Imagine a world without scarcity

My boys were fighting this morning over some pizza that Phillip had put in the freezer. Peter wanted some and Phillip wouldn’t share. The pizza was imaginary pizza and the freezer was also imaginary. They were not even using toys to represent the things in their imaginary world. So I offered to give Peter some fresh hot pizza – as many as he wanted. This made Phillip’s precious pizza that he had been hoarding instantly worthless. It was cold. Peter decided to be nice and brought over his 30 pizzas to share with Phillip. He did not mind sharing since he had an unlimited supply.

In economics 101 we learn that scarcity is what gives things their value, but scarcity itself is becoming rather scarce. Our family does not value furniture nearly as much as my parents did, because people leave good furniture on the side of the road for free, or offer it free online. There is very little left in the world that is truly scarce. Except for scarcity of time, much of the scarcity left in the world is artificially created.

For example copyrights turn worthless noise and regurgitated information into something people are actually willing to pay for. This stuff has no real value, but since you can be put in jail for reading, listening to, or possessing copies without a license they are perceived as valuable. In reality it is the license that is valuable and it is only valuable because it is artificially made scarce by laws that were created back in a time of true scarcity and are now quite outdated.

Food is scarce in some parts of the world, but that is usually because of government (or gang if that is not redundant) action or lack of transportation. We could easily grow enough food to feed everyone in the world if governments did not get in the way, and if we had a way to transport it “the last mile”. I am not sure there is much we can do about governments, but if we took just the money we spend on movies and music we could build the infrastructure needed to distribute food and other necessities to all the places that are currently very hard to get to.

That same infrastructure could deliver tools for production in those places and move the finished products to and from other markets. This would make it possible for most of the nations and people to participate in a world without scarcity.