Original question: “What is the economic concept of scarcity?”
Scarcity
is essentially the notion that resources are available in limited
supply. All resources are scarce, though it depends on the context from
which you view them, as they may be scarce in some contexts, but not in
others.*
If resources weren’t scarce, we
could create an unlimited amount of anything we knew how to make (and
many things we don’t even try to make, for lack of resources.) But
that’s not the world we live in.
Meanwhile, economics,
at its core, is the study of how best to use those limited resources.
Frequently, economists try to optimize relatively opaque notions of
‘utility’ or ‘wellbeing,’ given that the inputs required to produce
these notions are limited. In super basic terms, economics is an academic attempt to put the world’s limited resources to their best use. Put differently, economics is the attempt to make the most of the scarce resources at our disposal.
All
economic problems stem from how much of a given resource exists, and
how they are spread out around the world/universe. (In the near future,
we will likely mine resources from asteroids and objects from beyond our
planet, so we will end up reevaluating what is and isn’t scarce.)
*An
example of this context is that there is plenty of water in the
universe, but we can only really access the water on the planet earth.
Time is scarce, in that, as of now, humans have limited life
expectancies, but it’s not scarce in that grand tasks like the building
of the great wall, could be tackled by many workers.
