(1) Humans are characterized by both biologically and socially determined wants. (2) We seek food, clothing, shelter, and the many goods and services associated with a comfortable or affluent standard of living. (3) We are also blessed with aptitudes and surrounded by quantities of property resources—both natural and manufactured. (4) We use available human and property resources—labor and managerial talents, tools and machinery, land and mineral deposits—to produce goods and services which satisfy material wants. (5) This is done through the organizational mechanism we call the economic system.
(6) Quantitative considerations, however, rule out an ideal solution. (7) The blunt fact is that the total of all our material wants is beyond the productive capacity of available resources. (8) Thus, absolute material abundance is not possible. (9) This unyielding fact is the basis for our definition of economics: economics is concerned with the efficient use or management of limited productive resources to achieve maximum satisfaction of human material wants. (10) Though it may not be self-evident, all the headline-grabbing issues of the day—inflation, unemployment, health care problems, government and international trade deficits, free-trade agreements among nations, poverty and inequality, pollution, and government regulation of business—are rooted in the one issue of using limited resources efficiently.
D9. We can infer from the textbook passage that
the "biologically . . . determined wants" in paragraph 1 include cars.
the "biologically . . . determined wants" in paragraph 1 include food.
"socially determined wants" might include sunshine.
