on the demand side.
For any given good or service, there is a supply and demand. The supply can be described in terms of different quantities at different prices. The demand can separately be described as different quantities at different prices. The price has enormous influence over the quantity on both the supply and demand side.
No company can afford to build cars (supply them) if the sales price is only $1. But at a sales price of $30,000, a vast number of cars can be built. The cause is price, and the effect is quantity.
The demand for a good is also described in terms of price and quantity. At a given price, there is an amount of demand by the public for the good. A billion people might buy a car if the price were only $1. At a much higher price of $30,000, the demand drops to a quantity in the millions range. At a still higher price of $100,000, the demand falls much further to the thousands range.
Because supply and demand can both be expressed in terms of price and quantity, they can be plotted on the same graph. In a confusing convention, the y-axis is typically price, and the x-axis is usually quantity. (In most other graphs the cause is placed on the x-axis and the effect is on the y-axis, but you will find that economists often seem to have things backwards!) Just memorize this rule and stick with it: price is on the y-axis, and quantity is on the x-axis. This might help you remember: "p" for price is lower in the alphabet than "q" for quantity, and "p" appears first on the graph as one reads from left to right.
The supply curve is upward sloping: the higher the sales price, the higher the quantity that companies will produce for sale. That is because higher sales prices bring in greater revenue -- and greater profits -- to fund the costs of making the good or providing service.
The demand curve is downward sloping: the higher the sales price, the lower the quantity that people are willing to buy. Few people will buy a candy bar if it costs $5: if that price is lowered to $2, then more people will want to buy it, and if its price is lowered to $1, then even more will want to buy it, and if its price is lowered to 50 cents, then the demand by the public for that candy bar will be greater still. As the price for something goes down, the demand goes up. That results in a downward-sloping demand curve: as the price goes down the slope of the curve, the quantity demanded (sought) by the public goes up.
The supply and demand is the most basic relationship in all of economics. They have independent of each other, but are placed on the same graph so that it becomes easy to find "equilibrium": the point where supply and demand have the same value for their price, and the same value for their quantity (the point of the intersection of their curves). This equilibrium is the point for the price and quantity of the good in a free market.
The supply and demand curves usually look like this:
The above model for supply and demand helps us to consider the effect of shifts in demand and supply. First consider an increase in demand:
An increase in demand causes price to rise. The new equilibrium is at a point with higher price and greater quantity than before. What could cause an increase in demand? For gasoline, more people driving would cause an increase in demand. For heating oil, a colder winter would cause an increase in demand. For sports entertainment, a close rivalry can cause an increase in demand (spectators). In all those cases, price and quantity tend to rise. If there is a decrease in demand, then the opposite is generally true: prices and quantity tend to decrease. Next consider an increase in supply. Suppose farmers have better weather, for example, causing more crops at the harvest. Or suppose there is discovery of huge new oil reserves underground. Or suppose a new invention, such as Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, increases the production of a good (cotton). This curve shows what happens when there is an increase in supply:
Can you interpret that? When the supply curve shifted downward as supply increased, the price decreased but the quantity increased. The new equilibrium is at lower price and greater quantity than before. Consumers are happier as supply increases. The discovery of new oil reserves, or inventions like the cotton gin, make consumers better off.
Example: The Tyndale Bible
The Tyndale Bible was an illegal translation of portions of the Bible into English, the first high-quality English translation that was based on the ancient Greek. Though prohibited by King Henry VIII and the Catholic Church, William Tyndale secretly did the translation in the early 1500s (around the same time that Martin Luther was translating the Bible into German), and then Tyndale arranged for sale of copies of his work to the public in England.
Demand by the public in England was high for this Bible, but the supply was low due to limitations of the printing press and the opposition by the King and other authorities. High demand and low supply means this: a high price. The King and church authorities began buying up copies of this Bible to keep it out of the hands of the public, but often had to pay the "market price" to buy up the copies. This money then went to the printers and provided the funds for them to pay for the printing of more Tyndale Bibles. The operation of supply and demand in the free market made it difficult to censor and suppress this Bible.
Supply and demand comprise a very powerful force, stronger than any individual or government. Over time, supply and demand prevail, and ultimately all authorities endorsed the idea of an English translation of the Bible, leading to the printing of the magnificent King James Version in 1611. But the unstoppable effect of supply and demand did not occur soon enough to help Tyndale himself; he was executed as a heretic in 1536 after he refused to recant his beliefs.
What is Irrelevant to Supply and Demand?
Many things that you might think are important to the pricing of a good or service in the market are actually irrelevant. Supply and demand by many people determine the price, and thus the preferences of any single individual are irrelevant. The wealthiest person in the world cannot affect supply and demand any more than the poorest person can, in a free market. Supply and demand transcends and is above the views, preferences, and buying habits of any individual or small group of people.
Note also that supply and demand do not care who a person is or what his background may be. The store owner sells a chocolate candy bar for the same price to the richest man in the world as to the poorest man in the world. The President pays the same price as the most disliked person in town. Supply and demand, and the free market, treats everyone fairly and equally. Someone who walks into a candy store and offers to buy all the candy bars in the store may receive a slightly better price per candy bar because he is paying so much, but he won't receive any better treatment than anyone else, even the most disreputable person in town, who might also offer to buy all the candy bars in the store. The free market responds to powerful economic forces above any possible prejudice, gossip, or personal preferences.
The "market price" set by supply and demand often is often unrelated to the historical cost of the good. Someone may have paid $300,000 for his house in 2006, when houses were relatively expensive, but the market price of that house in 2009 may be only $150,000. When that person tries to sell his house in 2009 it does not matter what he paid for it in 2006. All that matters is what the supply and demand for that house is when he tries to sell it.
Equilibrium & Information
Consider these three basic principles of economics:
- When demand exceeds supply at a given price, the price tends to rise. Likewise, when supply exceeds demand, the price tends to decrease.
- A rise in price tends to increase supply and decrease demand. Conversely a fall in price tends to decrease supply and increase demand.
- Price tends to move towards the amount at which the quantity in demand is equal to the quantity in supply: SUPPLY EQUALS DEMAND.
Note the use of the verb “tend” in the laws of economics cited above. Companies that consistently lose money “tend” to go bankrupt and out of business. But it does not happen immediately, especially if the company is large. It takes time for the market to come to equilibrium. Ultimately supply does equal demand, but only after enough time and activity passes for the conditions to attain equilibrium.
“Equilibrium” is “where things are going” or where they have already arrived. The equilibrium for the universe is complete disorder and chaos, with every creature extinct. A constant increase in entropy is what drives situations to their equilibrium. (Devolution is the process, not the so-called evolution.) Economic equilibrium is when all the imbalances in selling and buying prices have disappeared and there are no more trends to different price levels. Randomness and profit-making pressures drive pricing towards equilibrium.
The ultimate equilibrium when there is perfect competition occurs when the marginal revenue to the seller equals its marginal cost of the product. In other words, the supplier keeps producing more and more goods until its marginal profit on each extra good falls to very close to zero. That profit decline may be because the goods are not selling as quickly or due to unsold goods. For example, the first SUV produced by Ford may sell at a high price, but its last SUV in a given year will have to be discounted heavily. Ford doesn’t want to make any more SUVs in a given year that it might have to take a loss on. It produces just enough so that marginal revenue falls to marginal cost, as best as can be predicted.
Imbalances in information are a reason for the delay in pricing to reach equilibrium. Buyers do not immediately realize when they can obtain the same good more cheaply another way. For many years people continued to pay high costs for renting telephones after it became legal to buy inexpensive ones. The effects of competition are not often felt overnight. A lower-priced competitor has to educate the public of the availability of its goods, and that takes time.
There is also a more permanent imbalance in information between the buyer and seller of a good. The seller always knows more about his good than the buyer does. The seller does not want to disclose the disadvantages, weaknesses, defects, and outright dangers of his good. The buyer has to beware in paying money to the seller for a good: caveat emptor (Latin for “let the buyer beware”).
Tobacco companies did not want to disclose that cigarettes cause cancer. Abortion providers do not want to disclose that abortions cause breast cancer, infertility, and severe psychological problems. There would be far fewer abortions if full disclosure of their harm were made prior to performing the service, and if taxpayer money was not used to fund the service.
Disclosure of harm is a problem for used car dealers who do not want to tell buyers that a car is a lemon (i.e., constantly needs fixing). Food manufacturers do not want to disclose all the fat and artificial ingredients in their products.
Governmental regulations require some of these disclosures (but not for abortion in New Jersey, which is one reason why New Jersey has more abortions than other states that do require full disclosures). Mandatory disclosure about goods and services may be the best and only effective type of governmental regulation. Food packaging now must state what the ingredients are and how much fat is contained. The buyer doesn’t have to guess about this information. The buyer must still beware, but can do so with more information than before.
Price Discrimination
The term “price discrimination” sounds ugly, but it means selling the same good or service at different prices to different people. It is an attempt by a seller to capture additional money from buyers who are willing to pay more.
Airline tickets are an example. Businesses are willing to pay more for airline tickets for their employees to travel to business meetings than tourists are. Why? Because the businessmen are traveling to make more money for their company, and the airline ticket can be paid out of their profits. If they are flying to do a deal worth $100,000, then they’re willing to pay many thousands of dollars for the airline ticket. Not so for tourists who fly.
The airline wants to sell the same seat at a price low enough for the tourist to pay, and then at a different, much higher price for the businessmen. This is price discrimination, because it distinguishes or discriminates based on who the buyer is. “Perfect price discrimination” sells each unit of a good at the maximum amount each individual buyer is willing to pay.
There are laws against price discrimination, but most sellers find clever ways to do it anyway. Airlines distinguished between business customers and tourists by its “Saturday night stay-over” rule. If the traveller reserves the return flight to include staying over at least one Saturday night, then he is likely a tourist. If he flies out and back in the same week without staying through the weekend, then he is likely a businessman. So the airline tickets were then priced much more cheaply for those who stay over at least one Saturday night.
In general, price discrimination depends on the existence of obstacles to prevent buyers from reselling their goods to other buyers. If the same good is sold at $X to person A and $Y to person B, and X<Y, then person A could buy an extra good and sell it to person B at less than $Y. The price discrimination would collapse due to the resale market.
But some goods cannot be resold. Goods that are personal to the buyer, like a tailored suit or dress, cannot be resold. Price discrimination works fine for personalized goods or exclusive markets, because there is not a resale market to destroy the discrimination.
Minimum Wage and Price Controls
So far we have been talking about economic exchanges in the absence of government controls. But the government does interfere in many ways in our economy. America enjoys more free enterprise than any other large country, but we are still heavily regulated.
During World War II, the government imposed controls to prevent companies from raising prices during the war. The needs of our military for goods increased demand that would ordinarily shift the demand curve and increase prices. But the government prohibited this from happening by limiting price increases.
Controls on prices (and also wages) were also imposed to control inflation in the early 1970s. A war in the Middle East, and assistance in that war by the United States of Israel, caused the Arab nations to reduce their supply of oil to us. That created gasoline shortages and increased energy costs, which then drove up inflation. Price controls were designed to limit the increases.
Today, the government prohibits employers from paying wages below a certain amount per hour, called the “minimum wage.” It is now $7.15 per hour in New Jersey, but only $5.15 per hour nationwide. If you work 40 hours a week for 50 weeks, or a total of 2000 hours, then that translates to a yearly salary of $10,300. It is nearly impossible to support a family that amount in most areas of the country, and many politicians are constantly demanding an increase in the minimum wage.
Unfortunately, it is even more difficult to survive without a job at all, which is what happens to many people (particularly teenagers) when the minimum wage is increased. Employers who would hire someone to work at $4 per hour might not be able to hire them at $5.15 per hour. Isn’t a job at $4 an hour better than none at all?
Moreover, illegal aliens find a wage of even $2 an hour better than what they could make in their homeland. Companies move operations offshore to take advantage of places that do not have minimum wages as high as ours. Alternatively, workers enter this country illegally to work at low wages and displace American workers, according to several lawsuits.
Minimum Wage and Dropping Out of School
Researchers have found that one effect of raising the minimum wage is that more students drop out of school, or do not go on to college, because they can make more money working at jobs than they could before. This can be understood as follows:
- Suppose that "x" number of students quit school to work at jobs when the minimum wage is $6 per hour.
- If the minimum wage is raised from $6 per hour to $7 per hour, then jobs appear more attractive to students and even more will leave school than before.
- Therefore raising the minimum wage causes more students to leave school in order to work at jobs.
Other studies show, however, that the more education that someone has, the higher their average income is. Students who complete four-year colleges make more money on average than students who completely only two-year colleges, for example. Students who complete two-year colleges likewise have higher average incomes than students who end their education after high school.
Raising the minimum wage thus entices students to take advantage of a "short-term" benefit of the higher wage, but they are worse off in the "long-run". They would make more money by staying in school and not being enticed by the increase in the minimum wage.
Socialized Medicine
The single biggest industry in the United States is health care, and it is sharply increasing in expenditures each year. It has three major components: government-controlled (Medicare and Medicaid), insurance-controlled, and private pay or uninsured. Each year, the demands for the government to take over the field grow louder, as insurance costs sky-rocket.
Most other countries have some form of socialized medicine. In the countries of Canada, North Korea and Cuba, it is actually illegal to pay money to a doctor simply to see you. The government control there is so great that you can only see a doctor paid by the government in those countries. In England, there is a two-tiered system: good care is provided to those who can afford to pay for it, and free but inferior care is provided by the government to those who cannot.
The Canadian government destroyed free enterprise in medicine there, and took over the health care system. The government now sets limits on wages and prices. Lowering the wages and prices prevents supply from rising to satisfy demand. Because demand is much greater than supply, patients have to wait a long time to see a doctor. There is a lower survival rate from cancer in Canada than the United States because of the delays in diagnosis and treatment there.
If an elderly Canadian is vacationing in Florida and falls and breaks his hip, which is very painful, the Canadian system of health care will not even reimburse the patient for surgery at the nearest hospital. Instead, the patient must fly back to Canada in excruciating pain to be operated on by a government-controlled doctor there.
In the United States, where health care still includes free enterprise, a patient can enter a doctor’s office or hospital at any time and receive services based on a promise to pay for them by check or cash. Prices vary, and it is worth shopping around. Immediate care always remains available at some price.
Medical care in the United States has the highest survival rates for cancer and the most advanced procedures. People from all over the world come to the United States to obtain the best care possible. The life expectancy for a child born with cystic fibrosis in the United States is 37 years, but only 27 years in Ireland under its government-controlled (or nationalized) health care.
In the summer 2009, the President Obama and the Democrats in control of Congress proposed a bill calling for a partial government takeover of health care. Their proposal included a "public option," which would be a government-controlled health insurance program like Medicare and yet available to persons of all ages. Their proposal includes many other controversial features, including:
- a “public option” that will define which treatments will be allowed and which will not, with a goal of limiting costs.
- mandatory insurance requiring people to buy what they do not currently want, and which may not cover what they need.
- requirements that "self-insured employers" provide insurance for their employees, even if the small business cannot afford it.
- government-defined health benefits, like abortion or sex-change operations, that must be included by insurance as a condition of being able to participate in a government managed "Health Insurance Exchange."
- "home visits" by government agents to "improve immunization coverage" (require proof of vaccination).
Sarah Palin, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate in 2008, criticized this plan as follows:
- The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
Thomas Sowell is an African American economist who consistently supports free market solutions to health care and other challenges.
In America children having cystic fibrosis live an average of 37 years, but under nationalized health care in Ireland the life expectancy for children with this condition is only 27 years. Government-run health care does not cover many special-needs conditions, and once everyone is in the government system there is not enough of a free market to fund proper care for special needs persons.
Tariffs and Quotas
"Imports" are goods shipped into our country by a foreign country, for sale in our country. China imports many goods that are sold in the United States by Wal-Mart, for example.
There are valid reasons to discourage the sale of imports and encourage sale of goods made domestically (made in the United States). The money paid for imports goes to the foreign companies, and support the foreign countries. The sale of imports do not help Americans as much as the sale of made-in-America goods do.
There are two approaches to disfavoring imports. The primary way in history was to impose a tariff on imports. A tariff is a tax on imports. A tariff raises the price of imported goods, and the supplier must then reduce its received price to attain the same level where supply meets demand. This has the effect of reducing supply. Goods made domestically (in the United States) increase their sales due to the decrease in sales by the imports. A tariff on a foreign-made car like the "Honda" would reduce the supply of Honda cars in the market. American car companies would benefit from that, but consumers who want to buy more Hondas might not.
The other approach to limiting imports is the use of quotas. Instead of imposing a tariff on Hondas, our government could set an upper limit (quota) on the total number of Hondas that may be sold in the United States each year. Quotas also reduce supply, but without generating any revenue to the government. Instead, quotas have the effect of increasing the price of the good (Hondas in this case) with the higher price going to the company that sells the Hondas. The government does not obtain any revenue from a quota, while it does obtain revenue from tariffs.
Prior to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment that legalized the income tax in 1913, and even long afterward, the major source of revenue for our national (federal) government in Washington, D.C. was tariffs. But tariffs have long been controversial, and dividing the North (which liked them because they "protected" the northern manufacturers against competition from imports) and the South (which disliked them because it increased the prices of goods they purchase and caused foreign nations to retaliate by placing tariffs on cotton and other exports from the South). Tariffs were a major cause of the Civil War.
Today tariffs are rarely used and the government relies almost entirely on the income tax for funding.
Assignment
Read, and reread, the lecture. Complete the homework assignments through the level in which you choose to enrol in this course:
1. The supply of a good, and the demand for that good, determine both the ______ and ______ at which the good is sold, at least in a market free from interference or control by government.
2. Suppose the price demand curve is P = $30 - Q, where P is price and Q is quantity. Also suppose the price supply curve is P = $6 + Q. At what price and quantity will the good be sold?
3. When the supply of a good or service increases, such as increasing the number of oil wells, what happens to the market price of oil? Explain. When the demand for a good a good or service increases, such more people driving cars that need gasoline (refined oil), what happens to the market price of oil? Explain.
4. Why do grocery stores lower the price of their fruit (such as grapes) when they have too many of that fruit and they are on the verge of rotting? Explain based by citing the downward slope of a demand curve.
5. Suppose 500 persons in a town each have the following weekly demands for gas, and the gas stations have the following weekly supplies:
| Gallons | Demand Price/Gallon | Supply Price/Gallon |
| 10 | $5 | $1 |
| 20 | $4 | $2 |
| 30 | $3 | $3 |
| 40 | $2 | $4 |
(A) What is the price and overall quantity of gas sold each week?
(B) Suppose Congress declares war and imposes a price control of $2 per gallon. At what price and overall quantity will gas sell each week? Is that desirable?
6. For most of our nation's history it used tariffs rather than taxes on income in order to provide money for the national (federal) government in Washington, D.C. What is the effect on the supply curve for a good imported from China if the U.S. government imposed a $1 tariff on it? Would that cause more or less of that good to be purchased? Why? Now suppose the government uses quotas rather than tariffs. By limiting the amount of a foreign good that can be sold in this country, Americans who make the same good have an easier time selling their good with less competition. What effect does a quota have on the supply curve and the equilibrium price for an imported good? Who makes more money because of a quota, and who loses the most from it?
7. "Time is money." Explain.
8. Suppose you work for a store and its owner arrives one day and tells you that wants to set new prices for every good in the store. He declares that he is the owner, and he should be able to sell his goods and whatever price he chooses. Will he succeed in this strategy, or is there another force outside the control of the owner that will determine the sales prices? Explain to the owner what your opinion is of his approach.
Honors
Write an essay of about 300 words total on one or more of the following topics:
9. Discuss the effect of supply and demand and the Tyndale Bible.
10. Is there a supply and demand curve for homeschooling, or homeschooling courses? Discuss.
11. Explain your opinion of the Democratic health plans proposed in the summer of 2009.
12. How does supply and demand and the free market help someone who might be an outcast in a community?
13. What is your view of the minimum wage? Should it be increased?
14. Should providers of abortion services be required to fully disclose to mothers the harm that abortion causes?