PS101 UIA Lecture 5

there we go all right so we're talking about why you need politics we don't see ultimately you need to resolve conflict that's how we can make a common decision and build the community we talked about how you can get conflict from scarcity and if you can fight over toilet paper over the role under the role

you can fight over the issue of uh or you can fight over the issue of oil gas gold uh the remotes you can fight about anything we talked about the basic problem of scarcity everybody wants the same thing there's not enough to go around then we're saying look the world's population we're five percent

americans use a quarter of the stuff can you ever solve that and get to 500 of available current resources and the answer is yeah it's possible scarcity is the easier problem to solve the problem not having enough stuff you solve by getting more stuff i had daughters you know they're still got daughters they're now older

but here's the basic thing we're all into fairness we want to get our fair share you will discover if you become a parent that fair is one of the most miserable words in the language yeah you got one cookie left in the cookie jar the two kids will fight over it they'll both say no you got the last

cookie no you got the last cookie it's not fair well uh how what what could you do to solve the problem of one cookie and two kids anybody cut it in half there we go you break it in half has that ever made anybody happy yeah you break that cookie in half and the kids will look at their share of

the cookie and one of them is going to say it's not fair chocolate chip cookie has 14.735 chocolate chips mine only has 14.732 chocolate chips it's not fair oh you know what you do at that point when your kids are holding the cookie parts and they're saying it's not fair i say let