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People queue up for soup and bread at relief tents in the aftermath of the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889. In economics, scarcity "refers to the basic fact of life that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources which the best technical knowledge is capable of using to produce only limited maximum amounts of each economic good."
In view of the scarce resources, the question of whether all available resources are fully utilized is an important one. A community should achieve maximum satisfaction by using the scarce resources in the best possible manner—not wasting resources or using them inefficiently. There are two types of employment of resources:
Earlier schools of economic thought stated that resources that are enough for everyone to have as much as they want are free goods. Examples in textbooks included seawater and air. Intellectual property laws such as copyrights and patents have the effect of converting some intangible goods to scarce goods. Even though these works are free goods ...
Hoarding resources can prevent or slow products or commodities from traveling through the economy. [4] Subsequently, this may cause the product or commodity to become scarce, causing the value of the resource to rise. A common intention of economic hoarding is to generate a profit by selling the product once the price has increased.
The abundant resource that have comparative advantage realizes an increase in income, and the scarce resource realizes a decrease in its income regardless of industry. This trade theory concludes that some people will suffer losses from free trade even in the long-term. [9]
A common pool resource however is often managed the group of people that have access to that resource [14]. Examples of this can be air, water, sights, and sounds. Tragedy of the commons refers to this title. An example would be unregulated forests as there's limited resources available and therefore rivalrous, but anyone may access these ...
The earlier term for the discipline was "political economy", but since the late 19th century, it has commonly been called "economics". [22] The term is ultimately derived from Ancient Greek οἰκονομία (oikonomia) which is a term for the "way (nomos) to run a household (oikos)", or in other words the know-how of an οἰκονομικός (oikonomikos), or "household or homestead manager".
Because productive resources are scarce, the resources must be allocated to various industries in just the right amounts, otherwise too much or too little output gets produced. [2] When drawing diagrams for businesses, allocative efficiency is satisfied if output is produced at the point where marginal cost is equal to average revenue.