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.

How deep does Abundance vs. Scarcity go?

So why does Abundance vs. Scarcity have to be either or? Couldn’t you just determine, in each situation, what pattern is fit and apply the right assumptions for that pattern? There are a couple different reasons why I think these specializations are best implemented as fundamental dispositions, as attitudes that are at the very core of personalities. The first has to do with Relevance Realization and the second with consistent, habitual action.

I’m using Relevance Realization to reference the concept John Vervaeke has developed. He has a whole lecture series developing this and related ideas, but the aspects I find important to the sequence of posts is how Relevance Realization is the answer to the problem that in real life, there are generally too many possibilities to consider all of them. If someone has to explicitly consider every possible consequence of an action to see if it is relevant, then, even if you are very very quick at making that consideration, it will take you practically forever, since the number of possible consequences is so large it might as well be infinite.

So humans need some way to narrow the field of things to consider that isn’t dependent on logical elimination. You need to just see it. You need to just Realize, in a way that is prior to your conscious rumination, what possibilities are Relevant. There’s no simple process to go back, after you’ve made a considered categorization of the situation, and re-do your Relevance Realization. You’ve already set your frame. Your automatic processes have already picked the things you are going to use in your conscious analysis.

People who haven't specialized are likely to miss important things about an abundance situation that scarcity specialists would see and things about a scarcity situation that a scarcity specialist would see. It will take a big breakthrough, something that shakes up their whole way of thinking and scrambles their assumptions, to let them pick up those details as relevant after they have rationally evaluated the situation as abundant or scarce. The only sure way to pick out the urgent, prominent characteristics of an abundant situation is for an abundance specialist to look at it, and likewise for a scarcity situation. Because those prominent characteristics just won’t be prominent to a non-specialist, they won’t stick-out and seem salient to weigh heavily in decision making.

  Izium Salient in 1942  The Ypres Salient at Night

The basic meaning of ‘salient’ is something that sticks outward so it is noticeable. In the military it is used of a situation where soldiers’ positions stick out towards the enemy relative to the rest of the battle line. It is a focus of both opportunity and danger. The perspective you take on them can make a lot of difference.

All this has assumed that we have a long time to consider and evaluate and consider again. But the other reason why an abundance or scarcity specialization needs to be deep set and long lasting, is that we can’t take that amount of time for most decisions. There are so many small routine decisions we make each day that most of them are made in seconds. We do this by having the basic frame and context of such decisions largely made beforehand. Stop to chat with the neighbor this morning? Put some extra tomatoes in the shopping basket? Empty the garbage now or wait til later? We make so many decisions each day that we don’t even think of as decisions. Having a set of orientations and pre-set assumptions not only allows these many decisions to be made in a reasonable amount of time, it creates a coherent strategy where the decisions support each other in a general direction toward a coherent set of goals. It creates a personality of how you approach socializing, resource management and schedule organization.

These are habits of thought that take time to develop and time to break. You can’t switch personalities and relational styles based on what sort of resource you are dealing with today. If you want to reap the long-term benefits of consistent specialized strategy you’ve got to let the disposition settle in for the long term and sink roots deep into your fundamental assumptions. So while there can be non-specialists who think about abundance and scarcity in a post Relevance Realization way and make use of understanding them on the surface layers, there will still be advantages to those who build a specialization into the base layers of their personalities.

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.

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.

Abundance vs. Scarcity

For as long as humans have been around they have been dealing to both abundance and scarcity. There are things around that there are more of than the group can use and there are some things where there is less than they would like to use. These two situations require not simply different approaches. They require different attitudes, expectations and mental dispositions to interact with most optimally. These are not surface level changes. They are deep changes in mindset that can only take place over many years.

Of course it is possible to take a compromised approach where you are not optimized for either but have flexibility for both. But this approach is always going to be at a disadvantage versus a specialist dealing with their specialty. So the stable outcome will be for a human group to contain a variety of specialization levels among its members. A few being more generalized and OK with dealing with either abundance or scarcity. Others specialized to be excellent at dealing with one or the other.

I think it would be impossible to get rid of these specializations entirely. If everyone is unspecialized or specialized in abundance then, as long as there is even one scarce thing in the environment, there will be a tremendous advantage to any person who specialized in scarcity. And this is really good for a society. A mix of different specializations allows a group to make maximum use of their resources and allows them to be flexible in the face of many different types of challenges.

I anticipate a couple of questions. First, if this is really a thing why haven't people noticed this before? Second, even if this is a thing, is this actually useful to understand? Well, I think people have noticed this. It’s just that we usually call this liberal and conservative dispositions. As we look back through history we feel like we can instinctively label various movements as liberal or conservative despite being totally unconnected with today’s political parties. But at the same time it’s hard to define what this meta-liberal or meta-conservative core really consists of. I think this is actually the dispositions that arise from an underlying abundance or scarcity specializations.

This means that we in the west are making a basic mistake about how we approach politics. We are looking at things as if one side or another must be wrong. Now it’s true that we have to pick a singular policy or set of policies that has the set of trade offs we most prefer. But we go further, thinking that whatever disposition those other guys have that makes them think a different policy is better is stupid, wrong, and maybe even evil. Where actually any society needs individuals with both types of disposition and they need to be included in one basic fabric of society.

So I’m starting a series on this blog about abundance versus scarcity and related concepts. I really value questions, feedback and challenges to my ideas

Sympathy for Socialists

Suppose you learned these wonderful laws of physics and they seemed so elegant and right. And you didn’t really understand how these simplified forms only applied to frictionless, air-resistanceless situations and to things like ideal gasses.

Then you looked around the real world and you notice that things harder to move than they should be. You aren’t able to get as much of what you want for a given energy expenditure as you expect.  You check with a physicist and hear that some of the energy is going to Waste-heat-ists.

You ask ‘Waste-heat-ists?  What are they good for?’

‘Oh nothing, they just add to the disorder of the universe.’

‘Why are we giving them energy?’

‘Oh we discover we could use this thing called the second law of thermodynamics and now that we are using a system of Waste-heat-isum; things are going just marvelously’

You think to yourself, well maybe for they are going marvelously for Waste-heat-ists, but what about ordinary people like you? You are putting energy into all these things and a bunch of it is being stolen by these Waste-heat-ists.

You ask engineer friends if Waste-heat is really a good thing. ‘Oh, no,’ they say, ‘We’re always trying to reduce it. But we can’t ever get rid of it entirely; it’s this second law thing we can’t get around.’

Mcleo001 at English Wikipedia [Public domain]

These evil Waste-heat-ists and their evil cronies have enacted this pernicious ‘second law’. Feel the indignation rise up in you. Waste-heat-isum is a leach on society, taking from good, hard-working people and producing nothing but chaos.

Can’t you see how wrong this would seem? If this was the level of your understanding of waste-heat, wouldn’t you see if from this perspective? Think how much more energy there would be to go around if we didn’t have waste-heat taking some away.  We could have abundance if Waste-heat-isum wasn’t producing artificial scarcity. Obviously we should free ourselves from our shackles and over throw the Waste-heat-ist system.