McCarthy: Artificial Scarcity Vs. Real Scarcity

Описание: There's two types of scarcity: there is real scarcity and artificial scarcity. Real scarcity is when there is simply not enough of something. There just aren't enough of something because that's the way Nature happened, or we just haven't made enough of it yet, or something like that. Artificial scarcity on the other hand is when there are rules put in place for the protection of a certain value set or maybe, say, an industrial monopoly or something along those lines, which is intently put in place to prevent the elimination of scarcity.

An example of this is copyright. Copyright is in many ways intended to protect the income of artists, in theory. In practice, it doesn't. In practice, what it mostly does is just artificially scarcify access to culture. And this is not really a bother for me and you, because we live in this nice world where we get enough paid to actually be able to access culture. But the creative industries claim something around 68 billion dollars worth of lost sales a year. I mean, that's of course a nonsense statement, but if we just break it down, 68 or almost 70 billion dollar a year, if we divide that by everybody, then it comes out to about 10 dollars a person, right? There is 7 billion people, so 70 billion dollars is ten dollars a person. But most people in the world don't actually get more than one dollar a day. So having them spend 10 dollars on access to culture, is a ludicrous statement. It just doesn't work.

So we can just right there say: Okay, the 2 billion poorest people in the world are economically incapable of accessing culture. And then we can start taking the next billion and the next billion, and actually it turns out there is only about maybe a billion people in the world who can actually access culture at that rate, because by then we're up to maybe 30, 40, 50 dollars a person. And this just isn't sustainable, it doesn't work that way.

So when we're saying artificial scarcity, what we're saying is: There is a certain amount of scarcity in the world; we don't necessarily know where it is. For instance, there is lots of evidence that says: There's no scarcity of food in the world right now, but there's lots of evidence that says that there's a scarcity of oil. At the same time, if you look at the market, the market will tell you: "Oh, but there is scarcity of both," and we see that in the fact that there is famine in various countries, there are food shortages and agricultural problems.

The statistics are pretty easy: In 2011 there were 6.8 billion people in the world; the total vegetable production was about 6.5 billion tonnes. And what does an average person eat? Well, an average American - they're a bit fatter than the average human - they eat about 883 kilos of food per year. Now that means that if we just take the vegetables that are produced and divide them by the average American, and not focus too much on the actual nutritional value, because vegetables are quite good, then it turns out everybody on the planet can be a vegetarian. And that's without even looking at the 2.4 billion tonnes of meat or the 150 millions tonnes of fish or all of the dairy products and all that. So, there is no scarcity of food. But our markets treat that like there is, and actually in many places like the United States, farmers are incentivised to destroy parts of their crop to get a better price. This doesn't do good things for human food security.

So, to take another angle on the artificial scarcity question: If we manage to map out which scarcities in the world are real and which ones are artificial, and we eliminate all the artificial scarcities, then we focus on fixing the real scarcities where they exist, and humanity can prosper in a way that it cannot now, because there are so many vested interests in maintaining scarcity of certain things.