Scarcity Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Scarcity is a concept fundamental to economics with important ramifications concerning human use of natural resources. Before the rise of classical economics, the term was primarily used to refer to times or situations of hardship; for example, there was a scarcity of food if people were starving; if people had plenty of food and other amenities, there was abundance. Classical economics redefined scarcity based on the claim that all humans (not just greedy ones) have unlimited needs and wants. Hence, any desirable resources that exist in finite quantities are considered scarce in the sense that there are less of them than people desire, and scarcity prevails even among the richest people in the most affluent societies.

This universal condition of scarcity is used to justify the need for everlasting economic growth in all countries, regardless of their wealth or poverty.

Economic growth typically entails increased consumption of natural resources, whether they are located in the same or a different country than where final consumption takes place, raising the specter of absolute resource scarcity.

Early critics pointed out that economic or population growth would be limited by absolute scarcity of physical resources. The most well known critic of this kind was Thomas Malthus, who argued that population would grow exponentially while the productivity of agricultural land would only grow in a linear fashion, leading to scarcity of food as population growth outpaced growth in food production. The results would include famine, pestilence, and war. Modern-day neo-Malthusians (e.g., Garret Hardin or Paul Ehrlich) posit that scarcity in food and other resources appears once human population exceeds a more or less constant regional or global carrying capacity, a concept derived from the study of animal populations. Their main advice to avoid this kind of scarcity is to stop population growth. Hardin’s “lifeboat ethics” goes further, arguing that resource scarcity demands that the welloff let starving people die.

Other critics of growth-oriented economics see population growth as only one form of problematic growth; they find trends of increasing per capita consumption of natural resources equally or more worrying. A path-breaking study of this kind was the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth,” which saw not only population growth, but also economic growth and resultant pollution as encountering limits, i.e., a scarcity of resources. Based on a similar logic, a few scholars have developed principles for an economy based on constant throughput of resources.

Defenders of capitalist growth-oriented strategies usually argue that new technologies will allow for continued economic and population growth despite any scarcities of natural resources. For example, Julian Simon argues that the “ultimate resource” is human ingenuity, which can substitute for any and all natural resources. Hence, any scarcity we encounter is due to the limitations of our own knowledge, and capitalist market incentives are the best method to stimulate the development of new technologies that eliminate scarcities.

Based on empirical studies she conducted in Africa, Ester Boserup made far less extreme claims, arguing that the pressure of population on land resources stimulated the development of more intensive forms of agriculture, which could in turn feed higher population densities. There is considerable empirical support for her thesis, as for example a recent study by Mary Tiffen and others in Kenya. In western Africa, various scholars have challenged claims that population pressure is leading to progressive natural resource degradation due to increasing scarcity, for example, by pointing out that local people are actively planting trees or otherwise enhancing local resources, and landscapes that appear degraded to some observers may actually have been improved. Such characterizations do not necessarily imply that capitalist markets are the solution, however, but instead point to a variety of relevant social institutions as being involved in finding solutions to increasing resource scarcity.

Scarcity and Justice

Leftist critics of both growth-oriented economics and of Malthusianism in its various forms regard scarcity as resulting largely from social injustice. Thus, Frances Moore Lappe argues that there is more than enough food production in the world, but economic exploitation leaves the poor (even many farmers) without access to food. Political ecologists likewise usually stress the role of political-economic exploitation in marginalizing the poor, who are then forced to make use of marginal environments in unsustainable ways in order to try to make a living. For example, poor peasants may be forced to clear small plots of land on erosionprone slopes in the mountains of countries ranging from the Philippines to Honduras, not because land as such is scarce but because the concentration of land holdings in the hands of a few has led to intense land scarcity.

Market Forces

Some critics of the optimistic idea that resource scarcity will lead to adaptive technological change point out that perverse incentives may prevent such a positive outcome. For example, if a species is close to becoming extinct due to trophy hunting, the scarcity of trophies enhances their prestige value to buyers. Therefore, their market value increases, leading to redoubled hunting efforts to the point of extinction. In the realm of traffic, the use of personal cars increases congestion, energy demand, and pollution compared to public transport or to walking or cycling. However, even in congested conditions, the relative speed and comfort of the car provide an individual incentive not to use public transport. Only if perverse incentives of this kind can be removed will resource scarcity lead to adaptive changes; the removal of perverse incentives usually requires some kind of social and not just technological change.

Further critiques of the economic concept of scarcity challenge the idea that human wants and needs are unlimited. If, as argued by Ivan Illich, our wants and needs are indeed limited, then perpetual growth is only possible through the continued creation of needs. Mechanisms to create wants and needs include advertising, but also “radical monopolies” such as transport systems that force us to rely on cars, and health care systems that force us to rely on expensive medical treatments.

Based on such a critique, scarcity can be overcome if the institutions that create ever more new wants and needs are dismantled, or are at least challenged by “convivial institutions,” which help people to define their own needs and fulfill them in self-reliant and resource-conserving ways. This would allow the simultaneous pursuit of individual freedom, social equity, and environmental sustainability, which are usually regarded as being at odds with each other.

Bibliography:

Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure (Aldine, 1965);
Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity (Harper and Row, 1974);
Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity (Houghton Mifflin, 1977);
Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton University Press, 1996);
Mary Tiffen, Michael Mortimore, and Francis Gichuki, More People, Less Erosion: Environmental Recovery in Kenya (John Wiley, 1994);
NicholasXenos, Scarcity and Modernity, (Routledge, 1989).