Abundance? Why does that require a specialist?

We humans love abundance. But isn’t one of it’s good points that you don’t have to do anything about it? If something is abundant that means all you need of it is already there, easy to get to. It might seem like no special fundamental disposition is needed to deal with this situation.

But another way to look at it is that you aren’t using all of the resource that is available. If you have more of something than you can use, than some of your access to it is going to waste. Maybe you can come up with new ingenious uses for this material and encourage everyone to take advantage of those uses. Or you can apply creativity directly to decorating objects made of the abundant resource. It could be that clay is abundant but a pot made and decorated by a great artist is one-of-a-kind and priceless. Thinking like this is what allows humans to take advantage of abundance.

Oil Bottle/Alabastron, photo: David Jackson CC-BY-SA

Second, since it is possible to get it easily, it's a waste if you put extra energy into gathering it. Why struggle for the last inaccessible dregs of an ore in one deposit if there’s another fresh deposit right at the surface just a couple of miles away. There will also be plenty of ways to get the resource that are risk free (or technically are not significantly more risky that anything else) So you should expect opportunities to gather the resource to be non-risky. But if you do find that one is risky, you should flee from it and find another opportunity.

Which brings me to the differences in views of risk. To deal well with abundance, someone needs to have a basic starting assumption that most ordinary things are not risky, but that if it is discovered that something is risky everyone should stay away from it. So action options can basically be divided into non-risky and risky, and the risky options can be discarded as live possibilities automatically.

On the other hand someone with a scarcity orientation needs to look at everything as almost certainly risky, but be willing to engage with it anyway. If it looks like there is an easy risk-free way to get a scarce resource, you need to treat that with extra caution. Because obviously that is a trap with the risk cleverly hidden. But even with that extra caution, you approach it anyway, trying to figure out what the trap is and how to disarm it. Someone who deals with scarcity is always taking calculated risks and making trade-offs between different costs and possible consequences.

So to an abundance specialist the scarcity specialist looks totally paranoid about everyday things; but when the big risks come around they look ridiculously cavalier. From the opposite perspective the scarcity specialist sees abundance specialists as having their head in the sand about everyday risks and seem to have panicked overreactions to big risks. And this is just a very small part of the fundamental differences these different viewpoints give rise to.