Scarcity Is about More Than the Market

From Robert Bellafiore on The Public Discourse.com (July 10, 2023):

Behind the dry equations and supply and demand curves of modern economics lies an entire anthropology. Humans, it posits, are fundamentally acquisitive beings, seeking to satisfy infinite wants in a finite world, directing our limited resources toward the satisfaction of unlimited demands. As economist Lionel Robbins put it, “We have been turned out of Paradise. . . . Everywhere we turn, if we choose one thing we must relinquish others. Scarcity of means to satisfy given ends is an almost ubiquitous condition of human behavior.”

But however intuitive this view feels today—it really does seem correct when I have to decide whether my paycheck will go toward attending a concert, or seeing a movie, or buying a new economics book—it’s far from the only way to conceive of humans and their environment. Modern economists’ conception of scarcity has such a monopoly on our imagination, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind argue in Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis, only because we’ve forgotten the many competing approaches out there. By revealing alternative ways of thinking about scarcity, abundance, and growth over the last 500 years, Jonsson and Wennerlind—intellectual historians at the University of Chicago and Barnard College, Columbia University—hope to show how “scarcity itself can and should be liberated from its connotations in modern economics.”

carcity offers a crash course on the many musings that philosophers, artists, theologians, and economists have had on the topic. And despite their hostility to modern economics, Jonsson and Wennerlind reveal one deep similarity between it and rival accounts: in every case, the seemingly mundane topic of scarcity raises some of the most foundational questions one can ask. Jonsson and Wennerlind’s historical investigations helpfully illustrate how tawdry matters of getting and spending have always been underlaid by questions about man, nature, technology, and their relations.

Unlimited Desire vs. Limited Nature

Jonsson and Wennerlind identify two broad schools of thought that have taken shape across the centuries. The Cornucopian ideology calls for “an active mastery of nature together with a dynamic and expansive notion of desire.” It optimistically envisions people’s ability to reap the bounties of nature so that it can provide for our many, indeed insatiable, wants, and it sees the expansion of knowledge and technology as the surest way to do so. Such figures as philosophers Francis Bacon and David Hume and economists Adam Smith and Paul Samuelson celebrated people’s ability to push back the boundaries of ignorance and poverty and advance learning and commerce for, as Bacon put it, “the relief of man’s estate.” For them, science enables us to uncover nature’s secrets, while technology and trade allow us to put those secrets to good use, raising our standard of living and continually improving our lot.

In the other corner is the Finitarian ideology, which emphasizes “the limits to human power over nature and the need for constraint and moderation of human desires.” The Finitarians generally see nature as altogether more mysterious, but also more fragile, than the Cornucopians do—a subject more fitting for stewardship than for domination. Because nature’s resources can be depleted or disturbed, society must learn to curb its wants, aim for “good enough” rather than “always more,” and thereby strike a stable balance between means and ends. From the Romantic meditations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Ruskin, through the bleak visions of David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, and culminating in the warnings of modern environmentalists such as E. F. Schumacher, Finitarians tend to be a more dour bunch, exhorting us to keep our demands in check, and cautioning against the hope that new technologies will solve perennial problems.

Are these groupings simply another way of listing capitalism’s champions and critics? Not quite; for Jonsson and Wennerlind, scarcity forces us to think through questions far more expansive than simply whether free markets are good or bad—for example, whether man is a part of, or above, nature, and how the deployment of technology transforms both. Theologians such as Thomas More and François Fénelon and novelists such as Daniel Defoe and Joris-Karl Huysmans had weightier questions on the mind than how exactly government should or shouldn’t regulate economy. Scarcity’s exposition of such a wide array of thinkers compellingly conveys the range of thought given to matters that are today cordoned off in the economists’ province (although the summaries are sometimes given too summarily—can one really learn anything about Martin Heidegger in two pages?).

Scarcity also reveals many surprising ironies and affinities that a mere debate over capitalism would obscure, such as the tension between thinkers’ premises and their predictions. The Cornucopians might celebrate the ability to achieve our many desires, but only because they start from bleak convictions about how, in our postlapsarian state, we can never be satisfied. For them, one choice always forecloses another—just look at the glee with which economists will ruin a good meal with the reminder that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The pessimistic Finitarians, in contrast, while somberly calling attention to our, and nature’s, limitations, just as often find themselves daydreaming, as do Karl Marx and Charles Fourier, of the frabjous day when we will attain all we need, and want no more than that. [read more]