Do we live in a world of scarcity?
It sure seems so.
But after walking the Camino de Santiago I have my doubts. The walk provided visions, every day, of the amazing fecundity and abundance of creation. (See my earlier columns here and here.)
This is not a philosophical matter. It’s an everyday economic matter. There’s a good chance we have it all wrong. Everything would change if we got it right instead of wrong.
That includes our brain-dead politics. The only thing both parties share is a devotion to solving the problem of scarcity. They offer opposed but flawed solutions.
To explore this, I went back to a book from 1979, Bernd Heinrich’s “Bumble-Bee Economics.” In the book Heinrich explores the development cycle of a colony. He discusses the amount of honey and pollen collected by worker bees. He considers the distribution of worker bees and drones. He remarks on the abundance of possible future queens.
In one colony he found “an old, nearly bald, tattered queen.” The colony also had 261 workers, 136 new queens, 392 queen pupae, 341 drone or worker pupae, and 239 larvae. That’s a lot of would-be queens.
Naturalists see the history of the colony as a story of heroic struggle, death and scarcity. (Skeptics should check out the videos by David Attenborough. He frames his explorations as struggles for survival.)
But viewed from a genetic perspective, the history of the colony isn’t a story of struggle and loss. It is a story of amazing fecundity. It’s an abundance that assures the long-term survival of bumblebees.
We humans, like bumblebees, began as hunter/gatherers. We started farming about 11,000 years ago. That’s plenty of time to work with nature to produce plenty for all. Not figuring it out is the tragedy of our species. Century after century we chose hording and power over abundance. (You can explore this notion further by reading Daniel Quinn’s “Ishmael.” A long discourse between a talking gorilla and a human, it’s an entertaining start.)
A century ago, Ukrainians came to hate Russia with a special passion. Stalin starved millions to death, exchanging their lives and grain for cash. He branded them as “kulaks” who were impeding the revolution. (A powerful film, “Mr. Jones,” captures how Stalin did this.)
Today hunger is a distribution problem. It isn’t a production problem. Food abundance thrives alongside food scarcity. Raj Patel, a researcher at the Lyndon Johnson School at the University of Texas, Austin, captured the juxtaposition in his recently updated book “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.” People and their rulers continue to misbehave. In yet another century.
Finger pointing would be easy here. But it is a proven waste of time. So no bad guys. We’ll get results for ourselves if we ignore the vast machinery of scarcity talk. We can devote our time and effort to finding our personal abundance. Eventually, the politicians will follow.
How can we do that? The path is uncertain and I’m new to it. So bear with me. Here are some steps.
—Start by knowing where not to look. Several places come to mind immediately, such as the wealth-porn advertising pages in the publications that gather affluent-to-wealthy readerships. The Wall Street Journal is a good example. So are sections of The New York Times. Anything in Forbes magazine. Need I mention Town and Country? I’m also talking about all the personal finance magazines. They cater to a broader demographic. But they are part of the vast Luxury Consumption Complex.
— Put a value on your time by eliminating TV advertising on your streaming services. My wife and I did this. So have millions of others. I wrote about it here. It works.
— Become a de-activist. Yes, easier said than done. But here’s the reality of today’s Internet. Once it was an amazing information source that I treasured. You likely did, too. But today so much traffic rushes toward us that it has become useless as a road to information. Instead, it is a 24/7 sales and marketing tool. The Internet is a gigantic time suck. (I’m working on this one.)
Is it impossible to disconnect? Difficult, yes, but not impossible. And the beginnings of a rebellion are becoming visible. Start by reading, “Ten Arguments for Deleting Social Media Right Now,” by Jaron Lanier.
The future is about what we do.
Related columns:
Scott Burns, “Whatever happened to leisure?” 7/12/2023: https://scottburns.com/whatever-happened-to-leisure/
Scott Burns, “Are you selling your leisure time too cheap?” 11/30/2023 https://scottburns.com/are-you-selling-your-leisure-time-too-cheap/
Scott Burns, “The disappearing cow problem,” 7/24/2024: https://scottburns.com/the-disappearing-cow-problem/
Scott Burns, “A walking retirement almost anyone can afford,” 8/12/2024: https://scottburns.com/a-walking-retirement-almost-anyone-can-afford/
Sources and References:
“Bumblebee Economics” on Amazon:
“Ishmael” on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Ishmael-Novel-Daniel-Quinn/dp/0553375407
“Mr. Jones” on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Mr-Jones-James-Norton/dp/B089XVJB9S
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1612191274?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title
https://www.history.com/news/ukrainian-famine-stalin
https://rajpatel.org/meet-raj/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1612191274?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10227388/
“Arguments for Deleting Social Media Accounts” on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Arguments-Deleting-Social-Media-Accounts/dp/125019668X#:~:text=About%20the%20authors&text=Jaron%20Lanier%20is%20known%20as,He%20lives%20in%20Berkeley%2C%20California.
This information is distributed for education purposes, and it is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement of any particular security, product, or service.
Photo by Jill Wellington: https://www.pexels.com/photo/flowers-and-fruits-on-a-table-5832735/
(c) Scott Burns, 2024