which holds that as production of a good or service increases, the marginal opportunity cost of producing it

increases as well. This happens because some resources are better suited for producing certain goods and

services instead of others. When government spends a certain amount more on reducing crime, for example,

the original increase in opportunity cost of reducing crime could be relatively small. However, additional
36 2 • Choice in a World of Scarcity

increases typically cause relatively larger increases in the opportunity cost of reducing crime, and paying for

enough police and security to reduce crime to nothing at all would be a tremendously high opportunity cost.

The curvature of the production possibilities frontier shows that as we add more resources to education,

moving from left to right along the horizontal axis, the original increase in opportunity cost is fairly small, but
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