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Why can we never seem to keep on top of our workload, social diary or chores? Why does poverty persist around the world? Why do successful people do things at the last minute in a sudden rush of energy? Here, economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir reveal that the hidden side behind all these problems is that they're all about scarcity.
In this classic study, the authors assess the importance of technological change and resource substitution in support of their conclusion that resource scarcity did not increase in the Unites States during the period 1870 to 1957. Originally published in 1963
This book brings together geological, biological, radical economic, technological, historical and social perspectives on peak oil and other scarce resources. The contributors to this volume argue that these scarcities will put an end to the capitalist system as we know it and alternatives must be created. The book combines natural science with emancipatory thinking, focusing on bottom up alternatives and social struggles to change the world by taking action. The volume introduces original contributions to the debates on peak oil, land grabbing and social alternatives, thus creating a synthesis to gain an overview of the multiple crises of our times. The book sets out to analyse how crises of energy, climate, metals, minerals and the soil relate to the global land grab which has accelerated greatly since 2008, as well as to examine the crisis of profit production and political legitimacy. Based on a theoretical understanding of the multiple crises and the effects of peak oil and other scarcities on capital accumulation, the contributors explore the social innovations that provide an alternative. Using the most up to date research on resource crises, this integrative and critical analysis brings together the issues with a radical perspective on possibilites for future change as well as a strong social economic and ethical dimesion. The book should be of interest to researchers and students of environmental policy, politics, sustainable development and natural resource management.
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. The Scarcity Slot is the first book to critically examine food security in Africa’s deep past. Amanda L. Logan argues that African foodways have been viewed through the lens of ‘the scarcity slot,’ a kind of Othering based on presumed differences in resources. Weaving together archaeological, historical, and environmental data with food ethnography, she advances a new approach to building long-term histories of food security on the continent in order to combat these stereotypes. Focusing on a case study in Banda, Ghana that spans the past six centuries, The Scarcity Slot reveals that people thrived during a severe, centuries-long drought just as Europeans arrived on the coast, with a major decline in food security emerging only recently. This narrative radically challenges how we think about African foodways in the past with major implications for the future.
Facing Up to Scarcity offers a powerful critique of the nonconsequentialist approaches that have been dominant in Anglophone moral and political thought over the last fifty years. In these essays Barbara H. Fried examines the leading schools of contemporary nonconsequentialist thought, including Rawlsianism, Kantianism, libertarianism, and social contractarianism. In the realm of moral philosophy, she argues that nonconsequentialist theories grounded in the sanctity of "individual reasons" cannot solve the most important problems taken to be within their domain. Those problems, which arise from irreducible conflicts among legitimate (and often identical) individual interests, can be resolved only through large-scale interpersonal trade-offs of the sort that nonconsequentialism foundationally rejects. In addition to scrutinizing the internal logic of nonconsequentialist thought, Fried considers the disastrous social consequences when nonconsequentialist intuitions are allowed to drive public policy. In the realm of political philosophy, she looks at the treatment of distributive justice in leading nonconsequentialist theories. Here one can design distributive schemes roughly along the lines of the outcomes favoured--but those outcomes are not logically entailed by the normative premises from which they are ostensibly derived, and some are extraordinarily strained interpretations of those premises. Fried concludes, as a result, that contemporary nonconsequentialist political philosophy has to date relied on weak justifications for some very strong conclusions.
Scarcity is considered a ubiquitous feature of the human condition. It underpins much of modern economics and is widely used as an explanation for social organisation, social conflict and the resource crunch confronting humanity's survival on the planet. It is made out to be an all-pervasive fact of our lives - be it of housing, food, water or oil. But has the conception of scarcity been politicized, naturalized, and universalized in academic and policy debates? Has overhasty recourse to scarcity evoked a standard set of market, institutional and technological solutions which have blocked out political contestations, overlooking access as a legitimate focus for academic debates as well as policies and interventions? Theoretical and empirical chapters by leading academics and scholar-activists grapple with these issues by questioning scarcity's taken-for-granted nature. They examine scarcity debates across three of the most important resources - food, water and energy - and their implications for theory, institutional arrangements, policy responses and innovation systems. The book looks at how scarcity has emerged as a totalizing discourse in both the North and South. The 'scare' of scarcity has led to scarcity emerging as a political strategy for powerful groups. Aggregate numbers and physical quantities are trusted, while local knowledges and experiences of scarcity that identify problems more accurately and specifically are ignored. Science and technology are expected to provide 'solutions', but such expectations embody a multitude of unexamined assumptions about the nature of the 'problem', about the technologies and about the institutional arrangements put forward as a 'fix.' Through this examination the authors demonstrate that scarcity is not a natural condition: the problem lies in how we see scarcity and the ways in which it is socially generated.
Describes economic scarcity and explains how consumers make economic choices concerning the use and distribution of economically scarce items, including capital and natural resources.
Michael Dobkowski and Isidor Walliman have edited a book that, although ominous, is not a fatalistic look at the future. The Coming Age of Scarcity lays out the perils of not recognizing the reality of genocide or of acknowledging the full implications of warfare. Showing how scarcity and surplus populations can lead to disaster, The Coming Age of Scarcity is about evil. It tells of "ethnic cleansing" and excavates the world's expanding killing fields. The writers in this volume are all too aware that the future suggests that present-day population growth, land resources, energy consumption, and per capita consumption cannot be sustained without leading to greater catastrophes. The essays in this volume ask: What is the solution in the face of mass death and genocide? As philosopher John K. Roth says in the Foreword, "The essays can sensitize us against despair and indifference because history shows that human-made mass death and genocide are not inevitable, and no events related to them will ever be."
The Earth's human population is expected to pass eight billion by the year 2025, while rapid growth in the global economy will spur ever increasing demands for natural resources. The world will consequently face growing scarcities of such vital renewable resources as cropland, fresh water, and forests. Thomas Homer-Dixon argues in this sobering book that these environmental scarcities will have profound social consequences--contributing to insurrections, ethnic clashes, urban unrest, and other forms of civil violence, especially in the developing world. Homer-Dixon synthesizes work from a wide range of international research projects to develop a detailed model of the sources of environmental scarcity. He refers to water shortages in China, population growth in sub-Saharan Africa, and land distribution in Mexico, for example, to show that scarcities stem from the degradation and depletion of renewable resources, the increased demand for these resources, and/or their unequal distribution. He shows that these scarcities can lead to deepened poverty, large-scale migrations, sharpened social cleavages, and weakened institutions. And he describes the kinds of violence that can result from these social effects, arguing that conflicts in Chiapas, Mexico and ongoing turmoil in many African and Asian countries, for instance, are already partly a consequence of scarcity. Homer-Dixon is careful to point out that the effects of environmental scarcity are indirect and act in combination with other social, political, and economic stresses. He also acknowledges that human ingenuity can reduce the likelihood of conflict, particularly in countries with efficient markets, capable states, and an educated populace. But he argues that the violent consequences of scarcity should not be underestimated--especially when about half the world's population depends directly on local renewables for their day-to-day well-being. In the next decades, he writes, growing scarcities will affect billions of people with unprecedented severity and at an unparalleled scale and pace. Clearly written and forcefully argued, this book will become the standard work on the complex relationship between environmental scarcities and human violence.
