Scarcity

Scarcity as an all-pervasive fact of our lives is dominant in academic and policy thinking. Indeed, climate change poses new challenges to resource availability for human survival. Water wars, famine, and oil threats regularly appear as news stories. Resource scarcity is linked with population growth and growing environmental conflicts, and science and technology or innovation is usually evoked as the appropriate “solution.” But what is scarcity? Why has blame been attributed to it for many of humankind's woes, for centuries? The scarcity postulate (i.e., that human wants are unlimited and the means to achieve these are scarce and limited) underpins modern economics. This entry discusses the legacy of the scarcity postulate and demonstrates how understandings of scarcity have largely been naturalized and universalized in a range of academic disciplines and dominant policy debates, having profound implications for society/nature relations and the governance of markets, technology, and institutions. This entry also explores some alternative ways to conceptualize scarcity, which take into account often neglected cultural, historical, institutional, sociopolitical, and distributional issues that offer more just ways to look at resource allocation.

Why is scarcity usually associated with economics? Many economists see scarcity as essential to the definition of economics. For example, Lionel Robbins's famous and all-encompassing definition of economics is still used to define the discipline today. He wrote in 1932 that “economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between given ends and scarce means which have alternative uses” (1932, 16). A quick glance at any economics textbook makes it evident that economics is still defined as the science that studies scarcity.

Authors such as Nicholas Xenos and Hans Achterhuis have played a key role in demonstrating that scarcity is a child of modernity and that prior to the seventeenth century, it was not viewed as a ubiquitous feature of the human condition. For example, Xenos, in the work Scarcity and Modernity, shows how certain attributes of modernity have given rise to the universal notion of scarcity and that several paradigms propounded by neoclassical economics make scarcity out to be a ubiquitous and permanent feature of the human condition. The etymological roots [Page 1247]of the word scarcity go back to the Old Northern French word escarsete, which meant insufficiency of supply. Until the late-nineteenth century, scarcity connoted a temporally bounded period of scarcity or a dearth. Scarcity was experienced cyclically, dependent usually on poor yields. After the Industrial Revolution, which led to cataclysmic changes creating new needs, desires, and the frustration of desires, the concept acquired a new meaning, which culminated in its “invention” in neoclassical economic thought of the eighteenth century. From scarcities, which were temporally bound and spatially differentiated, came the scourge of scarcity, “a kind of open-ended myth” (Xenos 1989, 35) from which deliverance was sought. Scarcity, not a scarcity or scarcities, was essentialized and its simplistic universalization led to the obscuring of ambiguities and regional variations. A condition of natural scarcity is said to pervade because of an individual's limitless wants and necessities and the limited means available in nature to satisfy them. Scarcity emerges both as the raison d'être of society and as the basis of government since there is the need for an external arbiter to establish a system of rule and manage property either through the means of the market or through formalizing rights regimes.

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