Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, man.

And the world. Hello, this is the Science of Everything podcast, episode 13. I'm your host, James Fodor.

In this episode, I'm going to look at the price system, specifically how supply and demand can act

in concert to achieve a price that clears the market, maximize a surplus, achieves efficiencies in production and consumption, and just generally

regulate economic activity in such a ways to achieve a desirable, efficient, useful outcome,

all without any central planner, and we'll look at how this emerges spontaneously from

voluntary individual decisions, which is quite a remarkable feat.

So, before I start, I'd just like to say that the things I'm going to talk about here are

simplifications for the purpose of emphasizing how the free market can work under normal conditions, I would say. There are certainly market failures,

or times when the free market doesn't work. Examples include externalities and public goods,

imperfect information and so on, and a large proportion of economic literature seeks to examine

these market failures and how they can be rectified or how they can't be rectified.

But for the most part, there is general agreement amongst economists that the market generally

works pretty well to organize production and to regulate the economy.

And so generally the things I'm going to be saying in this episode apply most of the time to most areas.

And so with that caveat, let us begin.

So first of all, I want to explain what I think is the economic problem.

In other words, what is economics about?

What is the free market for?

Well, the fundamental idea behind economics is that of scarcity,

the inability to have as much as we want of, well, pretty much anything.

The idea is that no matter how much we get of something, or how much better things become,

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