[extropy-chat] economics, scarcity, and plenty

[Jef Allbright]

On 11/1/05, Jeff Davis <jrd1415 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Welcome to the list, Dave.
>
> --- David Masten <dmasten at piratelabs.org> wrote:
>
> > I'm new to the list, and I seem to have come in on a
> > discussion of
> > things that just don't make sense. "Economics of
> > scarcity" and
> > "economics of plenty" are meaningless to me.
>
> Let me try to help out, speaking only for myself, of
> course.

Let me contribute my own perspective as well.

I think we could all agree that scarcity and abundance can be seen as
the two extremes of a single scale.  And we have plenty of examples
showing generally that no matter what our actual place on that scale,
we tend to think in terms of scarcity.  We evolved under conditions of
scarcity and fierce competition for survival, and it's our nature to
perceive and behave in those terms.

But what happens when the conditions of our environment improve to the
level that our basic needs are met?

Similar to Mazlow's hierarchy, we might be expected to move our focus
from survival to "self-actualization", or in the domain of economics
from alleviating scarcity to maximizing growth, or in the domain of
politics from striving for zero-sum social power to striving for
win-win social frameworks.

It's still the same scale, but the focus is changed to better match
the environment, and the nature of the actions reflect that change. 
As others have pointed out, we will still compete:  for attention,
mind-share, more successful ideas winning over those less successful,
but the focus will be qualitatively and substantially different.

There will still be a leading and tailing edge of relative scarcity
and relative abundance, and as the the Red Queen said, "to stay in
place you have to run very, very hard, and to get anywhere, you have
to run even harder."

- Jef
http://www.jefallbright.net