Comment by hunterpayne

Not sure if you are serious. But consider a tragedy of the commons situation for the production of a commodity. Now consider that that commodity's price is influenced by weather. In such a situation, price will likely be volatile a lot of the time. You can mandate that your own producers follow certain laws to conserve your commons. But other places (ie governments) can choose to not follow those laws. And so you have a situation where everyone in a certain society can choose A but you still get B.

BTW, if you think that's somewhat arbitrary, I just described the global ag and fishing industries. So most food production has this quality. So any society that's largely agrarian will follow this pattern.

To start, learn about the following topics:

- Laffer curve

- Tragedy of the Commons

- Substitute products

- And of course, supply/demand curves