The foundation of modern economics is that resources are scarce. But what if that simply isn't true? In this video, I explore how the assumption of scarcity drives inequality, stress, and unsustainability – and what a post-scarcity economy could look like.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
What if economics is all based on a lie? The lie would be that scarcity exists. But what if it doesn't?
What if there is enough to go around in the world that we live in now?
What would economics look like if that were the case?
Because the fact is that if there isn't scarcity, almost everything that current economic theory says might be completely wrong.
Let's just look at how economics defines itself.
I've taken this quotation from Investopedia, which is one of the sort of common online dictionaries of economics, and it says that:
Economics is a social science that focuses on the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
The study of economics is primarily concerned with analysing the choices that individuals, businesses, governments, and nations make to allocate limited resources.
Note the critical word in there. It is 'limited'. The decisions that economics talks about have to be made because it is said that resources are limited. They are, in other words, scarce.
But that assumption may no longer be true in the world in which we live. What if most resources are not limited, in other words? And what if the idea of scarcity is an illusion or, worse, a manipulation? That's the idea that I want to explore here.
I think I can make some simple suggestions to you.
The first is that there is enough food to feed everyone in the world unless governments decide to deny it to people. We know that because 8 billion people are being fed on this planet every day, except in places where governments have decided to create food shortages.
We can also house people because, again, around the world, almost everybody is housed.
We can clothe people. We can educate them. And in a great many cases, we can provide everybody with healthcare, although not always adequate, but it could be if we wanted it to be.
And, perhaps most particularly important now is that there is enough renewable energy in the world for everyone to have access to it. In other words, we are capable of meeting everyone's needs if we want to and if we can create systems to ensure that they can have access to the resources they require for those needs to be met.
But why don't they, in that case, get all the things that they need?
Well, there are simple, straightforward answers to that. Basically, access is denied most, especially by markets.
Markets are rigged. Markets are rigged so that profit can be extracted on the basis of there being scarcity. In other words, markets manufacture scarcity.
They restrict supplies.
They increase prices.
They extract profits which are disproportionate to those which should be earned by those within them by denying access to companies who might reduce prices.
They will therefore deliberately create market situations where people are left without, and this isn't by chance. This is deliberate.
It's because some people want to be wealthy, leaving others in poverty, and it's because those who want to be wealthy realise that the easiest way to do so is not to be innovative; it is not to supply good products or services; it is simply about trying to restrict supply so that maximum profits can be made.
And the truth is that we can look at some markets where we can see that this is obviously the case.
For example, there is enough land for everyone in the UK to have somewhere decent to live, and if we chose to make them available, there would be enough builders in this country for that to happen. We might need to allow some in as migrants for a while, but when we tried to build half a million houses a year in the UK, we had the builders available, and we could, again.
What is more, the materials to allow houses to be built could be found. They may not exist at this moment, but if we really tried to make sure that everybody had a decent house in this country, the materials would be available, and innovation would make them sustainable.
But the fact is that, although I've just said, land is abundant, builders are available, and materials exist, we are not building anything like the right number of houses, because those who control the land are restricting our access to it. It's not available to keep land prices high.
And funding is not available because people are being priced out of housing by excessive interest rates and excessive demands for what are effectively rents on the existing supply of land by those who own it.
As a consequence, people are homeless, not because we couldn't house them, but because we've decided to prioritise house prices over the need for housing.
And now think about another market which is rigged in this way.
That's the one for medicine. We could eliminate the vast majority of diseases that kill in our world, 📍 but we don't. And the reason why is very simple, and that's because there is no profit for medical companies, pharmaceutical companies, in curing illness. They only want to manage illnesses; they don't want to cure them. And the reason why they want to manage illnesses is that giving somebody, for example, a statin to potentially control heart disease for half a person's lifetime is much more profitable than finding a cure for the heart disease in the first place.
They don't want cures.
They want people to remain ill because that's the way they make more money.
They manufacture scarcity for cures to maximise their profit from treatments to maintain conditions, and that, too, is deliberate.
Resources aren't scarce, but the economic system we have makes them scarce.
Now, imagine how economics would have to change if we decided that we were going to make resources available and scarcity was going to be abolished.
We would begin to have to address questions around the allocation of resources.
Right now, we deal with how we ration resources. The market is not an enabling tool. It is not a system for allocating resources. The price, mechanism, rations availability, and what we should be doing is looking at how we can make things available to everyone who needs them.
The answer should not be about how we manufacture scarcity, but how we create conditions where there is always going to be enough.
This is the big question that we need to ask, and we need to ask it within a specific context, and that, of course, is that we have to do this within the planetary constraints, which we now know exist.
So we are doing enough, in a sustainable way, and this isn't a mathematical problem. It isn't something that can be manipulated with a formula. This is a philosophical problem. It's about what the purpose of economics is. And I'm suggesting to you that the purpose of economics should be about ensuring everyone has a chance, and the existing economic model is not doing that.
The existing economic model assumes we always want more than we can have, and in the process, it encourages the idea that we must forever consume greater numbers of things, but that will inevitably mean that access is denied to some, while others, who have access to wealth, of course, consume more than they will ever need.
As a consequence, existing economics is built on the basis of creating and maintaining inequality, whilst all the time pretending that markets are efficient, when very clearly they aren't.
The alternative is to allow governments to match resources to need.
Now, I'm not saying that private companies won't have a role in this. I'm perfectly happy for them to do so. I'm perfectly happy for them to be manufacturing things so long as they're about meeting need.
But when it comes down to it, we have to ensure that access for the products that they make will be available to everyone because we cannot live in a world where some go without, and in the world we live in, far too many do.
So government has to use its powers.
Those of money creation, taxation, and regulation to effectively deliver well-being. And they have to define success in terms of sustainable lives lived well, and not GDP growth.
We have to make a change, and we can do so by dropping one assumption.
That assumption that the world is based upon scarcity, when in fact it isn't. We now need to redesign economics for fairness and sustainability. If we stop pretending that resources are scarce, we might just save the world for ourselves, for our children, and for generations to come. This is possible.
We could, in the process, deliver something which is the economic nirvana, its idea of heaven, and that is happiness.
It would be possible for everybody to have enough on this planet to be happy, to live without fear, to live without stress, to live without anxiety, the things that destroy our well-being, but we haven't chosen that option, and my suggestion to you is that we could.
So what do you think? Is it possible that we could re-engineer economics to live in a world where we assume that everybody could have enough, and that scarcity is in itself a choice, and that if we made the choice for sustainability, we might be happy?
What do you think? There's a poll down below. Let us know your thoughts.
Poll
Is econmic scarcity now a myth, and not a reality?
- Yes (49%, 125 Votes)
- If it isn't, we should make it so (37%, 95 Votes)
- No (9%, 22 Votes)
- I don't know (5%, 13 Votes)
Total Voters: 255
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Neoliberalism 101. Scarcity is often manufactured or contrived in order put up prices and increase profits.
25 reservoirs have been sold off by private water companies without being replaced since privatisation. The result is the highest water prices in Europe.
And we are aware of the 1973 oil crisis in which we blame Middle Eastern countries; except that it was planned by the Americans who profited greatly from the increase in prices.
Source
Clive Lewis: ‘Private Water Companies Have Sold 25 Reservoirs Without Replacing One’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16wMqJH5qrk
Source: How Big Oil Conquered the World (Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6r8nkxCKO4
Oil and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s: A Reanalysis
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/oil-and-the-energy-crisis-of-the-1970s-a-reanalysis
Thanks
And much to agree with
I’ve always felt that the scarcity issue – although applying to some natural resources – does not exist because too many believe in competition.
I think competition is wasteful myself. I think cooperation yields more and more fairly.
I think a clue is in how we treat natural resources which we take for granted. We exploit, exploit and exploit and only then – having made them scarce – do we put a value on them as if to reserve them for some who ‘deserves’ it or reward ourselves for finally realising what we’ve done.
It’s perverse.
The central question here surely remains planned economy versus free enterprise – or rather the optimal balance point between these competing strategies, each of which in themselves have strengths. Economic research used to indicate that planned economy models could be more statically efficient – but free enterprise more dynamically efficient: chaotic and wasteful production and marketing, although crazy now, facilitates the emergence of entirely new technologies that in the end out-perform planned efficiency.
These old debates were of course carried on in virtual ignorance of climate-ecological breakdown. It’s obvious that no market mechanism can address catastrophe decades, or centuries in the making. Probably green economics therefore implies more government intervention and planning – so the question then becomes how to pass power from private corporations to more environmentally and socially responsible structures, without also facilitating a potentially oppressive state apparatus.
Thanks, and useful, and relevant.
Nail on head time.
Geof,
Elinor Ostrom attempted to answer that question in her groundbreaking 1990 study “Governing the Commons” in which she identified the techniques & circumstances required for a commons-based grass roots community model to succeed where the mainstream “state” & “firm” models fail.
She showed that common-pool resources could be managed collectively without recourse to either corporate or government control and indeed that such autonomous management can work better than top-down control in many real-world situations.
Free download here: https://www.actu-environnement.com/media/pdf/ostrom_1990.pdf
Hi Matthew – I’ve spent much of my working life in the co-operative, community business and social enterprise movement, so have no doubts that people can, and indeed always have self-organised in these ways – within particular natural, cultural, political, etc environments. But there’s the rub: identifying the specific policy levers that will move a whole society in the right direction, without too much disruption, and moreover how to assemble an electoral coalition that might access these levers.
Agreed
Good morning.
Is the “other related material” relevant to this transcript and for the purposes of the ChatGPT, missing?
Thanks
Sorry – but I am not following
Um,…..
The idea of oil running out has been around for a long time
The current situation seems to be that while it won’t ‘run out ‘ we will reach or may have reached the point of peak production
There are also questions about the amount of copper and phosphate
The challenge is to meet human needs within the constraints imposed by our available resources and to provide the leadership needed to get the population in the developed world to support that
Some years ago I read a book about the collapse of the USSR it was written as a novel but it seems that without a ‘market’ there were major issues about misallocation of resources etc factories making products that ever Soviet consumers would not buy so that is a situation we need to avoid
But yes a lot to agree with
The real question is “what standard of living is compatible with planetary resource limitations?”
Here is an excellent scientific paper that attempts to answer that question, it is well worth reading:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378020307512#s0070
I hope Richard doesn’t mind me quoting the conclusion extensively, it is very relevant to the discussion in hand:
“What can be made from these results? First, we can reiterate what has been suggested by countless other authors: high-quality, low-energy housing, widespread public transport, and diets low in animal-based foods are globally important issues for sustainability ambitions. In other words, demand-side solutions are an essential part of staying within planetary boundaries (Creutzig et al., 2018). However, the perspective of the current work is a global, big-picture one, and it focuses exclusively on final energy consumption. The results are thus of limited use for guiding specific local and national actions to reduce ecological impacts effectively and holistically. Consequently, further work applying bottom-up modelling to specific local contexts – following Rao et al. (2019) – would be valuable. To suggest where consumption can be reduced most effectively, it would then be useful to take current energy consumption data and distinguish so far as is possible luxury, wasteful, and sufficiency based consumption (Gough, 2017, Shue, 1993) – disaggregating the latter to needs-based consumption categories, and considering trade-offs and synergies between dimensions of social and ecological sustainability.
What the current work does offer are answers to broader questions. To avoid catastrophic ecological collapse, it is clear that drastic and challenging societal transformations must occur at all levels, from the individual to institutional, and from supply through to demand. From an energy-use perspective, the current work suggests that meeting these challenges does not, in theory, preclude extending decent living standards, universally, to a population of ~10 billion. Decent living is of course a subjective concept in public discourse. However, the current work offers a response to the clichéd populist objection that environmentalists are proposing that we return to living in caves. With tongue firmly in cheek, the response roughly goes ‘Yes, perhaps, but these caves have highly-efficient facilities for cooking, storing food and washing clothes; low-energy lighting throughout; 50 L of clean water supplied per day per person, with 15 L heated to a comfortable bathing temperature; they maintain an air temperature of around 20 °C throughout the year, irrespective of geography; have a computer with access to global ICT networks; are linked to extensive transport networks providing ~5000–15,000 km of mobility per person each year via various modes; and are also served by substantially larger caves where universal healthcare is available and others that provide education for everyone between 5 and 19 years old.’ And at the same time, it is possible that the amount of people’s lives that must be spent working would be substantially reduced.”
References:
Creutzig et al., 2018: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0121-1
Rao et al., 2019: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-019-0497-9
Gough, 2017: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rsta.2016.0379
Shue, 1993: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9930.1993.tb00093.x
🙂
A friend calculated that each runner bean in a supermarket packet was priced at 14p. Meanwhile, I am collecting runner beans by the bucket load and cannot give enough away.
Scarcity needs to be created. Didn’t the Dutch destroy every clove tree in 1652, except on the islands that they controlled?
Did they?
Wow…
What a story
Here is a link to the actions of the Dutch East India Company which set about creating a monopoly over the trade of clove.
https://thetreeographer.com/2017/09/08/the-clove-tree-that-ended-a-monopoly/
‘One of the policies enacted by the Dutch in 1652 was extirpation: the elimination of any clove trees not owned by the company. As they set about uprooting thousands of trees, one tree managed to avoid detection.’
Thanks – fascinating – and supprting many of my assumptions in the wealth series.
Since I had a heart attack seventeen years ago, I’m on medication, including statins, for the rest of my life. I have been told by my G.P that I must continue to use these drugs in order to help me survive. It seems I don’t have a choice, although I must be contributing to big pharma profits.
Do some research on statins, I suggest.
That’s all I can say. There are a lot of questions about them and their side effects.
Alex,
Please consult your GP and raise your concerns directly with them before discontinuing any medication. I’m sure they will be able to persuade you of the validity of their prescription choice and also reassure you that their choice was not affected by financial considerations beyond those applied externally by bodies such as NICE.
I agree with Richard’s suggestion to research statins but I would emphasise seeking out academic studies rather than clickbait news articles.
Here is a recent, very large meta-study (which combines the findings of many studies) that confirms the efficacy of statins for your condition:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1884492/
I would also note that statins aren’t very profitable for the pharmaceutical companies and you can even buy margarine with added statins, albeit at very low levels.
I admire your confidence in GPs. The vast majority do what the algorithm tells them. They do not read. They do not think. This is exactly why 90% of them could be replaced by AI, and will be. And do statins work? The odds are heavily stacked against them in most cases.
See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9048231/
Statins try to reduce cholesterol. This is very obviously a weird thing to do. 92% of cholesterol is produced in the liver and is essential to brain functioning. That’s why we make it. We need it. Only 8% is open to control then. As the paper notes, it seems to have very little link to heart disease except in diabetics. The cholesterol story is another medical false narrative, but very few GPs will know that. I live with someone who reads the literature, extensively.
Yes, Matthew, you are quite right to flag that warning. I did discuss this with my GP who I trust because he does keep up to date with current thinking, and does listen to patient concerns, and it was agreed that we would reduce the dose to the minimum possible and to monitor statins on a regular basis. Statins were prescribed by the heart surgeon after a heart attack and, as the book suggests, surgeons always prescribe the highest possible dose. So far so good, and I have recovered from a concerning side effect, whilst statin count has remained low.
[Replying to myself because I can’t reply to Richard directly]
The link posted by our gracious host says that statins do not appear to offer any benefit in respect of cardiovascular risk reduction for elderly patients who are healthy, which is not the case for Alex because he has already suffered a heart attack. My linked meta-study involves a much bigger sample size and confirms statin efficacy for Alex’s situation.
Furthermore, statins do not “try to reduce cholesterol” — they change the balance between the high and low density lipoproteins that constitute what is commonly called “cholesterol” to the patient’s benefit. A high proportion of HDLs in the blood in correlated with an increased level of atherosclerotic formation and other cardiovascular health problems; increasing the relative levels of LDLs improves this picture significantly.
The current thinking on this issue, and ways to manage it is much more advanced than you suggest, is my summary, but I am going to leave it there.
I very much doubt I could be persuaded to take a statin.
I agree with Matthew here. Richard is right not to take a statin if he is fit and well, which he clesarly is, and eating and exercising healthily, but anyone who has demonstrated atherosclerosis by way of for example, a heart attack, is well advised to follow medical prescription. Not just to try to prevent further incidents but because they may be at enhanced risk of a stroke. The latter I do not want, albeit I have agreed with my GP a monitored reduction in dose. A friend in Los Angeles was amazed that I am not now on a regime of annual angiograms, and I pointed out that this is the NHS not US medical insurance.
Sorry, Richard, but I think we are at odds again.
I asked my medical adviser about this.
She thinks any GP would take a risk not prescribing a statin to a person who has had a heart attack. But that’s because of the legal risk.
The real risis are dementia, kidney disease and type 2 diabetes with little sign of efficacy except in cases where a person has disbetes (see earlier noted paper).
At best, statins gave an advantage in 5% of cases where they might be appropriate.
I know where I think the risk is.
Try this
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EFGiyXCuAcU
It’s very breif, but this is where the science now is.
And this
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TLHuLdxkTyM
Richard,
Your middle class idea of sharing everything with poor people is fantastic. It really is, especially with your MMT expertise to provide some intellectual reality to this dream. I admire it but it is not taking all things into account.
For example, the energy cost of energy. To use your popular blog to advance some other ideas that need to be considered I will share these links if you don’t mind:
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
As both these authors point out, money is only a future claim on physically produced things. You can do all the financial engineering you like but if there is no more easily available energy it won’t make a bit of difference.
We are at the at point in history now. I urge your readers to become literate in the important discipline of energy economics.
Your ideas of abundance are not feasible for our civilisation in the future. For all the reasons these authors explain.
Yoruy comment assumes this is right:
“One instance of the latter constraint is the unfolding failure of renewables as full-value equivalents for oil, natural gas and coal. Wind and solar power have lesser energy densities than fossil fuels. These inferior characteristics result in the need for a proportionately larger delivery infrastructure. This infrastructure, being material, cannot be created, operated, maintained or replaced without the use of correspondingly large amounts of energy.”
I think that is fancifully stated to suit a hypothesis, rather than being a statement of fact.
But you also totally fail to get my point that there is no scarcity with regard to need. I did not say so with regard to artificially manufactured wants.
So, now try again on a realistic basis, I suggest.
Your idea of “artificially manufactured wants” is interesting. Some people might own 3 jumpers, others might own 6, which is maybe 3 too many in your book. But most people do not think like you and there is no amount of persuasion that will force them to do so.
If people can be persuaded to want too much, why can’t they persuaded to want less? Please explain.
Scarcity is a lie….. IF we could all “play nicely”. But even if the vast majority do and wish to it only needs a small group to “spoil it for the rest of us”.
There IS scarcity…. but only because this group has infinite appetite.
Political Economy is all how we handle this “scarcity”….. so, sadly, economics IS about scarcity.
I would disagree.
Economics is about manufactured scarcity, which is very different.
That was my point.
So, you are tying this in with the ‘virtue signalling’ that is prevalent in our society – the ‘virtue’ being wealth and Independence, the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ and the myths that have been created around those, when really Jesus & Mohammed basically answered the questions about true virtues a long time ago and has since been usurped by ‘greed is good’ etc.
If so, I happen to agree – modern economics allocates exclusivity – that’s what it does and the best way I can think of expressing it at the moment.
Agreed
The key to manufactured scarcity is, I suggest, property rights. Progressively, the commons are eroded, enclosed, captured by elites, who then restrict access and charge for it in some way. Something that’s been going on for centuries (ref. Guy Standing, re England, f.ex.). Specific resources may well be exhaustible, but as you indicated, globally there’s essentially enough for our needs; so the issue is that goods are excludable. That is enforced by “law and order.”
But why do so many – at least in ‘advanced’ western economies – demand so much more than they need? You already discussed this in a previous post about the wealthy and their ‘positional goods’.
The majority of people seem to be driven by the same mindset but at lower levels of wealth and income. Do we therefore need some sort of Anti-Bernays, to promote a ‘change of mind’? (Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, sometimes called the father of spin, who developed the techniques of propaganda and marketing for consumer goods, the lifeblood of growth-oriented capitalism, who wrote: “Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.” He seems to have had the view that ‘the masses’ operate on feelings and need to be led, by elites, those who know better – who’ll get rich thereby.) But is it right; and could it even be effective; to use similar methods of persuasion, for good ends? Or can polite, rational argument be enough?
Why can’t we argue for what is good?
That is my question, in a nutshell.
Too early for polls, and I voted incorrectly! I’m sure it won’t skew your poll that much though.
I sit firmly in the camp that can be summed up by your sentence, “Markets are rigged so that profit can be extracted on the basis of there being scarcity.” We’re in a turbo-charged rentier-capitalism phase, which is now proceeding so quickly and openly that it has the potential to bring about widespread disaffection and disruption from people. I think it also sits with the ever increasing populism movement we’re seeing in numerous countries since it’s probably the only way to continue with trickle up economics.
The second chapter of Mankiw’s standard textbook on economics is “Choice in a World of Scarcity”. I didn’t read any further.
There’s a very good book on statins by Malcolm Kendrick “Statin Nation: Damaging Millions in a Brave New Post-health World”.
Thanks
Murray Bookchin published a collection of essays in 1971, Post-Scarcity Anarchism. From the outset he dismissed the idea of scarcity even in that era. Describing a world where technological abundance allows for a radically democratic and ecological society. Post-Scarcity Anarchism was both a critique of the existing system and a visionary proposal for a new social order based on freedom, sustainability, and mutual aid.
He didn’t really have a creditable alternative to the capitalist state but many of his other key ideas mentioned above are worth exploring and even more relevant today.
Perhaps economist have fallen into the same trap as many non-economists, that of conflating money with real resources.
This would make sense because, for most of the time economics was developing, economics operated assuming a gold standard. With currencies linked to gold then, yes, there was always going to be a shortage of gold, and hence a shortage of money. And if you equate money to real resources then you will believe that you live in a world of limited resources.
All of that changed some decades ago when countries adopted fiat currencies. With that change there was no longer a shortage of money, which could now be created at will. Most governments have continued to believe the (neo-liberal) myth that there is still a shortage of money. And that has caused many of the problems we have today. Nevertheless there does not now need to be a shortage of money.
Of course we can’t just print money and all become rich. The economy has to be managed, to avoid inflation amongst other things. But the problems are different to a gold standard, money constrained economy.
We DO have enough of many real resources, and we could create more of those resources we are short of (e.g. energy). So, yes, in many ways we do not live in either a financially constrained or real resource constrained world. Which does mean, yes, that much of conventional economics is wrong. It needs to be rethought to manage the different problems we now have.
Thinks
No my friend, we definitely cannot create energy.
We can generate it.
I am not sure being pedantic, or patronising helps. Please don’t do either to fellow commentators.
We can generate vast quantities of energy should we wish. To say we can’t create energy is merely pedantic. I’m not suggesting we break the law of conservation of energy with a perpetual motion machine.
For example, about 20 million households in UK live in houses (i.e. not flats and apartments). If each house had 4kW solar panels they would generate (peak) 80 gigawatts. The total UK generating capacity was 74.8 GW in 2023 (latest figure I can find). So 80GW is an awful lot of generating capacity. That does not include solar on commercial buildings (lots more capacity). It does not include wind generation, lots more capacity.
We can generate much more energy if we wish.
Agreed
I’ve been contemplating the idea of a blockchain type software to facilitate resource sharing where entities could signal a need for a particular resource and entities with that resource could commit to provide it. Similarly entities could commit transport equipment or manpower to get goods from point A to B. I’m imagining the software could enable grassroots groups to pool resources and create trade networks that aren’t under the influence of major shipping companies.
Even if not practical for use at the moment, a software along these lines might help us consider where there is need for a particular resource, where that resource might be produced, and where and when that resource needs to travel. These dynamics are things we need to start to understand in order to try to meet everyone’s needs.
I love the idea of committing a couple bushels of carrots from the garden which a neighbor picks up along with their contribution and drops off with a semi truck driver who committed to pick up several loads and drive them to the dock yard where Frank and his barge will take the whole load down river etc etc.
But, how would that actually work?
Listening to this and other recent videos and blogs I wondered if you’d thought of resurrecting L.T. Hobhouse’s distinction between ‘property for use’ and ‘property for power’. J.A. Hobson used the terms property and ‘improperty’ for basically the same distinction. Tawney also referred to ‘property without function’. It seems to me they are powerful ways of getting a fundamental but much overlooked point across that might gain traction.
I like.
I will reflect on that.
This thread came to mind while I was watching this video today. Probably a bit late to attract any attention. Ow but I think it explains quite well what I was trying to get at in my earlier comment.
Not many people seem to be aware of this problem. There IS scarcity of the most important thing of all. That is energy. This video points to one manifestation of the problem.
https://youtu.be/hpNKZV3GfBY?si=_IFY5dfEpmHOwEVR