Tag Archives: scarcity

A version of this post appeared on Pieria in December 2013.  In my post “The desert of plenty”, I described a world in which goods and services are so cheap to produce that less and less capital is required for investment , and so easy to produce that less and less labour is required to produce them. Prices therefore go into freefall and there is a glut of both capital and labour. This is deflation. There are two kinds of deflation. There is the “bad” kind, where asset prices go...

This post first appeared on Pieria in November 2013.  Throughout history, humans have dreamed of plenty. They have longed for there to be abundant supplies not only of essentials, but of luxuries. The promise made to the Israelites wandering in the desert was that they would eventually come to a land “flowing with milk and honey”. And the vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation is of riches beyond imagination. Recent forecasts of forthcoming abundance, too, have focused on...

By J.D. ALT I’ve been continuing to work on the book I first proposed here at NEP last spring—The Millennials’ Money—and am getting close now to having it ready for publication. The aspect of it that was least successful (and there were several NEP comments to that effect) was the framing of the “ideology of money scarcity” as having evolved from the particularities of the baby-boomer’s generational experience. That was always a shaky and not-very-insightful argument—and I recently came to...