Interlude: This isn’t black and white, it’s a spectrum

One little note I want to put here. I've been talking about as if the world is mainly made up of a bunch of pure abundance specialists and pure scarcity specialists. And I’m going to keep on doing this. There is a trade off of how abundance specialized you can be against how scarcity you can be. But I want to acknowledge that you can compromise, you can make that trade off. Most people out in the real world do make some sort of compromise and are not fully specialized. Some people can even have at least a little bit of both specializations. So while I’m focusing on pure types keep in might this is a simplified version that will provide a base for discussing a more complicated reality.

abundance vs. scarcity: The sources

I mentioned in the first post that people have been talking about abundance vs. scarcity as a liberal and conservative tendencies. But that’s a simplification. People have been poking at what is beneath political dispositions and I want to go over some of the ideas I’m building on in thinking about Abundance vs. Scarcity.

The first thing I remember getting me started thinking about this is Scott Alexander's Thrive vs. Strive theory. This basically the idea that the rightist position is to take actions that would be most useful in surviving in a desperate situation and the leftist position is to do what would make sense to do to thrive the most in a secure situation. I liked a lot of this idea including this quote:

The rightists will ask: “So you mean that rightism is optimized for survival and effectiveness, and leftism is optimized for hedonism and signaling games?” And I will mostly endorse this conclusion. On the other hand, the leftists will ask: “So you mean rightism is optimized for tiny unstable bands facing a hostile wilderness, and leftism is optimized for secure, technologically advanced societies like the ones we are actually in?” And this conclusion, too, I will mostly endorse.

But I also feel this tends too much towards giving the impression that for any given circumstance there is one right balance that everyone should adopt; rather than there being synergistic advantages to having a mix of perspectives. I also think conservative tendencies naturally lead to advantages beyond bare survival. 

I was also aware of some aspects of the different versions of Robin Hanson’s Forager vs, Farmer theory of political tendencies. That most civilizations had to develop a farmer moral that was more rule based and hierarchical as they became dependent on agriculture and the long term planning it required. But that as the industrial revolution made countries more prosperous and safe it allowed the resurfacing of an older and more fundamental moral instinct that is more about cooperation and social bonds. This idea interested and intrigued me but I was uncomfortable with the implication that this was just a triggering of old presets that weren’t truly relevant to today’s situation.

But there was a connection to theory connecting political leanings to evolutionary ideas like r/K and fast life history strategy vs. slow life history strategy. This is where you look at living organisms in general and see there is a dichotomy between organisms that put all their energy into having as many offspring as quickly as possible (r strategy), and those who husband there energy to having and raising a smaller number of higher quality, better prepared offspring who have a higher individual chance of survival (K strategy). And then try to draw an analogy to certain human behavior patterns that are reminiscent of one biological strategy or the other.  I thought there seemed to be something here, but what it was felt confused. Perhaps because the differences among humans are so small compared to the vast difference between different types of animals.

Then I saw Jordan Hall discussing rivalrous vs. anti-rivalrous commodities. Including the idea that with rivalrous goods for one person to have more another person had to have less, but that this was not the cause with anti-rivalrous goods. There is a lot more to Jordan Hall’s concept than that. But the way he talked about it got me thinking of different types of commodities and people having different strategies that were correlated with the type of commodity they were dealing with.

I think all these ideas are worth looking into in their own right as well as having some bearing on how abundance or scarcity specializations drive us.