What economic concept explains why "we cannot grow the worlds food in a flower pot".?

please explain why.

What economic concept explains why "we cannot grow the worlds food in a flower pot".?
Seems like the concept of limited recourses.





You know last time I checked, "they are not making any more land.." so when does massive suffering and starvation occur from limited recourses?





Does this help any?
Reply:I suspect that the answer is the concept of diminishing marginal productivity. As a simple example, suppose that it takes three inputs (land, labor, and capital) to grow food. If one of these is fixed such as land, then increasing the others will increase the the amount of food produced. However, the increase in production for each increase in the amount of labor or capital will get smaller and smaller. In other words, the marginal productivity of these inputs declines as more and more are combined with a fixed amount of land. Thus in theory it would be possible to grow the world's food in a flower pot, but the amount of labor and capital required would be huge because of their declining marginal productivity.
Reply:Good question, hilda.





The flower-pot thing is usually used to illustrate how "marginalism" works. If we lived in a perfect world, we could grow all the world's food in a flower-pot because that would mean that we had discovered the technologically optimum way to grow food!





But we haven't - yet. So we begin growing food in the best available land - the land in the flower pot, say. But that doesn't provide enough food so we move on out to the second best land and grow food there. And if that doesn't feed everyone, we go out another circle and grow food there. Sooner or later we reach a point ("the margin") where the land is not worth farming.





Finding that point is called finding "the margin" in econ-speak. It means, how far will you go to get something you want. In this example you will keep farming, all the time getting poorer and poorer crops, going out in circles from the best soil - the flower pot - until you reach "the margin" and give it up as not worth the effort.





"Marginalism" is an extremely important concept in econ. If you are studying econ seriously, make sure you understand it. (It isn't that hard).





I hope I helped a little.

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