Good Thursday Morning!
1. Question – Would it help to categorize your
economic choices?
2. Thought – The first step in understanding
economics is to learn why choices are necessary?
Like everyone else, you are constantly in the middle of an
unavoidable predicament caused by two contradictory ideas:
insatiability and scarcity. Insatiability means that
everyone has unlimited wants.
If you were to write down everything you could possibly
desire, the list would help to illustrate this idea of
insatiability. How long would it take you to complete your
list? An hour? A day? A year? Fifty years?
Consider the things that might go on your list. First, you
would list the basic needs such as food, shelter, and
clothing: but then it would quickly become a list of
wants: what kind of foods would you want? This part of the
list alone could take years to complete. What about
shelter? Would you really be content with basic shelter
when you could have a mansion? Would you be happy with
just one mansion when you could have one at the lake and
one in the mountains? How about one (or several) in each
major city of the world? Next is clothing. No sooner would
you finish your immense clothing list than it would
require rewriting, because tastes, preferences, and styles
change.
The second concept in the predicament is scarcity. To the
economist scarcity does not mean that everything is in
short supply. Rather, it means that everything is finite,
or limited in quantity.
There are only so many hours in a day, so many dollars in
circulation, so many tasks that one may perform at any
given time, and so many barrels of oil on earth. We say,
therefore, that time, money, labor, and natural resources
are scarce or limited in quantity.
When insatiability and scarcity combine, choices become
necessary.
The dilemma of scarcity and choice is such a fundamental
idea in economics that it has become the underlying theme
of every economic concept. Indeed, even the word economics
implies scarcity and choice. The word economics is the
product of two Greek words: oikos (OY kahs), which means
house, and nomas (NAH mahs), which means administration
of. (Economics by Alan J. Carper)
“It is better to deserve without receiving,
than to receive without deserving.”
(Robert G. Ingersoll)