Scarcity

[Forstater, Mathew]

Haven't been closely following this thread, but I always liked David Harvey's
piece on the population, resources, and ideology (old article from Economic
Geography, 1974).  Two tidbits from it: He recounts the story about how the
Chinese delegation announced at the 1972 Stockholm conference on the Environment
that there is no resource scarcity and environmental problems should not be
discussed in those terms.  Some Western commentators concluded that China must
have vast reserves of minerals and fossil fuels that the West didn't know about!

He then discusses the terms "subsistence" "resources" and "scarcity" and how
these terms are understood differently by Malthusians and Marxists.  Marxists
understand all of these terms to be historical and relational.  "Scarcity" is
not something "inherent in nature"--its definition is cultural and social.
"Resources" and "subsistence" also can only be defined with respect to
particular technical, cultural, and historical contexts.  Scarcity presupposes
certain social ends. Etc.

So human societies always have a number of options in approaching resource
questions: changing its social ends, altering the social organization of
scarcity, changing its technical and cultural appraisals of nature, changing its
views concerning the things to which it is accustomed, etc.

Ahistorical, natural, non-relational 'scarcity' has no place in Marxism.

Neoclassical scarcity also has no place in Keynes.  Of course, for Keynes there
were other scarcities, if one wants to put it that way--in capitalism, there is
a scarcity of demand, jobs, money.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Henwood [mailto:dhenwood at panix.com]
Sent: Sunday, April 08, 2001 3:07 PM
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
Subject: Re: Scarcity

Brad DeLong wrote:


>>In message <p0500191bb6f4544fa9e5@[140.254.114.190]>, Yoshie Furuhashi
>><furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes
>>>>>Could you tell us why you think scarcity is inescapable?
>>
>>Justin, wisely:
>>
>>>>We will never live on the Great Rock Candy Mountain, where roast
>>  >>chickens grow on trees and fish jump into our frying pans.
>
>But--from the perspective of any previous millennium--we do live on 
>Big Rock Candy Mountain...

But does it feel that way? There's no evidence that increases in 
wealth, beyond a certain minimum, make people happier (or lead them 
to report themselves as being happier). There's no satisfaction in 
satisfaction, as Freud put it.

Doug