03 What is scarcity?

Scarcity is a formula between needs and resources, but it leads to powerful emotions of fear and to struggle. We feel it in our lives and on a global ecological scale. How can we recognize and overcome our scarcity mindset?

Transcript

Welcome to Cornucopia, the podcast in which we examine the shift to abundance. How do we live abundantly? My name is Karim Benammar, and on today's walk, let's look at the opposite of abundance: let's look at scarcity.

So, while I want to talk about abundance, about our potential for abundance, about this possibility to live abundantly, for many people, the experience of their daily life, the reality of their life, the way they look at their life, is a sense of deep seated scarcity. They're experiencing that there isn't enough now, and they're afraid that there won't be enough in the future. Many people need and want more things for a comfortable life, or for a secure life, or for their children, and these things are not available for them, these things are not available for everybody. 

And apart from this personal experience and this personal fear, there is also a more global fear, an ecological fear, that there aren't enough natural resources on planet Earth to give everybody a comfortable life. There are limits to the planet, and we're overshooting these limits, and therefore there is a sense of absolute scarcity. The one planet that we live on is just not enough because we are consuming several planets’ worth of resources at the moment. And so this sense of scarcity is not just relative to what we have, but   absolute:   here really just isn't enough,

So there's this feeling of scarcity, this emotion, but scarcity can also be defined in a different way. We could think of scarcity as a relationship. It's a relationship between what we have - or our resources -, and what we need. If what we need, or what we think we need, or we may need in the future, is so much larger than what we think there is available, then we're in a situation of scarcity. And the opposite is that: if what we need is so much smaller than what is available out there, if what is available out there is so much larger than we could ever need, then of course y ou have a situation of abundance. Abundance comes from the Latin ab unda, literally there's water everywhere, it's overflowing, t here is so much more than you need. My cup runeth over.

So you can think of it as a balance. In a surplus situation, in a situation of abundance, you have more than you need, more money, more things, more than zero, more than a balance point. You are ahead basically. And scarcity, on the other hand, is this constant sense of a deficit, of a lack. You have less than zero. You have less than you need. You have less than your balance point. You have less than you need to feel comfortable, or safe, or happy.

And when our survival is at stake in a crisis, you can imagine that we care very deeply about scarcity. If you have a scarcity of food, if you don't have enough to eat, this is a real problem. Without food, you might last a few weeks. Without water, you might only last a few days; and without air you will only last a few minutes. So there are crucial things that human beings need, and if they're not available or available in a  plentiful manner, then our survival is at risk. 

In this pandemic, of course, we're experiencing scarcity at the moment because of the scarcity of vaccines. Vaccines can only be produced at a certain speed. Rich countries have bought up all the vaccines,  and there's very little left for other countries with less strong economies or less political clout. And this situation with vaccines is made worse because we've actually decided not to share the know-how for these vaccines, not to share the patents or the recipes. And so we're actually creating additional scarcity. We'll talk more about this on the next walk. 

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So scarcity can be seen as a formal relationship between needs on one side and resources on another side. You can see it as a balance that's either positive or negative. But scarcity, as we've seen, is also a feeling. There's this deep feeling that there isn't enough, there isn't enough to go around.  And when there's not enough to go around at the moment, you can see how this leads to struggle. The struggle to get our share, to get what we need in order to survive. When your survival's at stake, you will fight for food. And in our spoiled world, we may fight for the latest gadget or for a limited edition of a certain fashion house. The mechanism is the same. It could be a fear of survival, but it could also just be a fear of suffering, a fear of missing out, a fear of being left behind, and whether it's a real life and death situation, or it's just a much more symbolic experiencing of missing out on something, this fear can be really strong.

You can see that fear with our global ecological scarcity. The idea that there aren't enough resources globally makes people afraid. We are fearful because we know we are depleting the earth and the seas. We are fearful because we're causing these extinction events. We are fearful because of climate change. We're not just engaged in a fight for resources amongst ourselves, for food or for the things that we want, but it seems that we're also engaged in a fight with the planet itself for these scarce resources. And so this feeling of scarcity, but also this experience of scarcity, is associated with struggle. It's a struggle. It's a struggle to survive, a struggle to get our share. It's a struggle against others. It's a struggle against the planet. It's a struggle against nature. 

What makes that even worse is that it's not just the case of having scarcity now, but this much deeper sense of dread, this fear that there won't be enough in the future. If there's not enough of what we need now and things are running out, then it's just gonna get so much worse. There's gonna be even less chance of getting enough in the future. And so you can imagine that we're getting caught in this spiral of increasing fear and increasing struggle, and increasing dread - and all this emotion is caused by this imbalance between our resources and our needs.

We might have a scarcity of goods, of things we have access to. We might experience this global scarcity on an ecological level. And there is also a third driver of this  sense of scarcity, and that is a scarcity of status. So status is the place where you stand. It's your standing in a group. And this is something that, again, I will talk about more on another walk, but for now, let's just say that we have two competing tendencies. On the one hand, we want to belong to the group, we want to feel safe within a group. And on the other hand, we want to stand out within the group, because we need to ascertain our position within the group. So there's this paradoxical need to belong a nd to stand out. And that standing, that position is our status, and we need that status to feel safe.

In the past, there were probably far fewer status games, because status was established at birth. You were born a peasant, or you were born a merchant, or you were born a noble person. Since it was determined at birth, there was nothing you could do to change it. There was no possibility for movement.

Now, because we're living in a society which is ostensibly equal, which is ostensibly meritocratic, where what you do determines who you become, everybody supposedly starts from the same position, and eve rybody can become president. Everybody can become the director, everybody can become a star. And so we believe that status is acquired by merit. If you work hard, and you use your talents,   and you never give up, you can achieve anything you want. You can achieve any status you want. 

So status can be measured in money, and we believe that rich people are rich because they've worked hard, and they've done well. Status can be measured in titles, and it can be an academic title, or it can be an honorific title, or it can be a prize such as the Nobel Prize, and that makes you really special. And status can be measured in positions: you can become a director or a CEO, or you become Prime Minister, or President, or Head of State.

And because there is only a very limited number of these top positions, and there's an enormous competition because everybody can have a go, you can see that most people are going to be dissatisfied. Most people are not going to attain the top status. There is only a few top positions, and that creates scarcity, scarcity of top positions. And that creates, again, the fear, t he fear of missing out on the top position, the fear of not achieving that status in your life, not now and not in the future. 

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So we can look at scarcity as this formal relationship, a formula between our needs and our resources. We see that scarcity leads to strong emotions, this feeling of apprehension, this feeling of fear, this feeling of dread. We have seen that scarcity leads to struggle, a struggle amongst ourselves, and a struggle against the planet, against nature. We've seen that there is a scarcity of top positions, that the existence of status and status games makes the world scarce, increases that fear, increases that dread. 

But scarcity is also a mental frame. It's a way of seeing the world. It's a way of experiencing the world. It's a way of living in the world. If we believe there is scarcity, or if we feel this scarcity, or if we feel this need for struggle, then we develop a scarcity mindset. And through this scarcity mindset, you start seeing scarcity everywhere and you start reacting to the world as if the world is fundamentally scarce.

In this sense, I believe, the scarcity is not out there. It's not something about the world or about our society, but scarcity comes from the way that we look at the world. That's why I call it a scarcity mindset. Our mind is set to think in a certain way. Our mind is seeing certain things. Think of it as a frame or a set of glasses. We are wearing scarcity glasses when we look at the world. And when we're wearing these glasses communally, we are seeing global absolute ecological scarcity. 

I'm fascinated by this idea of a scarcity mindset. It's something that we're not really aware of. It's something that's become so automatic that we don't notice it. I believe we've been stuck in this frame of scarcity, perhaps for a few decades, perhaps for a few centuries, and were not aware of this, or wer ae insufficiently aware of this. And if we were to become more aware of it, if we would just ask: where does this scarcity view, where does this scarcity perspective, where does the scarcity thinking, this mindset, where does it come from? Then we would realize that it's just one of the ways of looking at the world, just one of the ways that we are going to act in the world. That it's just one of the ways that we think about the world. And it's not so much about the world. It says a lot more about us, about the frames that we use to look at the world.

Then the hope is that, if you could shift from this frame, from this mindset of scarcity to a frame of thinking in terms of abundance, you would be taking a completely different perspective, you would actually see different things. You would see a world that is abundant. You would see possibility. You would act differently. You could shift your emotions away from this fear and this struggle, which are paralyzing us. Our feelings can change when our mindset changes. We could shift our emotions away from fear and struggle, towards seeing this abundance, towards confidence in ourselves, confidence in our future, confidence in the resources of this bountiful planet. Instead of a struggle we could think of cooperation, we could think of sharing, we could think of generosity.

We don't have to be afraid all the time. The absence of fear, this sense of ease, the sense of confidence, the sense of calm, the sense of belonging, the sense that you have a right to it, that you don't have to fight for it continuously. Continuously fight against other people, for possessions, for status, that there is really enough to go around. That is not just a reality in the world, but it's also a mental mindset.

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So we are trying to understand this notion of scarcity, this feeling of scarcity, this mindset of scarcity. And on our first walk, I introduced two stories about abundance. One story was that there was a general sense of progress, which was very, very slow until a few hundred years ago, and then it accelerated and we've become more and more wealthy, and there is more and more abundance. The other story was that there wasn't really a perception of scarcity or abundance until say, three or four hundred years ago, that the idea of scarcity itself came from the Industrial Revolution, came with the beginning of mass production. And that it became stronger in the 20th century with this acceleration, as we started developing advertising and we started creating ever more desires for consumer goods, for status, for achievements.

And the remarkable thing is that the notion of scarcity is also really central to the development of modern economics, which is also about three hundred years old. The definition of economics, which I keep repeating: it is the distribution of goods under conditions of scarcity. When goods are scarce, we need to find ways to distribute them, to sell them. We need to set a price, there is offer and demand, there is trade. When you have scarce land, and scarce housing, and scarce goods, you have to find a mechanism to distribute these, because the need for these things is so much higher than what is available. And the science of economics then finds different mechanisms to allocate these goods. It gives us different theories about how to do this. It gives us different ways in which to do this. 

Economics traditionally hasn't dealt with abundance because there was never really a situation of abundance. When something was abundant in the past, like clean air, it was considered free, and so it had no price. When something is abundant and it's free, you don't need a price mechanism. You don't need a system to allocate it, to distribute it, because everybody can just take as much as they need. When things are abundant, you basically lose the reason for an economic system. 

Economics, by its own definition can't deal with abundance, doesn't deal with abundance. And this is starting to become a problem. Now that we have a digital world, we can make copies at basically zero cost. Everything that is digital could be basically free, or the cost would be so small because it's the cost of data, a little bit of energy to keep it somewhere. In that sense, it's difficult or impossible to price it. In order to keep an economy of digital goods, we have to create artificial forms of exclusivity. You have to claim copyright, or you have to have subscriptions, or you have to restrict access, or you have to make a limited edition. So you see that even when you create abundance - because you can easily create digital abundance -, you lose economics. You lose an economy unless you recreate that through a new form of scarcity. 

And the fear and the worry is that it is not just digital goods. We've gotten very good at producing objects very, very cheaply. And when we make good things cheaply, we are destroying economic value. And so we have to resort to things like making it a brand, or making it exclusive, or making a limited addition so that people will keep paying a higher price.

Think of a watch, for example. First, you probably don't need a watch when you have a smartphone, but say you wanted a watch, you can now make a watch for a few dollars or a few euros that is perfectly accurate, that is gonna last for years. And yet, of course, we have extremely expensive watches, we have watches at all levels of prices, because the watch says something about who you are. Here you see this mechanism of exclusivity, of branding at work. The thing could be incredibly cheap, so we have to find the way to make it scarce. We have to find a way to introduce scarcity, otherwise we don't have economics. 

Because we're shifting to this world of abundance through digital goods, through the development of technology and robots, and because we can produce good things ever more cheaply, we are going to have to develop an economics of abundance. We are going to have to find a way to calculate the value of things which are plentiful. We are going to have to leave behind this way of valuing things through scarcity and exclusivity, and have to find a way to value things which are abundant, which are plentiful, and for which there is no struggle, and for which there is no exclusive status. And that, believe me, is going to be quite a challenge. We'll talk about it on some future walks. 

I actually believe that one of the reasons for this scarcity mindset is this economic mindset. Our economic mindset rules the world. Most of the decisions we make in our lives, of the things that matter to us, of the things that we use to measure are worth, are based on monetary value. And monetary value itself is based, to a large extent on scarcity, or perceived scarcity.

In a way, we come full circle here. Because we see things as scarce, we can assign the value to them But because they have value, they are actually becoming scarce because not everybody can afford them, not everybody can buy them. And, if you have a sense that coming full circle is circular reasoning, you are right, because it is. It's a very strange loop that we've got ourselves caught in.

And this leads to very strange and unfortunate situations, where we could create goods, or we could do something for people, but we don't, because we can't make money doing it, because we can't create value out of the situation, or because if we do it, then we're actually destroying our own value creation, we're making things worse for ourselves. In this case, there is not enough real or perceived scarcity, and that's a terrible conundrum. If we are using scarcity as the only way to assign value, we are leaving a lot of valuable things out. We are letting go of this opportunity to create value for everybody. It's a tricky thing to think about. If we create value for everybody, then the value itself becomes lower because it's less exclusive, because it's less scarce. If we make cheap goods for everybody, then there's not going be much of an economy left because everybody just has access to everything.

So if you see how pervasive scarcity thinking is, if you see the relationship between scarcity thinking and economics in our development over the last few hundred years, you realize that this scarcity mindset is quite natural for us. That seeing the world through a scarcity frame, through glasses of scarcity, is a cultural thing to do. It's the society in which we grew up. And this fear, this fear of there not being enough, not enough now, not enough to go around, not enough in the future, is a fear which is not n atural. It's a fear which is actually cultural, it's part of our mental upbringing.

Because we're all stuck in this mindset, we experience the world as scarce. We feel scarcity. We think in terms of scarcity, and we may believe that scarcity is a natural situation. It's a natural situation in global economics. It's a natural situation in societies and communities. It's a natural situation that the earth itself is scarce. 

This mindset, this frame, this focus on scarcity stops us from seeing the reality of the surplus of life. It stops us from looking at the world through a different mindset, through the mindset of abundance. It stops us from experiencing this abundance through a feeling that we have with abundance, this feeling of ease, this feeling of confidence, this feeling of possibility, and it stops us from actually creating physical abundance because we think that scarcity is the only way to create value.

This, I think, is actually the core of our problem. Life is abundant. Natural life is abundant. Social life is abundant. Economic life can be abundant. But we are stuck with this frame of scarcity, with this mindset of scarcity. This is a psychological frame. It's a cognitive frame. It's a frame of our beliefs.

We are actually looking at an abundant world through scarcity glasses. So the question then is: how do we take off these scarcity glasses? How do we liberate ourselves from this mindset? How do we shift from this scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset? How can we try on abundance glasses? That is, I think, the challenge for our time, and that's what we'll be exploring on the coming episodes of Cornucopia. Thank you for listening.