The Scarcity Fallacy

We're told we don't have enough, I'll show you why that's wrong

Our society is built around scarcity.

Within economics and business this is nothing new, capital accumulation relies on the concept of scarcity, manufactured or otherwise.

In what economists refer to as the “market”, scarcity or abundance is a key indicator of what determines price, it also shapes our politics.

However like anything else within our society, what start as ideas to accumulate capital, permeate other spheres of life in small ways.

They start out as saplings, until eventually scarcity underpins many of the conversations we have, though we aren’t directly naming it.

In the West, we have a fundamental belief in the scarcity of things - this started as scarcity on the initial boundaries of our nations, to now scarcity on the very planet we live on, such that we talk about colonising other planets to sustain ourselves.

Scarcity is the framing for nearly every major flashpoint in our modern culture, economies or politics - employment, public finances, natural resources, time and physical space.

Lets look at each in turn.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

Financial Scarcity

Lets start with the most obvious one and the one that probably makes the most headlines.

The prevailing thinking is that there is very obviously an incredibly scarce amount of money at any one time. This is reinforced in our media, in our politics and in our economics textbooks.

Numerically, this is just outright incorrect. Recent data from Oxfam on inequality shows that the top 12 people (people, not percent!) have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of people. So that’s 12 people, with as much as 4 billion people.

4 billion people is the populations of the USA, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria and most of Brazil.

I could fit 12 people in my kitchen¹.

Let that sink in for a second.

That statistic alone should send alarm bells ringing and immediately put the concept of financial scarcity under scrutiny.

We don’t have a scarcity problem, we have an ownership and distribution problem.

As Oxfam’s report states “The amount of wealth gained by the world’s billionaires over the last year is enough to give every person in the world US$250 and leave the billionaires more than US$500bn richer”.

Many of these billionaires, despite hoarding half the world’s wealth, are investing in technological innovations they claim are meant to improve our lives, allow us to work less and have more leisure time.

That leads us to the next point, employment.

Employment Scarcity

Despite the promise of innovations in efficiency leading us to nirvana and a 15 hour work week, we are finding a return to older working practices in the very tech companies that are espousing this idea.

The “work from home revolution” is being rolled back, the 996 working pattern is making waves in Silicon Valley and despite the rise of AI and its apparent impacts on our productivity, we now need two incomes to sustain a family, meaning we are working more.

This is again, framed around scarcity.

There aren’t enough jobs to go around.

You see this play out when it comes to the welfare state - the Labour government recently talked about how we need to get people back into work. How getting people into work is a huge priority.

Unemployment is currently at 5.2%, I thought AI was supposed to put us out of work? Isn’t that the whole point of technological efficiency?

Unemployment is a crucial part of neoliberal economic policy.

It could, quite easily, be reduced significantly, if not eradicated.

This could be achieved by things like job guarantees, state driven industrial policy or what Zohran Mamdani is doing in New York. If we were to end employment however, this would put paid to the power of the employment scarcity myth.

Employment scarcity is used as a “reserve army of labour” to weaken worker’s bargaining power, limit wage growth and maintain labour based coercion in the economy.

Since there is no money and now no manpower, this allows states to justify austerity, create conditions on welfare and keep bargaining power in the hands of employers.

A win-win for everyone, of course.

Resource Scarcity

What we always seem to have the money and manpower for however, is advancing the interests of neo-imperialism.

Because of a long and storied history of interventionism, meddling and policy proscription, global inequality is rife, and only getting worse.

This furthers the argument that resources are scarce, all while we dump our money into an AI tech bubble that makes particular resources very scarce, such as minerals and fossil fuels.

What do we do about this?

Well, we have to get them from someone else.

People have been doing this for thousands of years but the American war machine is one of the most veracious and the most resource and financially intensive in history.

The US war machine is bigger than the next 10 countries combined, up to $990 billion a year and accounts for nearly 40% of total global military spending.

So the imagined scarcity of resources justifies expansion abroad.

To be clear, I’m not saying the world has infinite resources, it doesn’t, but once again this is a problem of control and political will, not of scarcity in and of itself.

There are alternatives to everything, innovation is infinite according to the capitalists.

We’ve either already found them and aren’t implementing them at the necessary scale or we haven’t bothered to invest the resources to develop them yet.

Time Scarcity

Because of this, we are staring firmly down the barrel of the climate gun.

The situation is bleak, there’s no denying that.

The Paris Accords were the last time we meaningfully came together to try and solve this but the data speaks for itself, we will be 3 degrees warmer by the turn of the century if we don’t chill out.

But even something like climate change, which is arguably caused by an abundance problem, is framed in terms of scarcity, a scarcity of time.

We have to reach net zero by 2030, we have to cool down by 2100, we have to slow emissions before we break every single planetary boundary we have. We’re in a race against time.

Again though, the solutions exist, as were laid out at The Paris Accords, we actually don’t have a scarcity of time, we have a scarcity of will.

Each of these myths has directly contributed to increases in migration habits from the Global South to Global North, which leads us to the next point

Spatial Scarcity

There isn’t enough space, enough jobs, enough resources, or enough housing, or enough NHS, or enough public transport, or enough of whatever it is immigrants are perceived to be hogging.

One way to frame the dangers of immigration is around scarcity of space.

When you believe there is limited space, it forces you to raise the drawbridge. When the lifeboat is full, you cut it from the sinking ship. This is a powerful narrative and one that isn’t grounded in empirical evidence.

Less than 1% of the UK’s population owns over 50% of our land. Our public infrastructure can’t sustain its current population because investment has collapsed, UK public investment has consistently lagged behind OECD levels.

The British state has sold 2,036,848 council homes since 1980, 41% of which now belong to private landlords. These haven’t been replaced at nearly the same rate. Developers sit on the land to control its value with planning permission gained for 1.4million homes since 2007 that have never been built. England is only 9% developed.

There’s actually plenty of space, plenty of opportunities for housing and plenty of capacity potential in our public services. But we can’t invest in them due to the “scarcity” of money or the “scarcity” of resources.

These are policy choices, not natural consequences.

Control Scarcity

Our scarcity of will is reflected in a scarcity of popular democratic control.

Control not only over our production, our institutions or our policies, but control over the dominant narrative.

Our media landscape is ruled over by a small handful of people who have no interest in everyday people recognising the abundance that’s available to us collectively.

Capitalism needs ownership over the concept of scarcity, neoliberalism is dialled into it on a policy level. If we have enough space for everyone, enough resources to solve our problems and enough money to buy everything we need then the question would become:

Why aren’t we doing it then?

This question shifts the spotlight from those that suffer under this narrative to those that control this narrative.

We actually have an abundance of all the things we think we’re lacking.

This simple truth is under lock and key. Those that seek to permeate this myth understand the overwhelming odds against them and understand that if we believe the things we need are in short supply, we’ll waste our time looking amongst ourselves for an answer as to why we don’t have them.

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1. I would have seen this as a brag 10 years ago