Dr Sam Wylie

But now we're in a situation where the demand's gone way up.

Everyone's going back to pubs and to clubs and restaurants and the like, and demand's gone way up.

And now we've got excess demand.

Now, the supply can increase if people stop doing what they're doing, driving Ubers or whatever it is, working in realty or something else, if they shift to the hospitality sector.

So if there's excess demand for restaurant meals and not enough people to wait the tables and to clean the dishes, then if the wages in that sector go up, if the price that is paid to people, wages are just prices after all, the price of labor, if those prices go up, it'll draw in those people from other sectors.

So if wages in hospitality go up and wages elsewhere in relative terms don't go up, then

then people will be drawn in.

And you can see that it's the prices themselves that is getting supply and demand together.

This is how it works in a free economy.

That's why we started off this conversation, Kate, with you asking me and making observations that some economies are sort of centrally planned.

where some bureaucrat is telling everyone what to do and others are free market economies where people decide for themselves.

But what's the coordinating mechanism?

What makes those people think, you know what, I'm going to stop being a diddy driver and I'm going to go and work in that restaurant?

Well, it's wages.

You know, they're making their own choice.

But the higher wage is the thing that's coordinating all those choices within the economy.

So it's prices that coordinate all those choices.

People look at prices and then make decisions.

How much can I earn?

How much is it going to cost me?