The Myth of Scarcity

Chapter 6 of the Ten Myths of Progress

In celebration of getting over the hump, publishing this, my sixth chapter of my upcoming book, The Ten Myths of Progress, along with my birthday this week, I’m making this chapter open to all with no paywall.

A World of Supposed Lack

I grew up in a house where “things are tight” was less a phrase than a quiet law of nature. My mother’s childhood had been shaped by the long shadow of the Great Depression, even though she was born after it ended. Her parents had lived through the worst of it. I recall tales of the ration books, patched clothes, neighbors losing farms to the bank and that survival mindset that became part of the family inheritance, passed down alongside family stories and handed-down furniture.

By the time it reached me, the Depression was a history lesson in school, but its psychology was still alive in many ways. It was there when my parents would steer us away from the toy aisle with the simple explanation, “We can’t right now.” It was there in the baloney sandwiches on white bread, or the peeling laminate flooring in the kitchen. Or the dwindling number of available cutlery in the kitchen drawer.

It was there in the way we drove from Illinois to Utah to visit family… three days in a packed minivan because flying was too expensive. It was there in the constant, quiet comparisons I made at school: other kids with bright new sneakers while mine carried scuffs or labels from Pay-Less; friends and classmates with the latest video game consoles, toys, or a swimming pool in their backyard.

Scarcity became more of a worldview. It whispered that there was never enough to go around, that wanting more was dangerous, and that one misstep such as an illness, a broken car, or a lost job could tip the balance from getting by to going under. It trained me to measure worth in terms of endurance, to accept limitation as natural.

Only later did I realize that this low-grade anxiety about “not enough” wasn’t just a family trait… it was part of a much wider story, one that our entire economic system depends on us believing.

Defining the Myth

Industrial civilization and, in its current form, neoliberal capitalism, rest on a foundational assumption: there is never enough to go around.² This assumption is so deeply embedded that we rarely even notice it. It’s taught in economics classes as if it were a law of nature: resources are finite, human wants are infinite, and therefore competition is inevitable.

From that “truth” flows the entire architecture of the modern economy. Prices are justified as the “most efficient” way to allocate scarce goods. Markets are framed as the natural arena where the strongest competitors earn their place. Accumulation is reframed as prudence, hoarding as security, and inequality as the inevitable outcome of a fair contest. If you have more than others, you must have earned it; if you have less, you must not have competed hard enough.

But much of this scarcity is not a brute fact of nature… it is engineered. The world’s dominant economic systems excel not only at producing goods but at producing deprivation. Water that flows freely is dammed and sold back to us. Seeds that once passed from farmer to farmer are patented and locked behind licensing fees. Housing sits empty while people sleep on the streets. In truth, there is often plenty, but access is fenced off by privatization, enclosure, and deliberate withholding.

Scarcity, in this sense, is less about the Earth’s limits (which I fully acknowledge) and more about the boundaries drawn by those who control resources. It is a story told to make the unnatural appear inevitable, to make competition appear moral, and to make solidarity appear naïve. And as long as we believe it, we will measure our lives not by what we share, but by what we can protect from being taken.

Historical Roots – Enclosure, Extraction, and Empire

The fear of “not enough” is not new. It is in fact as old as and crucial to the creation of civilization itself. Long before stock markets and quarterly earnings reports, the first agricultural surpluses marked a turning point in human societies. For most of our species’ history, food was gathered, hunted, grown, and shared in cycles of reciprocity. Abundance was seasonal and communal. You couldn’t hoard the salmon run or the ripening berries; you could only take your share and trust that the cycle would return.

Agriculture changed that. Suddenly, grain could be stored for years. Surplus created security, but it also created something new: something to steal. The same fields that promised stability also required defending from drought, from pests, and, crucially, from other humans. Protecting the surplus became a priority, and with it came fortifications, organized militias, and the beginnings of class divisions between those who stored the grain and those who labored to grow it. This was the seedbed of both militarization and patriarchy… systems designed to control not just resources, but the people tied to them.

Once surplus could be claimed, it could also be monopolized. Early rulers consolidated grain in central storehouses, doling it out as a tool of loyalty and obedience. Those who controlled the surplus controlled survival. Over centuries, this dynamic scaled up into empires. Armies didn’t just defend the storehouse; they expanded it, seizing land, enslaving populations, and extracting wealth from the peripheries to feed the imperial center. The “commons” of earlier societies, such as forests, rivers, pastures were enclosed, turned into private property, and policed with violence.

The enclosures of medieval Europe were one such watershed.¹ Land that had been worked collectively for generations was fenced off by law and force, pushing peasants into dependence on wage labor. Subsistence was criminalized; survival outside the market became almost impossible. This pattern of transforming abundance into scarcity through enclosure and extraction was then exported through colonialism. Colonized lands, often self-sufficient before conquest, were forced into monocultures designed for export, their economies and ecologies reorganized to serve distant markets. Debt, taxation, and militarized coercion made sure that the flow of wealth and resources moved upward and outward, away from the people who produced them.

That is still the primary mode of global control of resources today. It may have become more invisible, but it is as effective and horrendously unjust as ever before.

Civilization’s central myth that scarcity is the natural state of the world was built atop this history of manufactured deprivation.

The truth is starker: from its earliest days, civilization has not merely responded to scarcity; it created it.

Why? To consolidate power. What began as stored grain behind guarded walls has evolved into a global system where vast abundance exists—but access to it is locked behind gates, patents, and profit margins.

The Reality of Abundance

The story we are told is that scarcity is inevitable. Competition is the only way to allocate what little there is. But step outside the logic of markets for a moment, and the evidence tells a different story: abundance is not the exception; it is the rule.

Ecologically, the Earth is wildly generous. A single apple tree can produce hundreds of pounds of fruit in a season. A healthy wetland can yield fish, reeds, wild rice, and clean water without exhausting itself. Indigenous agricultural systems like the “Three Sisters” polyculture of corn, beans, and squash nourish both land and people in perpetuity, producing more total calories per acre than monocultures while enriching soil rather than depleting it.³ Even the UN’s own data confirms that small-scale, diversified farms often produce more food per acre than industrial agriculture, while requiring fewer fossil-fuel inputs.⁵

The problem is not that we cannot grow enough. It’s that we grow far more than we need. The truth is we waste it, destroy it, or make it inaccessible. Globally, an estimated one-third of all food produced is lost or wasted every year.⁴ That’s over 1.3 billion tons of food as trash while hundreds of millions go hungry.

In wealthy nations, edible crops are plowed under because prices are “too low,” milk is dumped to protect dairy profits, and supermarket shelves are curated to perfection, with imperfect but perfectly edible produce discarded.

Abundance is equally real in human cultures. Mutual aid networks, gift economies, and commons-based stewardship have sustained communities for millennia. Among many Indigenous nations, wealth was measured not by how much one kept, but by how much one gave away. In parts of the Pacific Northwest, the potlatch ceremony redistributed resources across communities, strengthening relationships and resilience. Anthropologists have documented dozens of societies where reciprocity was the organizing principle, not competition. “Scarcity” was not a central feature of life.

Even today, we see flashes of this truth. After disasters, when systems fail, people often don’t descend into chaos… they organize.⁷ Neighbors share food, shelter strangers, and form cooperative networks. These moments reveal that abundance is not just a material fact, but a social one: it lives in the relationships we choose to build.

The reality is this: the Earth can support human life in abundance, but only if we organize our lives around care, regeneration, and real limits… not profit and control. Scarcity is not the inevitable condition of human life; it is the result of choices, systems, and structures that keep abundance fenced in.

Scarcity as a Tool of Control

Scarcity, in its chronic, grinding form, is a political project. It is a strategy of rule.

Those who live in precarity rarely have the time, energy, or freedom to challenge the systems that keep them there. When rent swallows half your income, when medical bills arrive in five-digit envelopes, when your next meal depends on tomorrow’s shift, your horizon of action narrows to the urgent and the immediate. Organizing for systemic change becomes a luxury you can’t afford. You’re too busy hustling, competing, surviving.

Neoliberalism refines this dynamic into an art form. Public housing is defunded and replaced with “market solutions,” guaranteeing higher rents and more debt. Healthcare is privatized, so that even a routine procedure can send you into bankruptcy. Universities raise tuition while promising that a degree is your only ticket out of low-wage work… then funnel graduates into decades of loan repayment. Food deserts and water shutoffs become normalized in poor neighborhoods, while high-end groceries and bottled water line the shelves for those who can pay.

This is not accidental. In an economy that measures success by profit, keeping people just shy of stability is profitable. Precarity makes for pliable workers, compliant tenants, and obedient citizens. When survival itself is mediated by the market, dissent carries an immediate personal risk: you could lose your job, your home, your access to healthcare.

Scarcity also fractures solidarity. When resources are perceived as limited, people are more likely to see neighbors as competitors rather than allies. Workers fight over hours instead of organizing for higher wages. Communities divided along racial, ethnic, or national lines are more easily manipulated into scapegoating each other instead of confronting the structures that constrain them. Politicians and media outlets exploit this by stoking fear: they are taking your jobs, your benefits, your future.

The result is a society where abundance exists, but only for those positioned to extract it from everyone else. Artificial scarcity generates the profits, no question. But it also reinforces hierarchies. It keeps power in the hands of the few by ensuring that the many remain too insecure to imagine, much less build, a different world.

Anticipated Objections

Whenever the myth of scarcity is challenged, the same objections rise to the surface. They are reflexive, familiar, and, on the surface, reasonable.

1. “But we really are running out of resources.”
Yes and no. There are real ecological limits. Fish populations collapse when overharvested. Forests die when clear-cut. Aquifers run dry when drained faster than they replenish. These are limits rooted in biology, chemistry, and physics… not in market dynamics. But when the conversation stops here, it hides a crucial truth: most resource crises are not the result of absolute physical shortage but of reckless extraction for profit. The ocean isn’t dying because humans “need” the last tuna; it’s dying because industrial fleets vacuum up more than ecosystems can regenerate, while millions of tons of edible bycatch are discarded. When resources are organized around regeneration and need, not profit, they can be stewarded indefinitely.

2. “People are greedy, scarcity is real.”
Greed exists, but it is not the universal or immutable driver of human behavior that market ideology claims. Across cultures and history, cooperation, reciprocity, and mutual care have been just as prominent and often more so in sustaining communities. Greed flourishes in systems that reward it and punish generosity. In competitive markets, hoarding and exploitation are rational strategies; in gift economies and commons-based systems, they are antisocial behaviors that invite sanction or exclusion. Human nature is not fixed; it is shaped by the systems in which we live.

3. “Without markets, how do we allocate fairly?”
The assumption here is that markets are fair in the first place… which is demonstrably untrue. Markets distribute based on purchasing power, not need. A mansion with ten bathrooms will have more water piped to it than an apartment where a family shares one sink. Luxury apartments sit empty while people sleep under bridges. “Efficient allocation” under market logic means goods go to those who can pay, not to those who need them most.

Other allocation systems have existed (and still exist) without market exchange as the central organizing principle.⁶ The commons, mutual aid, community resource banks, Indigenous stewardship councils… these are not relics of a primitive past; they are living examples of collective decision-making that can prioritize equity, ecological health, and shared wellbeing.

In short: ecological limits are real, but scarcity as we live it is overwhelmingly manufactured. It is the result of economic rules, property regimes, and political choices, not some inescapable law of nature or human nature. And because it is manufactured, it can be dismantled.

Closing Reflection – A Different Kind of Wealth

When I think back on the richest moments of my life, they don’t involve anything I could have bought in a store. They weren’t measured in money, or in the status of what I wore, or in the sophistication of the food on my plate. They were measured in connection, in place, in the feeling of being part of something alive.

I remember wearing moccasins and helping to build a wigwam, learning how poles and bark fit together to make shelter. I remember fishing in a slow river until the sun began to sink, or swimming in the still water of a lake where the air smelled of pine. I remember the hiss and pop of a Dutch oven over coals, the savory steam of stew rising into the evening air, and the golden sweetness of peach cobbler spooned into tin bowls while laughter moved through the camp like wind in the trees.

We didn’t have fancy shoes or video game consoles. There were no swimming pools, no hotels, no plated entrées under silver lids. And yet, we didn’t lack anything. The absence of those things wasn’t deprivation… it was freedom from distraction. What we had was enough because what we valued couldn’t be fenced, bought, or hoarded.

These moments taught me that wealth is not the accumulation of things, but the depth of our relationships to each other, to the land, to the skills and traditions that sustain us. It is in the shared meal, the shared work, the shared fire. The myth of scarcity wants us to believe that without money, without consumption, we are empty. But the truth is that a life rooted in reciprocity and belonging is not poor at all. It is the kind of wealth that no market can price and no gate can keep.

Chapter Notes

¹ Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).

² David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

³ Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).

⁴ United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “Global Food Losses and Food Waste – Extent, Causes and Prevention” (Rome: FAO, 2011).

⁵ M. Altieri, Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2018).

⁶ Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

⁷ Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Viking, 2009).