Scarcity is the fundamental economic problem of having seemingly unlimited human wants in a world of limited resources. It states that society has insufficient productive resources to fulfill all human wants and needs. A common misconception on scarcity is that an item has to be important for it to be scarce. This is not true, for something to be scarce, something must be given up, or traded off, in order to obtain it. Simply put, the price of a good signals the relative scarcity of the good.