Under colloquial usage, as it is being used here, the term is meaningless. Under that definition, everything is always in "shortage". It is simply used as an attention grabbing mechanism to express some kind of emotion towards the subject.
Surely a transient shortage is possible due to licensing requirements. You could offer ten million dollars a year, but there are only so many people with a current CDL and finite capacity exists to grant new licenses.
You have done well to highlight why a technical shortage is defined the way it is.
In fact, where I live, it is quite illegal for a doctor to accept any amount of payment from a patient. We as a society believe that people, no matter how rich or poor, should have equal access to healthcare, so a doctor giving priority to a billionaire who can offer a handsome reward to get his common cold looked at over someone suffering something much worse is considered abhorrent. As such, we rely on a mixture of first-come, first-serve and needs-based priority instead of a price-based mechanism.
Never heard of any attempts to place similar restrictions on truckers, though. If you want to try and charge a billion dollars per mile, go nuts!
Source? That feels extremely low, maybe even by an order of magnitude.
The recent estimates are closer to 4.4 million software engineers in the U.S. (~2.75% of the working population)
Heh, we are probably more than the secretaries we replaced.
I honestly believe most companies are worse off using computers at all. At some size, you'd probably want some computer system for pay slips. But I am not too sure about that ...
source? I found a better BLS page that grouped all types of software professionals together but it still only came out to about 1.5M
In common use it means that something costs more than many people are willing to pay for it. So your Ferrari example would be a valid use under this meaning.
More likely it costs far less than people are willing to pay for it. When the Colonial Piepline was shut down for ransomware, the shortage occurred because a reasonable populace correctly assessed that the local value of gasoline had just skyrocketed far beyond its steady state price, so the demand became limited only by time and social costs (e.g. you don't want to be the guy whose picture is shown filling trash bags of gasoline) plus ways to store it.
Or it can mean that there's insufficient supply to meet demand at a "reasonable" price.
A commonly used example is milk, yogurt, cream and ice cream. Every year, the farmers produce milk. Some people want yogurt, some want milk, some want cream, &c. Say that one year, everyone wants yogurt for some reason. They are lining up to pay 200%, &c, for it. Then the allocation of resources adapts -- more milk is used to make yogurt. If demand for other products does not go down -- people still want just as much milk, ice cream, &c -- then their prices may go up. Over a reasonable time frame, the effect of this is that more land will be turned over to pasturage and more milk will be produced. Gradually the prices will come down. More people have more yogurt than before; more people are working on that and less on something else (whatever it was). The workers and consumers live happily ever after and resource allocation has adapted to price signals.
One important consideration in the above example is that if people want more yogurt and are willing to pay more, they must also be willing to go without something else. They only have so much money (so much of their own resources to allocate). That is why the resource allocation has to change. Now that might not be milk, per se, but it is probably something adjacent to it, like tofu. We can see how if the shift is from tofu to yogurt, the reallocation of resources might take longer -- people can't just take the milk consumers don't want and turn it into yogurt, they have to get more milk first, which means feeding more soybeans to cows and less to tofu machines -- but it still happens.
A simple example of a shortage is a situation where a virus affects a certain fruit tree, preventing it from growing (or, at least, preventing it from growing the desired fruit). Although people are willing to pay a lot for this fruit, and by extension are willing to consume less of other fruits or other foods, there is no way to turn resources over from the production of other goods to the production of this fruit. It might be that only a small number of areas are isolated enough to produce this fruit; they might all be turned over to it; but after that, there would be no elasticity in the supply of this fruit. Given what we know about the pricing, demand, ordinary cost of inputs for producing the fruit, the supply of this fruit before the virus, we must conclude that there is considerable demand which is not being met.
(Something else notable about the second example is that most of the new, elevated price of the fruit would go into some form of rent. The ground on which the fruit could be produced would be exceedingly rare and valuable, but the material inputs, labor, skill, &c needed for the fruit are the same as before; the new high price would mostly go to the ground rent or financing costs.)