We have more empty homes than homeless people.
We have more food than necessary to feed everyone in the world.
This is not an era of actual scarcity. It is an era of artificial scarcity.
We either already have, or we have the ability to create, a surplus of every necessity that is needed.
This includes housing, food, and clothing. We still have enough water, globally, if we are wiling to be smart about how we use it, and where there are geographical problems regarding access, the problem of access is easily solved. In general, we need to be a bit flexible in how we grow our food; we need to stop draining aquifers and help those farms that over-use aquifer water to grow crops that use less water, or help those farmers find other livelihoods.
Early research shows that intensive urban agriculture creates between three to ten times the food that traditional agriculture does.
We are also short of security. This is another artificial shortage, though it’s harder to fix. Most countries that have been destroyed recently were destroyed in large part because of outside intervention, whether from Western, Eastern, or Jihadi influence. We are in a cycle of blowback after blowback, with the first step being to stop doing things that will cause devastation.
Education is unequally spread throughout the world, but this is another problem which is solveable: We have the books, which cost cents to reproduce, the telecom networks are almost everywhere, and we can train the teachers. If we wanted to spend more money on teachers and less on finance, we wouldn’t have a problem.
Again, most of this “scarcity” is artificial. It is imposed through a money system where a few people have the right to create money, and everyone else has to access it from them. That money is nothing, more or less in this context, than permission to use society’s resources, whether it’s people’s labor or the results of that labor.
The only real restrictions on our ability to supply what people need are overuse of sinks (like carbon) and overuse of resources, whether renewable or non-renewable, but we either have the necessary technology to move away from that overuse, or we have scientists and engineers who would love to create it for us, but who can’t get the resources/money they need to do so.
But much of this is low hanging fruit; we already have enough food and housing and far more textile capacity than we need.
Dividing up the world as we do between countries is a huge problem in which our resources are wasted where they aren’t needed, while others go without. Colonial powers have drawn ineffective and nonsensical borders, as is the case with most of Africa and the Middle East.
By centralizing the production of various resources (and that includes both ideological and intellectual resources) in a few areas and to a few people, we have pooled necessities in places they aren’t needed and denied them to other people.
These are social problems, with social solutions. The idea that technology will “fix” them is somewhat (though not entirely misguided.) We already have the material means to care for everyone, we do not. This cannot be laid directly at the feet of technology–we have had this capacity for at least a century or so.
Oh, and the shortage of spare time for so many; with the shortage of work for others? Complete social construction. We are doing too much of the wrong kinds of work, and too little of the right kinds of work, and those choices are also social.
In the end, scarcity of the goods humans need most is almost always, in the modern world, artificial: It’s a social choice.
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vera
All true.
“We still have enough water, globally, if we are wiling to be smart about how we use it…”
Ah, but there’s the catch. Do you see any evidence that “we” are willing to be smart about how we use it?
Some of us are willing, but our willingness is not welcome. And then there is the American standard of living to defend. (Does anyone still believe it?) Most sheep trot on, bleating.
kkjjii
Ah, so I see that you support the infinite growth paradigm. You write some good things, but you are chasing a unicorn Ian.
Ian Welsh
Misunderstanding of article.
Declan
Mostly, I agree. Reading Amartaya Sen on famines is helpful on this topic.
And I always cringe when people talk about how the U.S. (or wherever) housing bubble was unsustainable because it was only through debt that all those houses could be built, with people so often failing to grasp that the debt is just a social function – obviously if we *could* physically build all those houses (as we clearly did), then we could “afford” to do so.
Still, there are physical limits that are starting to bite, I think in a lot more ways than are obvious at the surface* and the (social) system is so predicated on rapid exponential growth that even the merest hint of a constraint on a key resource (e.g. oil) can cause widespread problems.
* Think of anything where real progress has been made in the last 20 years that has made its way into the hands of the masses – is it big, or is it small? Odds are, you can only think of small things. No more Concorde, but you can have a nifty phone. No flying cars, but your computer can translate text into many languages at the touch of a button. With energy scarce for a generation now, the big dreams of the fifties have been replaced by the small dreams of the present.
Mike
Basically then, the issue boils down to people defending existing social structures, defending existing power bases, defending ‘tribal’ groups and boundaries, etc… i.e. the base primate subconscious behaviours that we can’t stop doing. And we’ll never raise our consciousnesses enough to overcome these reflex behaviours because we’re wired this way.
Even if we did somehow manage to achieve equitable distribution of resources, we’d still need to start a program of managed degrowth and population reduction in order to become sustainable as a species. And that’s not going to happen either, for the same reason.
@Declan, nice way of thinking about progress. Personally I think we peaked in 1969 with Concorde and the moon landings, and it’s all been downhill from there.
Jeff Wegerson
@Mike Europe is already in population reduction mode and in an energy sense degrowth. Germany for instance is on path to eliminate its nuclear power plants. The best birth control is economic development (for all classes, or at least the lower classes.)
@Declan We have had flying cars for a long time. It’s just that geometry prevents their use where everyone wants to use them, that is, in the city. The saying in urbanist circles these days is that “a highly developed city is not one where the poor have cars but where the rich use public transit.”
The Concorde was only useful across the ocean. The follow-on technologies appear to be hyper-loops and/or sub-orbital rocket planes. Hell, in the U.S. the fifty-year old technology of High-Speed Trains, would be technological progress.
If energy were truly scarce we would not have been able to waste it as profligately as we have. No, energy is not scarce, air is, as in a handy sink to dump toxic residues.
As for the moon, the reason there is so little interest in going there is not technological or even economic rather it’s the corrosive effects of lunar razor dust.
So yes social arrangements constrain progress in technology and well-being.
Peter*
The ‘Prosperity’ doctrine, or is it a religion, has costs, many of them hidden, especially to those who do the most prospering. A superficial or Pollyannaish view says, look there is plenty for ‘us’ to prosper but for 5% of the worlds population to consume 25% of the worlds resources our prosperity depends on exploiting the other 75% of the world population and extracting their resources at an ever increasing rate along with massive ecological destruction.
This has been the ‘cost’ of civilization from the beginning, when cities developed they had to exploit the countryside and if the countryside didn’t like being exploited the newly created armies were there to enforce the exploitation necessary to produce the cities prosperity. Enforcement of our exploitation has become our largest enterprise with worldwide garrisons and perpetual war to maintain the flow of prosperity to us.
The technology that made all of this wonderful prosperity possible is agriculture and it is the most destructive technology we have created, stripping much of the world’s land of everything living to mine the soil to feed the teeming and possibly cancerous human population growth leaving depleted soils degraded environments pollution and ocean dead zones.
The quaint idea that cities could produce much of their food needs only shows that most people don’t have a clue what is required to feed, clothe and shelter 7 Billion people or even the 320 Million in the US.
Here are some crop statistics from just US industrial agricultural production.
Corn crop from 400,000 corn farms, 14 Billion bushels, 20% exported.
Wheat crop, 58 Million tons.
Soybeans, grown on 83 Million acres, 3.8 Billion bushels.
nihil obstet
Our whole economic/political system is built on scarcity. Until we get a widely accepted alternative framework for development of and access to resources, I don’t know how we can reform the power structure.
More accurately, our economic/political system is built on the manipulation of scarcity by the powerful. Where there is abundance benefiting the many, the powerful create scarcity. That’s the point of so-called “intellectual property” laws. Where there’s scarcity benefiting the many, the powerful demand abundance. That’s the point of right-to-work laws and HB-1 visas. Then of course, economists assure us that the manipulators’ power comes from natural laws of supply and demand.
Until people can see an alternative system for developing and distributing resources, they will resist unfairly giving those empty houses to lazy people, or paying more for food that Monsanto and lobbyists assure us is safe, or any of the natural laws that comfortable economists assure us cannot be repealed (they’re NATURAL!!!)
Work on the alternative vision is crucial.
ekstase
“This is not an era of scarcity. It is an era of artificial scarcity.”
I wonder if the problem, for some people, is that we have enough, because it holds out the possibility of equality. And as we know from psychology, for some people, that is an idea that they can’t stand.
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Jessica
Yes, are social choices, but socially unconscious choices. All of us together create societies and keep them going through countless day to day choices, but we are usually not conscious of ourselves doing this as individuals and collectively we are unconscious of creating our societies (and much energy is expended keeping us unconscious). As a result, we experience society as an external force, roughly the way we experience the weather. The next step in our maturing as a species is to create societies that are conscious of themselves as societies.
When we create conscious societies, most of our problems will be easy to solve, but the act of creating conscious societies will be demanding and take time.
V. Arnold
Hmm; the conversation is about gaining prosperity and we can’t even supply sufficiency.
The cart before the horse.
The world, by design, is not and never will be “sufficient”; but sovereign countries at least have the potential for sufficient economies; but not as long as they are led by a ring in their noses.
It will take a massive effort of will and intelligence to even understand that possibility.
Frankly; I’m not optimistic as long as the U.S. is the driver of the pack…
Jessica
There is a contradiction between our existing capacity to make what we need (and the far larger capacity that we could build up within a few years) on the one hand and the amount of that capacity we are capable of using within the constraint that the rich and powerful stay that way. This contradiction is much sharper than it was during industrial capitalism. Because of this greater intensity of the contradiction, historically unprecedented levels of time and energy are devoted to maintaining the most crucial scarcity: knowledge.
The knowledge work strata was created under industrial capitalism and is the key source of new production in recent decades. If unleashed, it could sweep away scarcity, but so far it has thrown its lot in with the obsolete elite. In particular, the top layer of the knowledge work strata is minions to the elite. These minions are overpaid to primarily work on maintaining the artificial scarcity of knowledge. (The lower parts of the knowledge work strata, on the other hand, are underpaid to actually produce something useful. Think of an adjunct at a college vs. the college president)
Bernard
well, pretty soon all the “might have beens” will be too late, and our choices continually and exponentially diminish by ignoring them. Nature will show us where and when to get off. This “Market Capitalism” path is suicide, and “is not healthy for children and other living things.” the “There is No other way or no Alternative” is good marketing, though. the “Greed is Good” Genie has been let out of the box. Typically, what we see here is American Exceptionalism, conning the Americans while taking the rest of the Earth down with them, as the American “Way” destroys both the existing balance of life on Earth and kill everyone else, friends and enemies alike,” on its’ way down. My Way or the Highway…
Interesting times, indeed!
Stirling Newberry
>Mostly, I agree. Reading Amartaya Sen on famines is helpful on this topic.
Yes.
Pelham
I particularly liked the point about money supply being in the hands of a few who control the spigot for the rest of us, which I believe underpins most of the rest of what you’re saying.
Bear with me: Last week a couple of nice Jehovah’s Witnesses came to the door with the latest issue of their magazine, whose theme was the sin of obsessing over money. The two Witnesses promised to return and discuss the articles with me.
I’m actually looking forward to a sit-down with them. What I will point out is what the Bible would describe as sorcery but what these days we refer to as monetary policy implemented by the Federal Reserve and Treasury. It’s a Satanic hocus-pocus that creates scarcity out of abundance — and thereby inclines we poor victims toward the sin of greed inspired by said scarcity.
Mixing biblical metaphors, one might say that these money-changer serpents and others just like them have had us feeding on the fruit of the Tree of Monetary Ignorance for centuries. Time to drive them out of the temple and/or the garden.
Jessica
If American politics were moving in a direction different from the rest of the first world, then that would suggest that the cause is specifically American.
However, what I see that politics across the 1st world are less humane than a few decades ago. Social safety nets have been shrunk everywhere. Of course, some places – Scandinavia – are run more humanely and democratically now than the US is now (or ever was for that matter), but compared to themselves 2-3 decades ago, they are all moving in the neo-liberal direction.
One could argue that this reflects overwhelming American dominance, but I think that would just duck the question of why all first-world nations are willing to follow the American lead and move toward less humane politics.
EmilianoZ
If you end artificial scarcity what you will have is real scarcity. Remember the communist experiments in Russia, China and Cuba? Oh boy, they had very real shortages. The only things that bring about productivity gains are the carrot (profits) and the stick (fear of hunger). Everything else is pipe dreams.
Tal Hartsfeld
What you state in this post is SO TRUE!
But …what is anyone going to do about it? Attempt reforming any of the “power-and-control obsessed” junkies who run things they way THEY see fit, who view the “average sod” as mere “Barbie wind-up toys” to be pawned and serfed for their own amusements? Who see themselves as being “special” and “superior” to the vast majority, and figure that vast majority “doesn’t matter” anyway so “whatever happens to them isn’t really that important”?
Karl Stout
On a projected path the 11 or 12 billion humans, it’s best to keep artificial scarcity in the drivers seat. We’re not doing the planet or the existing humans any favors if we don’t. Why is the real elephant in the room, overpopulation, so hard for professed liberals to face up to?
Tal Hartsfeld
Yes, Karl
…but women SO-O-O-O-O want to keep “having their ‘babies'”.
And the “family” is the universal “norm”, while being single is the universal act of “heresy”.
Families and kids are always “top priority” over single adults, who, by themselves, simply “don’t matter”.
I DO agree with you about overpopulation. One can’t “fit a hundred people into the space of a small closet”.