Your assignment this week focuses on the Economizing Problem. In your journal entry, address the following:
- Define the Economizing Problem and discuss why human needs and wants are unlimited and why resources are limited.
- Think about three major economic systems. Most countries are mixed economies. What do you think about the government regulation: should it be increased at the time of increasing scarcity of resources and a growing population, or decrease? Why?
Please remember that all submitted posts: essays, discussion forum and journal reflection posts you can use in your Final Research paper. Please save all your posts.
Readings
Readings- Understanding Economics and Scarcity
- Introduction to Economic Systems
- Justin V. Hastings. A Most Enterprising Country : North Korea in the Global Economy. Cornell University Press, 2016. EBSCOhost
NOTE: in your Textbook/Reader from McGraw-Hill Create, this can be found on pages 2 - 28.
Videos
Scarcity (2:54)
This video is a short animation explaining why goods and services are scarce.
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Are We Running Out of Resources? (4:07)
In this video, Professor Steve Horwitz addresses the common belief that the world is running out of natural resources. Instead, there are economic reasons why we will never run out of many resources. In a free market system, prices signal scarcity. So as a resource becomes scarcer, it becomes more expensive, which incentivizes people to use less of it and develop new alternatives, or to find new reserves of that resource that were previously unknown or unprofitable. We have seen throughout history that the human mind's ability to innovate, coupled with a free market economic system, is an unlimited resource that can overcome the limitations we perceive with natural resources.
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Economic Systems (13:44)
This video discusses the differences between command economies and market economies, with a focus on mixed economy towards the end.