Lead:

In economics, relative to the infinite nature of human desires, scarcity refers to the relative finitude of economic goods or the resources required to produce them, that is, "human beings have infinite desires, but only limited resources", and the finite nature of resources promotes competition and choice.

Artworks have reached new heights at auction, such as Xu Beihong's work sold for 22 million yuan at an auction in Beijing in the autumn of 2005; At the 2006 Spring Festival auction, "Yugong Moves Mountains" was sold for 33 million yuan in Hanhai, Beijing; In the autumn auction of 2006, "Slave and Lion" was sold for 53.88 million Hong Kong dollars at ** Christie; At the 2007 Spring Auction, "Put Down Your Whip" sold for HK$72 million at Sotheby's. In less than two years, the auction record has tripled, which is really a price per season, and the price is rising.

Why do Xu Beihong's works continue to fetch such high prices? This brings us to scarcity in economics.

In economics, relative to the infinite nature of human desires, scarcity refers to the relative finitude of economic goods or the resources required to produce them, that is, "human beings have infinite desires, but only limited resources", and the finite nature of resources promotes competition and choice. Xu Beihong is one of the few leading artists in the history of Chinese art, which makes his works extremely collectible, and everyone wants to have them, but there are only so many Xu Beihong's works, so they are very scarce, and there will be bidding auctions, and high prices will be auctioned.

In 2004, David Beckham kicked the ball into the stands in the penalty shoot-out of the quarter-final between England and Portugal at the European Championships, and a fan picked up the ball and put it up for auction online, where it was eventually bought for 28,000 euros.

Scarcity is one of the prerequisites of economics, and scarcity has a huge impact on society and people's lives.

(1) Scarcity leads to competition and choice, which promotes the development of society because it provides the impetus for the development of society. If resources were abundant, then the world would be very different, and people would work the same whether they worked or not, and they didn't have to think about all aspects of life.

(2) The scarcity of resources has historical conditions. With the development of the times, scarce things can be changed. In the past, when there was not enough to eat and not warm to wear, food and daily necessities were scarce, but now these things are rich.

(3) The scarcity of resources varies from person to person. For a millionaire, money is no longer a scarce thing, but for a person who doesn't even have a job, the meaning of money is different, gold is a very precious thing for every normal person, but for a person trapped in a cave, the temptation of a steamed bun will be even greater.

(4) Scarce resources can be redistributed through exchange. Marriage is a most practical example. For a man who has an unsatisfactory figure and a successful career, the congenital conditions cannot be changed, and for him, he may not be able to achieve a tall man and a handsome face in this life. Then he will place his hopes in marriage, hoping that his significant other will meet those expectations of his. Appearance is a scarce resource for him, and in comparison, career and money may not be very important to him, because these are rich for him. People always want to exchange their abundant resources for their scarce resources.

It can be seen that scarcity in economics provides a basis for us to solve some problems in life, and at the same time, scarcity points out the direction for our production.

Resources are always scarce, and people are always in great demand. Make good use of scarcity services to make your products scarce, so that there will be more demand for products. It is recorded in the Book of Jin, Wenyuan, Zuo Sichuan:

During the Taikang period of the Western Jin Dynasty, there was a very famous literary scholar Zuo Si. When Zuo Si was a child, his father looked down on him and often said to outsiders that he regretted giving birth to this son. When Zuo Si became an adult, his father also said to his friends: "Although Zuo Si is an adult, his knowledge and principles are not as good as when I was a child." Zuo Si was unwilling to be despised by this kind of contempt and began to study angrily.

After a long period of preparation, he wrote a "Sandu Fu", which wrote the Wei capital Yecheng, the Shu capital Chengdu, and the Wu capital Nanjing in the Three Kingdoms according to the facts and history. At that time, it was believed that its level surpassed the "Liangdu Fu" written by Ban Gu in the Han Dynasty and the "Liangjing Fu" written by Zhang Heng. For a time, it was widely spread in Luoyang, the capital, and people praised it and competed to copy it, which made the paper several times more expensive at once. Originally, the amount of paper that cost 1,000 wen per knife suddenly rose to 2,000 or 3,000 wen, but later it was dumped out, and many people had to go to other places to buy paper and copy this famous book through the ages.

Why does the phenomenon of "Luoyang paper is expensive" happen? Because in Luoyang, Kyoto, people are competing to copy the "Sandu Fu", so that the demand for paper is increasing, and the supply of paper cannot keep up with the demand, so that the price of paper will continue to rise. This brings us to the concept of economics: the law of supply and demand causes price changes.

Samuelson, a famous American economist, once said: "Studying economics is no simpler, you only need to master two things, one is supply and the other is demand." "What is supply and demand? Supply refers to the quantity of the commodity that producers are willing and able to offer to sell at all possible prices over a given period of time. This supply refers to an effective supply, which must meet two conditions: the producer's desire to sell and the ability to supply. Demand refers to the quantity of the commodity that consumers are willing and able to buy at various possible prices in a certain period of time, and refers to the desire of consumers to get a certain commodity. Demand is not a natural and subjective desire, but an effective need, and it consists of two conditions: the consumer has the desire to buy and the ability to buy.

For the relationship between supply and demand, people generally believe that demand determines supply, such as everyone has the need to wear clothes and shoes, and the production and sales of leather shoes will appear in the market. However, the supply-side school emphasizes the supply side of the economy, arguing that demand automatically adapts to supply.

Generally speaking, when supply and demand are in balance, the market price is the normal price. When supply exceeds demand, the market price is lower than the normal price; When demand exceeds supply, the market price is higher than the normal price. Mr. Lu Xun has such a sentence in the article "Mr. Fujino": "Probably because scarcity is expensive." When cabbage from Beijing is shipped to Zhejiang, it is tied to the root with a red rope and hung upside down in the front of the fruit store to become 'gum cabbage'; the wild aloe vera from Fujian is invited into the greenhouse as soon as it arrives in Beijing, and it is called 'agave'. "The imbalance between supply and demand leads to cabbage being sold at a good price in Zhejiang, while aloe vera can also be sold at a good price in Beijing.

In general, the relationship between demand and price is inversely proportional, that is, the higher the price, the smaller the demand; Prices fall and demand rises. For example, if the price of ice cream goes up by two cents per scoop, you'll buy less ice cream. This relationship between price and demand applies to most goods, and, in fact, it is so common that economists call it the law of demand, which states that when the price of an item rises and the quantity demanded decreases when other conditions are equal.

In addition, changes in supply and demand are also closely related to changes in the market environment. For example, when "SARS" hit China, the prices of vinegar, disinfectant, and medicinal masks across the country have risen, and some daily necessities have also become the target of ordinary consumers, mainly because the sudden "SARS" virus has caused a sharp increase in consumer demand for these items. In Europe, every summer when the weather warms up in New England, the price of a hotel room in the Caribbean plummets. When war broke out in the Middle East, the price of gasoline in the United States rose, while the price of used Cadillac cars fell.

In a few cases, the opposite will happen, i.e., the higher the price, the greater the demand; The lower the price, the smaller the demand. Such goods are usually conspicuous goods with symbolic status in society, such as diamonds, antiques, etc., which often lead to an increase in demand due to higher prices.

People have the impression that wheat belongs to "fine grains" and corn belongs to "coarse grains", and the price of wheat has always been more expensive than corn. However, since 2006, the price of "coarse grain" corn has been rising, even surpassing that of wheat. In 2007, the industrial purchase price of corn in Baoji area of Shaanxi Province was 1.66 yuan/kg, while the market price of wheat was only about 1.44 yuan/kg.

People can't help but wonder: how is corn, which made people uncomfortable in difficult economic times, worth more money now? And it's more expensive than wheat?

The existence of any phenomenon has its intrinsic cause. Corn, which has always been cheaper than wheat, is suddenly worth more and is more expensive than wheat, and this change in price indicates that their supply and demand have changed. There is a question of equilibrium price, so what is an equilibrium price? The equilibrium price is the price at which the demand and supply of a commodity reach equilibrium. If there is an imbalance between supply and demand, then the price will fluctuate, that is, the demand will be greater than the supply, and the price will rise; If demand is less than supply, prices will fall. In other words, supply and demand in the market oscillate up and down around the equilibrium price.

Through the analysis of the understanding of equilibrium prices, we will not be surprised by the fact that corn is more expensive than wheat. In 2007, the corn planting area in Baoji City decreased compared with previous years, so the output decreased a lot. In the turbulent tide of agricultural industrial restructuring, many townships, towns, and grain farmers have reduced the planting area of corn and replaced it with economic crops with high returns and quick results, such as watermelon, which has led to a decline in the overall output of corn. Despite the continuous development of science and technology, the corn yield has increased to a certain extent, but because the annual corn output in the city has not only not increased significantly, but also in some years it is less than in the past.

Although production has decreased, demand is actually rising. First, the soaring price of pork has mobilized the enthusiasm of the majority of farmers to raise pigs, and the breeding industry has greatly increased the consumption of corn feed. Second, with the innovation of technology, corn is no longer a staple food used to fill the stomach in the eyes of modern people, and is made into a variety of products through various technologies, such as corn starch, corn oil, corn gluten and fuel ethanol. This has led to a strong increase in industrial demand for corn. As a result, the supply of corn is significantly less than the demand, causing the price to be out of balance, and the price will inevitably rise in order to reach equilibrium.

The function of wheat is relatively simple, the demand has not changed much, and the output is stable, the supply and demand are basically balanced, and the price will not rise. In this way, it is not surprising that the price of corn is higher than that of wheat.

For the equilibrium price, we can also use the example of a ball game ticket.

Let's say a stadium invites two famous teams to play a commercial football exhibition match. For the organizers, it is hoped that the ticket price (supply) will be high, the total number of visitors will be large, and the price and supply will show a positive change relationship. For fans, the lower the price of tickets, the higher the hospital (demand) purchased, and the price and demand will move in the opposite direction. However, the ticket prices demanded by the fans are too low, and the organizers will be reluctant to hold the game because the income is too low or even the loss; Conversely, if the organizer sets the ticket price too high, the majority of fans are reluctant to buy, and the organizer's income is limited. Therefore, in order to meet the demand of fans to watch the game, and the organizer also wants to attract more fans to buy tickets, they must find a mutually acceptable price and quantity between demand and supply, thus forming an equilibrium price for team tickets (here the equilibrium price is assumed to be 300 yuan).

What would happen if the ticket price for a football match was more expensive or cheaper than the equilibrium price? Assuming that the ticket price is reduced to 200 yuan, at this time, because the price is low, the quantity demanded by consumers will exceed the quantity provided by the organizer, forming a phenomenon of short supply, thus causing the price to rise. At this time, people who did not buy tickets had to spend more than 200 yuan to buy scalper tickets in order to see the style of their idols. Consumers are gradually decreasing their demand due to higher prices, or the organizers are increasing the supply of tickets in order to satisfy the audience who could not buy tickets before, so that the ticket price will tend to another equilibrium price.

On the contrary, when the ticket price is set at a high price of 400 yuan, there will be a large number of empty venues for the game, and due to oversupply, the organizers have to sell them at a reduced price, or attract spectators by discounting and giving away football gifts to avoid "inventory accumulation". Audiences also felt that the demand for tickets had become cheaper, and after this adjustment, the gap between supply and demand gradually narrowed to a balanced price.

In short, the formation of an equilibrium price in the market depends on both supply and demand. Equilibrium is the inevitable trend of the market and the normal state of the market, and the price out of the equilibrium point will inevitably form an imbalance of oversupply or insufficient supply. Due to the role of competitive forces on both sides of the market on both sides of supply and demand, there is a mechanism for self-regulation, and the imbalance will tend to be balanced.

The existence of equilibrium prices reflects the inevitability of economic activity. For a production enterprise, it is necessary to find ways to increase the demand for their products in the market, and when the demand is large, the equilibrium price will naturally be high, so as to improve economic benefits. The equilibrium price is the price at which the demand and supply of a commodity reach equilibrium. If you want to improve efficiency, you must break the original equilibrium price and increase the demand for products through various effective ways.