Scarcity And Scarcity

In the first chapter of Cocktail Party Economics, the main focus is on Scarcity and how it affects everyone every day. Scarcity “captures the idea of limited resources” … “relative to multiple potential recipients” (Pg9). Which in simple terms, means that everyone wants everything, when in reality that is not possible.

In an article called Water Use and Scarcity in Canada, we can see how the idea of scarcity comes into play. The author Scott Thornton starts off by stating that Canada has one filth of the worlds fresh water supply and that because we have this asset, we are able to take advantage.

Previously, when I stated the quote from Cocktail party, we can compare how the limited resource (in this case the fresh water) is being taken up as the demand for the

In the section of “So, how does one get a drink around here?” in the Cocktail Party, I compared the first point of an open bar to how Canada is treating the fresh water. At an open bar, the alcohol is free and anyone can take as much as they would like. The people that come first get the supply they want, and the rest have to deal with it. Much like our consumption of the water, one day our ancestors (if we keep up the pace we are at) will run out of clean fresh water.

Thornton believes that the problem is partially because of the price of our water compared to other nations. Canadians are “averaging 31 cents per cubic metre while many others pay twoto-five times that rate. Germans pay the most at 2.16” (Thornton, 2015). Compared to other nations, our water is practically an “open bar”.

The next similarity I found between the reading and the article was how the water scarcity around the world was relative to another analogy that was presented. About 2.5 billion people around the world (over 1/3 of the population) does not have access to water supply. This is comparably similar to the problems that you would have in the book when she was dealing