we asked richard gill to analyze the forces that drew william levitt and the vets together. a large potential demand for housing in the postwar period, and william j. levitt supplied that demand. how does the market system work? through the laws of supply and demand. a professional economist is likely to give you a more complicated response. he's likely to draw you a graph, the most famous in our subject, the graph of supply and demand. and there it is. a fairly harmless-looking contraption. it took economists a long time to come up with this particular diagram. how does this diagram help us? first, what does the graph mean? we measure the quantity of product along the horizontal axis. in this case, number of houses. along the vertical axis, we measure the price of a family home. our demand curve is here. our supply curve is here. the price of the product will be determined where these two curves intersect. at $9,000 per home, the quantity of homes supplied and demanded will be equal. let's show how these curves clarifies the levittown story. we said there was a great demand