From scarcity to abundance by Geoff Olson
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any of us consider philosophy to be a specialized field of study, with little real-world application. Yet we’re all philosophers of one kind or another. We all have our own ideas about love, freedom and the meaning of life – or its non-meaning. These ideas, though not always articulated, often guide our lives to a surprising degree. Just as fish don’t have any notion of the medium they swim in, one particular belief system so thoroughly pervades our culture that most of us would be hard-pressed to identify it as a philosophy at all. This is the notion that life is defined by a competition for dwindling resources. The philosophy of scarcity has dominated cultural life in the West – and academia, business, government, the military and beyond – for the past few hundred years and pervades everything from PBS nature documentaries to reality television shows like The Apprentice and the Survivor series. Its essence is summed up by hard-nosed realists and their dictum “There is no free lunch.” As a philosophy, scarcity is given substance by real-world examples. Oil, water, food, money: all appear to be in perennially short supply, as expressed by the recent meme, “peak everything.” Famine, drought and wars over territory make scarcity seem the norm for the planet, rather than the exception. But how much is our perception of scarcity driven by a cultural consensus that it is fundamental to existence? There is a real world out there, a world that often fails to deliver us the goods, but there’s no denying that our relationship to it is conditioned by our beliefs and interpretations. For some time now, a different idea has been brewing in popular culture: the philosophy of non-scarcity, or abundance. The exploration of this idea, however, has been mostly limited to extropians and science fiction writers and ignored by academia. “Abundance” has been a word relegated to evangelical and new age groups. In his blog, Wired editor Chris Anderson noted this absence from academic dialogue: “My college textbook, Gregory Mankiw’s otherwise excellent Principles of Economics, doesn’t mention the word abundance. And for good reason: if you let the scarcity term in most economic equations go to nothing, you get all sorts of divide-by-zero problems. They basically blow up.”
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ne of the greatest shifts in human thinking came with the discovery that the world was not flat, but round. This implied that the finite globe could be circumnavigated and its territories mapped and conquered. In the early 1600s, Queen Elizabeth founded the East India Company, a mammoth trading monopoly that was given charter rights to create proprietary colonies anywhere on Earth. The East India Company was both the Halliburton and Blackwater of its time. It mapped out and mopped up the resources of distant lands, while encouraging the inhabitants to become pious, proto-Britons, or at least compliant widgets in its worldwide labour machine. Lieutenant Fletcher Prouty, author of The Secret Team, notes how the East India Company founded Haileybury College in England to “train its young employees in business, the military arts, and the special
skills of religious missionaries. By 1800, it became necessary to initiate the task of making an Earth inventory, that is, to find out what was out there in the way of natural resources, population, land, and other tangible assets.” The first man put in charge of this vital census was Robert Malthus, head of the department of economics at Haileybury College. He is remembered today as the prophet of scarcity, author of the enormously influential 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. In this treatise, he proposed, “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetic ratio.” In other words, unchecked population growth always exceeds the growth of means of subsistence. In modern parlance, we call it the “carrying capacity of the environment.” The actual population growth is held in place by “positive
checks” – starvation, disease and other disasters – and “preventive checks” – postponement of marriage, contraception and other practices that reduce the birth rate. A certain young naturalist, having recently returned to England from the Galapagos Islands, had an ah-ha moment when he came across Malthus’ essay. Surely, constraints on population acted as the driver of animal adaptation through a “survival of the fittest.” Charles Darwin introduced his revolutionary theory of evolution through natural selection with the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species. Both Malthus and Darwin have received a bad rap over time. But the problem wasn’t so much with the signal as the reception. Malthusians and Darwinists didn’t just seize on the new thinking to justify the status quo; they found entirely new ways to rational-
