ShmoopTube

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And finance Allah shmoop What is scarcity Oh diamonds gold

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oil Oscar winning actors These things are scarce Well a

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handful of beats sand a box of garbage An alley

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cat You have things Things are not scarce But what

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a scarcity even mean in economic terms All right let's

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back up a bit Basic forces of economics supply and

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demand Well the fundamental pricing action in an economy lies

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in figuring out how to distribute Limited resource is basically

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finding a way to get supplying two man in tow

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balance Yeah remember that graph This one right here Supply

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demand And here's why Base wife Right So that's the

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theory Okay People want stuff like hamburgers They get angry

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and need comfort food and or fuel and or calories

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masquerading as love Joe six Pack wants his burger demands

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it So yes that's demand And someone provides the stuff

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like supplies it like Freddie the fry cook and that's

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applied in the middle You get crisis which helped match

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and meter and measure The metrics are of Scarcity III

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where supply hooks up with demand Everything is relative or

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contextual right A bottle of water in the middle The

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desert can be worth a hundred bucks that same bottle

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in Kawai Hawaii where it rains five inches a day

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not so much so in contact When there's a lot

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of supply and limited demand Prices are low People might

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love hamburgers but there are a lot of them around

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a lot of supply They aren't scarce and all the

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ingredients to a burger well easy to find There are

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plenty of sources of all beef patties special sauce lettuce

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cheese pickles onions and plenty of wheat and you know

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sesame seeds to make the sesame seed buns there Yet

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tons of suppliers easy to make their called commodities a

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good or service that's more less the same wherever you

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biden in whatever form you receive it in But there's

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no significant scarcity of hamburgers so prices are relatively low

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in this sense There aren't infinite burgers but compared tto

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amber with the dinosaur blood in it and Olympic gold

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medalists and no brilliant honest Congress People Yeah Hamburgers aren't

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really scare So what is scarce How about beachfront property

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Everyone to live in a mansion in Malibu Yeah This

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little baby will set you back a cool twenty mil

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in this one eighty mil beachfront property in a good

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location is rare supplies very limited But everyone anywhere near

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the coast wants to live there There's huge demand for

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this scarcely supplied resource Now technically not all beachfront property

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is expensive but remember Three Mile Island you have this

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thing easy pickings But if you want to live by

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the beach in California without nuclear waste well you're going

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to have to pay up competing with other rich people

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willing to shell out millions and millions for a close

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up view of movie your flipper or well smog And

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note that what scarce today might not always be scarce

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or even prized beachfront property in California won't always be

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as rare if global warming continues There are a random

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new kits Greenland and all that ice sheet melts Well

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then here's the U S Map At that point the

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ice sheets melted oceans have risen and you remember that

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twenty million dollars Malibu home Well that used to be

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beachfront Now it's Atlantis and not the cool kind where

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you can swim with dolphins or the kind with superheroes

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know just bottom of the ocean Formally twenty million dollars

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fish habitat Yeah Demand has dropped to zero It's no

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longer scarce It's as common as junk on the bottom

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of the ocean Which basically is meanwhile with California's new

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coastline will land that used to be inland orange and

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walnut groves now has a spectacular view of the ocean

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Farmer McGee Yeah How about twelve million dollars for a

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couple of euro woman acres there by the coast Yeah

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I think that one of two carat diamond ring for

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your brand new wife Yeah The one who doesn't nag

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you daily to take out the garbage Yeah well that

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ring's gonna cost you about fifty thousand dollars because well

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there aren't many diamonds that big guy either Relatively scarce

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and they are desired If you want Cady playing on

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your hopes team Well it's gonna cost you about a

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quarter unit a season That twenty five million dollars because

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you know units hundred million bucks Why Well they're scarce

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They're scarce their desired They're not like a hamburger and

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their desired by many rich people who bid up pricing

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and well that's just how the game is played So

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these air today's prices for the intersections of supply and

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demand Tomorrow prices will move his attributed values or continually

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influx We value something's more today than we will in

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the future and all that stuff and I did might

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be scarce But that doesn't make it worth a lot

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of money Not if demand is low like well the

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Shmoop Family Singers song album is scarce and oh so

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not desired Yeah there's only one Steven Seagal this fat

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bald guy here he used Teo you know be somebody

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big action star in the day But he's not getting

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Denzel or even Brad Pitiful money These days the values

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attributed to scarcity can go the other way to something

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that used to be very common can become scarce you

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know like a bald eagle about that And if demand

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remained flat or steady well these now scarce but demanded

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things can become prized So watch out Brad you might

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be one of a kind of scarcity doesn't always mean

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high value your homies Just one hamburger addiction away from

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heading down the Steven Seagal path to oblivion But on

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the other side of the coin will maybe put a

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burger into your deep freezer just in case Who knows

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If it'll be scarce one day if all the cows

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were wiped out in a plague you know that mad

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cow disease thing is the thing Well Burger's just might 00:05:19.384 --> [endTime] become a scarce resource again

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