{"id":3079,"date":"2026-06-07T18:22:02","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T02:22:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/?p=3079"},"modified":"2026-06-07T18:22:02","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T02:22:02","slug":"three-cheers-for-scarcity-the-engine-of-cooperation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/post\/3079","title":{"rendered":"Three cheers for scarcity, the engine of cooperation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Something strange has been going on, which Marxist theorists and supply-side economists championing abundance. The former says something along the lines that capitalism is about artificial scarcity that artificially limits our imagination for potential worlds in which everyone has enough. It’s emerged as one of the tech-forward leftist rhetorics. The latter has been grounded out in California’ housing crisis, with the argument that the solution to the housing crisis is to do everything to let more houses get built, where everything means a stripping of regulations for the environment, safety, and so on. It’s led to strange things, like anarchists using capitalist-coding to pass as mainstream, and capitalists using anarchist-coding to appeal to the youths. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s all been a puzzle to me. I’ve been arguing for scarcity for years. It’s the impetus to share, which is the impetus to learn to share. Sharing is a skill that Americans have forgotten, and I blame that atrophy with many of the problems of our democracy today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For my favorite example, ranchers used to have to share the West. This led to innovative common property regimes, as ranchers and cowboys shared the country and managed it together to recover their herds and build a living together. That all went away when the invention of barbed wire made it cheap to enclose large plots, making it so no one has to share. In fact, if you take a look, you’ll see that most applications of technology are toward making things smaller, cheaper, and more easily privately ownable. I think this is why Americans have forgotten how to share, and why our democracy is under threat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When there’s not enough to go around, we have to talk, negotiate, and build a relationship. It makes us have to relate. On the other hand, when we don’t have to share, we lose our tethers to society and become unrelatable. For me, the ultimate test of abundance is the behavior of our billionaires. They’re smart people, but they invariably get isolated and diverge from the rest of humanity in what they need. They stop being relatable, and with inordinate power to have what they want, without regard for what anyone else wants, they gain inordinate power to take the world away from everyone else. Without scarcity we don’t need enough other, and without needing each other we lose each other, and betray our social roots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So enough abundance. For humanity, I wish scarcity and the tools for negotiating it gracefully together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Something strange has been going on, which Marxist theorists and supply-side economists championing abundance. The former says something along the lines that capitalism is about artificial scarcity that artificially limits our imagination for potential worlds in which everyone has enough. It’s emerged as one of the tech-forward leftist rhetorics. The latter has been grounded out … Continue reading Three cheers for scarcity, the engine of cooperation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3080,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpupg_custom_link":[],"wpupg_custom_link_behaviour":[],"wpupg_custom_image":[],"wpupg_custom_image_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3081,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079\/revisions\/3081"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}