Post-scarcity Economy - The Scarcity Problem

The Scarcity Problem

Scarcity is the fundamental economic problem of having seemingly unlimited human needs and wants, in a world of limited resources. It states that society has insufficient productive resources to fulfill all human wants and needs. Alternatively, scarcity implies that not all of society's goals can be pursued at the same time; trade-offs are made of one good against others. As such, the term post-scarcity economics may be somewhat paradoxical. To quote a 1932 essay by Lionel Robbins, economics is "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."

Economics in any and all forms rests on the assumption of conditions of natural or artificially enforced scarcity, far less than enough to supply everyone. The study of economics and its everyday business control and transactions tells you how each variation of the Price System makes an ideology of how to divide up that scarcity. You will find economics defined in terms of scarcity in every textbook on the subject, usually in the opening chapter. Without scarcity, some of them candidly admit, there would be no need for economics.

— John A. Waring, "Technocracy and Humanism", Section 3 Newsletter, Feb. 1985, No. 18 and Mar. 1985, No. 19.

However, in Marxist economics, scarcity is said to be peripheral. Human wants in practice are not assumed to be infinite, but variable and ultimately conditioned. Scarcity, instead, is secondary to the issue of differential distribution within a society due to class, primarily between a producing class (e.g. slaves, peasants, the proletariat) and a surplus-taking class (e.g. slave owners, lords, the bourgeoisie).