Scarcity? Who wants scarcity?

It’s silly to say any human wants scarcity. Humans always prefer abundance of anything they like. But in developing a specialty you are not choosing abundance or scarcity in the abstract. What defines whether something is abundant or scarce is not it’s raw quantity, but its quantity relative to how much is desired. Something is scarce precisely because it is desired. It is desired so much that more of it is wanted than is readily available.

If you look around at what is holding your group back, it’s going to be a scarcity. A group’s maximum productivity is determined by the input they have least of. Scare items can be bottlenecks that determine the pace and path of a society's direction. Scarcity management can be literally life or death for critical items.

By Mauro Cateb  CC-BY-SA

So you do want to be able to deal effectively with issues scarcity. But what dispositional adaptations do you need for this task?

If it was easy to get more of the scare item then it would have been done already and it wouldn’t be scarce anymore. Beyond that, if it were simply a matter of hard work that would net more than its own value in the resource then it would also probably no longer be scarce. So there is also probably risk of some sort associated with getting the resource. Scarcity requires a particular attitude towards risk that is often misunderstood. But I want to wait to go over that in detail until I can contrast it with other attitudes.

Of course sometimes there is a stock of the scarce commodity. You or someone else has put in the work of gathering the resource and now you have to decide what to do with it. You also have to keep in mind that getting more of the resource if you need it later is probably not guaranteed. So whenever you use this resource it is always a trade-off against all other possible uses for this resource, and also against possible urgent needs that might come up in the future. So when using resources there should always be a question of “is it worth it?” not only in comparison to other things being considered in the front of your mind but in relation to the vast future potential of unknown-unknowns.

Perhaps that last sentence starts to give a hint why you don’t want scarcity focus to be the only perspective in your society. Next time we’ll look at the opposite focus.