The entire field of economics is based on the idea of scarcity.

整個經(jīng)濟學(xué)領(lǐng)域都是基于“稀缺”這一概念。

And, arguably, we wouldn’t even need a field of economics, if there wasn’t the notion of scarcity in the world.

可以說，如果世界上沒有稀缺性的概念，我們甚至不需要經(jīng)濟學(xué)這個學(xué)科。

And the reason why scarcity is essential to economics is because economics is the study of how do you allocate these scarce resources.

稀缺性之所以對經(jīng)濟學(xué)至關(guān)重要，是因為經(jīng)濟學(xué)是研究如何分配這些稀缺資源的學(xué)科。

Air for most of human history has been considered a free resource.
And even today I’d argue that something like oxygen, at least on our planet, is considered a free resource.

When I take a deep breath it does not affect your ability to take a deep breath.
It does not take oxygen away from you.

Now is there an infinite amount of oxygen in our atmosphere?
No. But for our purposes it feels like there’s an infinite amount.

Now if the photosynthetic plants were to disappear and all of a sudden oxygen started to get diminished, or if we were in a space station where there isn’t a seemingly infinite amount of oxygen, well then you could imagine a world where it could become a scarce resource.

如果光合作用植物消失，氧氣一下子開始減少，或者如果我們在一個空間站里，那里沒有看似無限的氧氣，那么你可以想象一個氧氣可能成為稀缺資源的世界。

You can imagine a colony on the Moon or on Mars or in the space station where it had some type of economic system to decide who gets how much oxygen.

你可以想象月球、火星或空間站上的一個殖民地，那里有某種經(jīng)濟系統(tǒng)來決定誰獲得多少氧氣。