Difference between revisions of "Existing scarcity"

The page relates to 'significant scarcity'. Scarcity that matters to survival and quality of life.

Do you remember the Great Depression when one day everybody was doing business and things were going along pretty well and the next day there were breadlines? It was like someone came to work and they said to him, "Sorry chum, but you can't build today. No building can go on: we don't have enough inches." He said, "Whaddaya mean we don't have enough inches? We got wood, haven't we? We've got metal, we've even got tape measures!" They said, "Yeah, but you don't understand the business world. We just haven't got enough inches, just plain inches. We've used too much of 'em." And that's exactly what happened when we had the Depression, because money is something of the same order of reality as inches, grams, meters, pounds or lines of latitude and longitude. It is an abstraction. It is a method of bookkeeping to obviate the cumbersome procedures of barter. Our culture is entirely hung-up on the notion that money has an independent reality of its own.

A central tenet of the post-scarcity movement is that nearly all of the major scarcity that exists today is not due to the universe actually lacking the material. For example, enough energy falls on the earth from the sun every single minute to provide mankind's energy needs for a year ^[1], we produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet^[2] and there is 1,360,000,000 cubic kilometers of water on Earth^[3]. Yet we go to war over energy sources, 6 million children starve to death every year, and 13% of humanity does not have clean water to drink.

Part of the aim of this site is to show that this scarcity is neither natural nor necessary; it is synthesized by human political and economic structures. As Mahatma Gandhi said, "The world has enough for everyone's need but not enough for everyone's greed", or as Buckminster Fuller said, "It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival."

So what surmountable scarcity exists today?

Slums built on swamp land near a garbage dump in Jakarta

Collecting water in Mwamanongu Village, Tanzania

Pharmaceuticals, which are kept artificially scarce by commercial pricing

All the usual suspects, and a lot applies as much to Western countries as it does to the developing world.

• Clean energy
• Clean water
• Nutritious food
• Medicine and medical facilities
• Decent housing
• Sustainable development 
• High quality, interesting education
• Efficient transport that doesn't kill or maim significant numbers of passengers or contribute to changing our climate
• The facilities for people and communities to do more things for themselves; we are too reliant on machines and products from big business. Most people are not in a situation where they can even keep themselves alive when cut off from the products of centralized production, and this leads to unnecessary deaths and suffering when these services are disrupted in disasters
• Resources to get things done that need to be done - at a community level — sounds woolly perhaps but covers uncountable worthy projects that simply don't get done through lack of funds, manpower or bureaucratic hurdles
• Quality - quality products and architecture as examples.
• Time - people's time. Time to follow things important to the individual. Time for other people.

Causes

• Locked-up resources.

This includes intellectual property laws (patents and copyrights), which amount to deliberate restriction of information from people who wish to use it. These prevent large amounts information and ideas from being used for the good of humanity. Patents were invented to incentivize innovation by rewarding inventors, but corporations that are threatened by open collaboration are now using them to horde ideas and keep them away from public use.
Hoarding resources to inflate prices and keeping information secret for a competitive advantage are other examples of locked-up resources artificially creating scarcity.

• Short-term thinking
• Inadequate co-operation (lack of communication and sharing of knowledge).

This is also largely motivated by the monetary system, with different researchers from different company competing and guarding their knowledge, rather than working together for the good of mankind. Competition, rather than cooperation, is the default mode of operation of entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists, researchers and others. Competition leads to mistrust, self-interest and tribalism.

• Cultural and systemic inertia (that's the way it has always been done).

One strange effect of the monetary system as it is today is 'economies of scale'; it is cheaper to produce things on a large scale than on a small scale. As every technology entrepreneur knows, this is a huge hurdle to innovation and to the adoption of new technologies. In this way, our system of production is set up in such a way that actually incentivizes maintaining the status quo. The post-scarcity solution is to decentralize production by posting designs of machines publicly on the Internet so that anyone with access to fabrication equipment can make them from raw materials.

• Ignorance (lack of education or understanding). Examples: intercropping can greatly increase crop yields, rehydration salts could save millions from deaths from diarrhoea, the spread of AIDS could be halted if people understood how it spreads etc. etc. These solutions are cheap and easy to implement, but the people affected don't know about them.
• Incompetent government administration
• Bureaucracy

The world is full of good people with good intentions functioning within bad systems. Examples include politicians who find they cannot implement reforms without jumping through an impossible series of hoops and garnering support from disparate interest groups, or scientists who cannot pursue the research that matters to them because it will not win them grants. An extreme example is seen in the pharmaceutical industry, which is dominated by a few 'giants' that depend on 'blockbusters' to survive. To find these blockbusters, they must focus on diseases that affect large numbers of rich people. (Sadly, more is spent on researching cures for baldness than malaria.) The need to produce blockbusters means large-scale trials must be done for each drug, which leads to delays of years. And to make back the money of this protracted research process, prices must be kept artificially inflated. Though pharmaceutical researchers have the most noble of intentions - to cure diseases - they are hamstrung by the system they find themselves in.

• War (which can be considered as an extreme manifestation of competition and self-interest)
• and in no small part, monetary economics.

Food stamps are not needed at a feast. Bringing food stamps to a feast would be an annoyance at best but combine it with selfishness, competitiveness and bureaucracy and people will go hungry though they are surrounded by food. This is an (admittedly oversimplified) metaphor of the state of the world today; there exists a fabulous abundance of every important resource humans need, yet nearly everything has a price tag on it, restricting access with tragic results. But at this unique moment in history, this is beginning to change — the digital revolution and open culture have created a significant amount of resources without a price tag. If these free goods could be greatly expanded beyond their current quantity, we would enter a post-scarcity age.

Just one example of the effect of monetary economics is the delay it introduces in introducing technology. When a technology is invented that could — for example — help bring clean water to everyone on Earth, instead of being instantly brought to bear on making the world work better for humanity, it must go through a process in which patents are approved, business plans are written, market research is conducted, feasibility studies carried out, investment raised, contracts negotiated and so on. This creates a delay of years before a solution can be put in practice. In a situation of decentralized fabrication and free and open-source design, once a design is posted on the Internet, it can be reproduced around the world by anyone who needs it. The time from invention to implementation can be shorten from years to hours. In a period of history when new inventions spring up so rapidly, rapid implementation is more vital than ever.

Monetary economics also promotes planned obsolescence, making technology useful only for an artificially limited span of time.

See also

• Scarcity  (Wikipedia entry)
• Post-scarcity
• Mankind's fundamental resources