Wolfgang Hoeschele on the Economics of Abundance
Discussion
In his discussion piece, Brian Davey expresses his concern about serious impending resource scarcities (which I share), and his opinion that people who talk about “abundance” are not taking resource scarcity seriously, and are thus overly optimistic about the future of the world. He further assumes that most of these people come from the “knowledge and cultural commons” backgrounds, and sees this background as part of the reason for their excessive optimism.
While I cannot talk for everybody promoting ideas about abundance, I can certainly talk for myself, since I have written a book about the “Economics of Abundance.” Brian Davey surely has not had a chance to read that book yet, since it has only just been published and he was probably not aware of its existence before the International Commons Conference. In this forum, I’d like to summarize some of the ideas that I advance in this book, to show that promoting an “economics of abundance” is something very different from ignoring resource scarcities, does not imply excessive optimism, and does not require a background in the information industry (to which I do not belong; I am a geographer accustomed to dealing with very “down to earth” issues of resource use).
The Production of Scarcity
First, I would like to emphasize that material resources can be abundant, even though they exist in finite quantity. Material resources are abundant if they are used in non-depleting or non-degrading ways (e.g., breathing air), or if there is much more of them than are needed by people (e.g., fisheries in places where people fish only a small portion of the sustainable yield).
A fundamental problem about our present economy is that it sees no value in abundant resources because you cannot sell them at a high profit margin, e.g., you cannot package air for breathing and then sell it to somebody; where fish are abundant you can sell them but only at a modest price. In other words, only exchange value is recognized, use value is not. It is therefore advantageous for entrepreneurs to make abundant resources scarce so that they can then be sold at a higher price and generate more exchange value. The argument I make in my book is that the work of making abundant resources scarce is not left to individual initiative but is done by scarcity-generating institutions. Scarcity can be produced by manipulating either the supply or demand of a commodity such that demand exceeds supply. In this sense, there is scarcity even when there is a huge amount of production. One can also put it this way: our current economy maximizes inefficiency of consumption in order to generate the demand needed to justify ever increasing production. In such a context, increased efficiency of production does nothing to address issues of resource scarcity.
A good example pertains to transportation. Mobility – the ability to go where one needs to go – is most abundant if all or most people can reach their daily destinations by walking or cycling or public transport. In this way, mobility is affordable to everybody, and is available to young kids (as soon as they can move about independently), to old people (who can use public transport if they can no longer walk, cycle, or drive), to all members of one-car households, and to people with disabilities that prevent them from driving or walking or cycling (who can still use public transport). In these conditions of abundance, it would be possible for most people not to own their own car but to rely on car-sharing or taxi services for the comparatively rare times that they need a motor vehicle. The conditions that support abundant mobility – compact cities with streets amenable to walking and cycling and socializing – also support lower per capita investment in infrastructure, and on the whole lesser resource use than sprawled cities designed for automobile dependence. Hence, “abundance” does not consist of everybody having a car, but of everybody being able to move around freely and at low cost, without depending on complex and unsustainable commodity chains, while “scarcity” consists of everybody wanting or needing a car, no matter whether they can afford one or not.
The fact that so many cities do not support abundant mobility is a result of the concerted efforts of the car industry, the oil industry, real estate interests, and various associated economic sectors, which have together influenced governments to build or rebuild cities and transport infrastructures to serve the “needs” of cars (note that inanimate objects do not have needs). I have found that talking about how these institutions generate scarcity and alternatives create abundance helps generate great enthusiasm and creativity in working for change, as in a workshop that I recently led (see http://shareable.net/blog/abundant-mobility-one-towns-resources).
Scarcity is also generated by inequitable property regimes. For example, if a few people (capitalists, landed gentry, and the like) own the means of production, whether these consist of land, water, access to fisheries or hunting grounds, factories, or anything else, while others are constrained to sell their labor in order to obtain an income, then the property owners have an interest in keeping jobs scarce, to maintain a reserve army of unemployed labor that keeps wages low. We all know this from Marx, this is nothing new.
In addition, there are important “means of production” that have traditionally been owned by nobody, and it is of advantage to industrialists to use those as free goods of nature and to pollute or otherwise degrade them. Among these are clean air and water; polluting them creates scarcity among all the people whose health is adversely affected. Then, great investments are required to clean up air and water, to the benefit of those industrialists manufacturing the necessary equipment. Common ownership of natural resources (natural resource commons) as well as of workplaces (worker cooperatives) and knowledge (knowledge commons) is essential to undermining this mode of scarcity generation, and to create abundance instead.
On the level of individual psychology, scarcity is a result of never knowing when enough is enough, of always wanting more. This addictive mindset is fostered by a consumerist culture and insecurity and fear about the future; overcoming such addiction requires precisely the “positive human relationships in caring communities, which generate feelings of peace, contentment, love happiness and other psychic rewards which defy quantification” that Roberto Verzola mentions in his piece.
An economics of abundance is not an economics that assumes that abundance necessarily exists, but one that analyzes modes of scarcity generation such as the ones I mentioned above, and that points out ways to counteract them. Just as scarcity is socially constructed (and is very real, just as real as a humanly constructed building), so also abundance has to be created. Under current circumstances, this is a daunting task; whether we will succeed in accomplishing it before we face ecological catastrophe I do not know. However, I feel strongly that the idea of generating abundance points out the kind of path we must take if we are to have any hope of averting disaster. Thus, the value of my proposals does not depend on optimism or pessimism, it depends on whether they are a realistic path out of our current quandary." (http://p2pfoundation.net/Abundance_of_Food_vs_the_Abundance_of_Recipes#Wolfgang_Hoeschele:_Economics_of_Abundance)