There's never a shortage. Shortage just means somebody wants to pay less than they're having to. Even if half the truck drivers vanished, there still wouldn't be a shortage. The price would simply go up and some people who would have shipped things by truck would produce those things closer to their destination or otherwise not need a truck afterall.
That's a simplistic view of shortages of labour markets. Just taking trucking as an example, many jurisdictions have safety standards drivers need to meet. If "half the truck drivers vanished" tomorrow we'd have an absolute shortage until labour could be spun up to account for the supply demand.
It's also overly simplistic to believe that trucking companies can infinitely raise wages to support demand. People/businesses only tolerate a certain cap of pricing on goods and to say that ceiling is infinitely high is silly.
If markets were perfectly efficient, sure all your wishes and hopes would be a reality. But we're not efficient, we're flawed humans running these things so the flaws are apparent when you attempt to accommodate.
How are you defining shortage? If half the drivers vanished, then half as much stuff would be shipped by truck. What's the problem with that, other than things would be worse for people? Is there a correct amount of truck driving that should happen? Are we currently at that correct amount? Have we ever been?
Yea, it's an emotional concept that seems to mean things cost more than somebody was expecting. You could say there's a shortage of anything you like, so it's a meaningless word. There's a shortage of helicopters because lots of people want them but don't want to pay the high price they currently have. There's a shortage of petrol because if it was much cheaper, I'd be running a generator to power my house. I want that cheap petrol but there isn't enough for the price to be so low.
The reason why the world doesn't work the way you're suggesting and why shortages do exist is nominal rigidity. And it's much more complicated than "the boss is reluctant to pay the worker more". The client might also be reluctant to pay for the service more, regardless of supply and demand. Consumers might be reluctant to pay a higher price. If the current increase in demand for trucking services is temporary, and they increased wages, they're kind of stuck with the now higher wages as wages are strongly sticky-down (in other words you can't just constantly adjust wages to their market price, up or down, because humans react very negatively to their wages being cut). It is deeply entrenched in the economy and human minds. This is why shortages often only resolve themselves in the long term. Until they resolve themselves, they certainly do exist.
This isn't necessarily true. The can be shortages of resources (food, water) independently of price. Labor is just another resource, why cant there be a shortage of it?
Food prices do go up and down, and on each up, more people on the fringes of survivability die from lack of food, perhaps indirectly through disease. How high do food prices have to go before it would be classified as a shortage? The distinction seems arbitrary.
>Food prices do go up and down, and on each up, more people on the fringes of survivability die from lack of food, perhaps indirectly through disease.
This really isn't true. In practice it may be, but that's due to inefficient allocation, not due to a lack of resources. We have enough food to feed the entire human population. A shortage would be if we didn't.
What does "shortage of food allocation" even mean? Problems with how food is allocated is completely different sort of problem than not having enough food.
I agree with your point, but I wonder if there has been a shortage of food or water in the last 30 years that more money could not have solved quickly. It seems these happen in poor/war torn areas.
Offhand IDK, I was more thinking in terms of a theoretical resource constrained environment where the population is beyond the carrying capacity. You have a shortage that money cannot solve.
Even there, the situation isn't fundamentally different.
We are constantly in a situation where we do not have enough resources to do everything we'd like to do, we have decide which are the best uses of the resources.
If we don't even have enough resources to keep everyone alive, then we are still in that exact same situation of not having enough resources to do everything we'd like to do. We are going to have to decide how to expend those resources (i.e. which people are going to live)
