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World Studies - Scarcity & Self-Interest Notes
- Understanding human behavior is essential to an
understanding of history and other social studies.
- We are studying how people behaved in the past,
so if you understand why people behave the way
they do, history makes much more sense.
- Scarcity and self-interest are two concepts central
to understanding human behavior.
Self-Interest
- Human behavior often seems irrational, but human
behavior is actually very rational because all
humans are self-interested.
- Self-interest is the idea that people act in their
own interests at all times. In other words, people
behave in a way which benefits themselves.
- All behavior follows this idea.
- This is different than being selfish, which means
you care only about your own interests.
- With self-interest, you act in a way that benefits
you in some way, even if it doesn’t appear that way
to others.
- If you don’t benefit in some way from a behavior,
you won’t commit that behavior.
Scarcity
- Everything in this world is scarce.
- Scarce means limited.
- Scarcity is the idea that people and nations do not
and cannot have enough income, time, or
resources to satisfy their every desire.
- Economics is the study of how individuals make
choices about how to use scarce resources to fill
their wants and needs.
- Needs are things that a person MUST have to
survive.
- Wants are everything other than a person’s needs.
- Because everything is scarce, people and nations
compete with each other for ownership and control
of resources.
- This competition has caused many of the major
events in world history.