Christopher Sweeney, Editor

Nature produces for every animal
everything that is sufficient to support it
without having recourse to the improvement
of the original production.

— Adam Smith

We tend to hail modernity as the fertilization of barren fields, the taming of crop-destroying frosts and floods, the banishment of precariousness, the stymieing of angst. According to this narrative, the unpredictable world of old that kept most people on the threshold of sudden disaster has given way to a new world of abundance — thanks to technology, markets, politics, and capital.

These stories we tell about the past — of forlorn families hovering on the brink of ruin, their fates subject to the violent caprice of weather — assume that material scarcity perennially characterized human life on this planet. They also consecrate the present, by insisting that we live now in a time of unparalleled abundance, and are on the cusp of overcoming scarcity altogether. Are these stories — about the past, about the present — true?

You can plot the central myths of the major Western religions as you would a novel. You can outline Christianity’s main story, for instance, as U-shaped. It begins in Eden, the lavish garden, and immediately takes a turn for the worse with Adam and Eve’s sin. The downward arc rounds upward at the birth of Christ. According to Christian teaching, the world will one day return to its ancient paradisaical state, purged of all possibility of sin. Judaism’s principal narrative follows a similar pattern. It begins when God brings the Jews out of Egyptian slavery into the Promised Land, turns down with their disobedience and exile, and loops up again when they return to their homeland.

Many of us pretend to live unshackled from such myths. Yet economics — the quintessential “science” of our time — is our religion and scarcity its primary myth. Economics tells the cosmic tale of how humanity has moved from material dearth to abundance. Like all culturally significant stories, economics involves a lack. For Christianity, humans lack God’s presence. In Judaism, God’s people lack a homeland. The lack of economics is scarcity.

The “lacks” of Christianity, Judaism, or other religions have a relationship with the history and experience of peoples. Christians respond to human failure, or sin, which is evident in the world. Jews remember the historical experience of being dispossessed and exiled from their homeland.

Is the “lack” of economics related to any reality? Was there a time when scarcity was the defining fact of life for human beings? Is scarcity finally disappearing? Are we really better off today?

All our catechisms want us to believe in the myth of scarcity. Students in introductory economics classes are sure to hear their subject defined, simply, as “the study of the allocation of scarce resources.” Economics teaches us to assume from the start that there is not enough on this planet for all, and that this has always been the case. Students are trained to parrot this axiom in every situation. Whenever teachers or fast food workers strike, there is not enough to pay them the raises they demand. Don’t higher wages lead to fewer jobs? When the sick and destitute call for subsidized healthcare, there is not enough to pay their doctors. Doesn’t market intervention drive prices up in the long run?

Listen to these respectable men and college graduates, now initiated into the mysteries of middle class life, explain why the poor cannot be helped. They are sure to reel off this same dogma of scarcity with a David Brooks pretense to reasonableness. When the poor rise up in protest and confront these smug men — on Detroit streets, Bronx streets, or Wall Street — they are greeted with the same patronizing homily. “You should be grateful. True, there is not enough money for your raise or healthcare. But compared to olden times, you are prosperous. There is not enough yet, but so long as you stay in your place and work hard, your time of plenty will come.”

Think, indeed, of how this pious sentiment was enacted in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008. Around the globe, but especially in places like Greece or Italy, austerity was imposed on the poor as a rotten promise: one more bout of scarcity and human want would finally wither away.

As with every myth, that of scarcity, though situated in a primordial past of plague and malnutrition, is more a meditation on the present. Scarcity exists, as every economics textbook asserts — but only for those deemed unworthy of a greater share of wealth. The myth of scarcity, indeed, aims to transform a monstrous social atrocity into a fact of nature. Our wealth distribution is so inequitable, so unjust, that billions of people live in perpetual hunger, accrue life-long debt, and lack basic access to healthcare while a small cohort of others amass unfathomable riches. This, the myth of scarcity asserts, is a perfectly natural state of affairs, perfectly just. Society is not to blame.

At any rate, the impoverished rabble can partake of the scarce wealth there is only through the voluntary benevolence of their worthy overlords or the hopeful anticipation of a time of plenty in an equally mythical future. Faith is what is required, and a paradoxical one at that — faith in the unavoidable reality of scarcity and in the eventuality of its demise.

Economics . . . is our religion and scarcity its primary myth.

When it comes down to it, scarcity has always required faith. In 1968, for instance, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which predicted that human population was growing at such a rapid rate, and resources so scarce, that the world would eminently experience widespread famine. Though half a century later, Ehrlich’s doomsdaying has yet to materialize, to this day he believes he was right. It seems a lack of evidence for his thesis only increases his faith.

In 1798, the Anglican cleric Thomas Malthus was one of the first to proclaim the necessity of faith in the gospel of scarcity. Scarcity was not a first principal for all economists before this. With a religious zeal, however, Malthus prophesied that the world population would soon reach its natural limit and that widespread starvation and epidemic would follow. As a safeguard, he advised employers to lower the meager wages paid to most workers (the irony of promoting scarcity for workers in order to prevent it was evidently lost on him). Unsurprisingly, employers converted en masse to Malthusian preaching. Economists, the theologians of capital, soon followed suit.

It mattered not to this pious pastor or his disciples that his prophesy failed, or that his “remedy” threatened workers with literal starvation. Malthus’s assumptions about the natural limits to human population growth have been disproved time and again — wage hikes and all. Yet the cult of Malthus has even experienced a resurgence in recent years.

These anecdotes illustrate that scarcity is not a fact so much as an article of faith, accepted on faith and thus not subject to empirical verification or falsification.

According to Christian teaching, “You shall know a tree by its fruit” (cf. Matthew 7:16). Faith in scarcity is accompanied by its own peculiar fruits, two of which suffice to reveal the merit of this creed.

First, faith in scarcity construes famines as natural, inevitable.

Second, faith in scarcity insists that government regulation and private ownership, in varying proportions, produce more abundance than the unregulated, common use of land and other resources (the “commons”).

These speculations, like scarcity itself, fail the typical tests of scientific rigor, but they are no less popular among pundits and politicians because of it.

With regard to famines, Amartya Sen won the Noble Prize in Economics for demonstrating that famines are not natural facts. They are always political facts. Famines tend to happen, Sen concluded, because powerful agents misappropriate food, and not because there is a lack of it.

Moreover, as the recent history of agriculture in “developing” nations illustrates, part of this misappropriation involves the violent imposition of monoculture. Such an imposition is often the underlying catalyst of famines mistakenly attributed to errant weather or other natural factors. Put simply, when multinational corporations seize a region’s common land, buy up its small plots, and pressure displaced farmers to grow a single cash crop using ecologically destructive techniques and chemicals, an unexpected storm can and will produce famines. In contrast, when practicing traditional agricultural methods, indigenous peoples routinely create highly stable local ecosystems with incredibly diverse flora and fauna.

With regard to the commons, Elinor Ostrom likewise won the Noble Prize in Economics for showing that the so-called Tragedy of the Commons was spurious. For time immemorial people around the world have successfully managed common land, forests, seas, and other shared resources on their own. Government regulation or private ownership are simply not necessary for administering the commons effectively. Society works as well if not better if uninterrupted by bureaucrats and bosses who supposedly want to help by lining their pockets.

Famines, therefore, are not naturally occurring, nor are traditional regimes of land and resource sharing necessarily less generative than state regulation and capitalist enterprise.

If scarcity is not inevitable in the present, though, is this because economics to some extent has delivered the goods? Even if scarcity persists just enough to make a more equitable distribution of wealth unfeasible, still the poor of the present have to be better off than they would have been before capitalism, right? Recall the David Brooksian homily to the unwashed masses cited above: “Compared to olden times, you are prosperous.”

Juxtaposed with medieval peasants, certainly, today’s poor own more TVs and phones — along with a hefty share of debt. The myth that scarcity afflicted human existence until very recently only holds if we value having an abundance of consumer goods over possessing the means of our survival.

Indeed, the first and most obvious difference between our poverty and that of earlier times is that prior to widespread industrialization, being poor was compatible with owning the means of production. The so-called poor of yesteryear regularly possessed — in fact if not in title — the tools needed for agriculture or a trade, the land for planting, the space for craft, and plentiful commons for hunting, fishing, and foraging. Everything needed for living, and living well, lay in their hands.

What about the famines, the unexpected rainstorms, the droughts that plagued premodern people?

Here too the ingrained assumptions of economics are false. A person who takes time to read the ancient historians — say, Ammianus Marcellinus — will discover that the “poor” are not depicted as ghastly skeletons always on the verge of starvation or crop failure. Peasants and plebs, rather, are commonly upbraided for drinking too much, gambling too much, feasting too much, talking too much. That is, respectable Roman gentlemen like Ammianus assumed not that there was too little wealth for everyone to eat, drink, and be merry but rather that there was too much of it for those deemed unworthy.

Such is also the case with the Salian law, a Frankish civil law code developed during the Dark Ages, purportedly the most economically destitute period in Western history. Individual laws routinely assume that the peasantry, though “desperately poor” and “starving,” nevertheless own sheep, hogs, and goats; fish in teeming streams; hunt abundant game in the woods; and bring in sizable harvests of cereals. Dark Age peasants, it seems, by and large lived on a mixed diet, supplied by various reliable and accessible sources, and were thus kept well insulated from want.

Similar data from disparate times and places suggest that, as a matter of course, we should not assume that scarcity plagued past societies. If the claims about humanity’s bygone scarcity are dubious, however, the central myth of economics unravels. Are the afflictions of today’s poor so negligible when compared to those of the past? Have we collectively entered a time of abundance as a species? Have the poor gained anything substantial from capitalism? Or have we rather lost it all? Is scarcity the myth the rich recite when they’re fleecing us more absolutely and ruthlessly than ever before?

Economists such as Malthus emerged with their sacred tales of scarcity at that moment when life was truly grim for most — the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this period, racialized chattel slavery was at its height throughout the Western world; the private enclosure of the commons was reaching its devastating conclusion in Europe; peasants, long used to working for themselves, outdoors, and at a generally leisurely pace, were forced off their land to labor in the dehumanizing conditions of early factories; and indigenous people were slaughtered or forcefully moved to the least desirable lands. Such widespread suffering, such abjection, was not an inescapable outcome of human population boom, as the Reverend Malthus evangelized. It was rather the manufactured result of capitalism’s ravenous, unhinged pursuit of profit.

It seems doubtful that we are in a much better situation today. In the US, more than one in ten face food insecurity. The percentage of people living on the streets is at an all time high in cities like New York and San Francisco. Many of us, mired in impossible debt, worry month to month if we will have the means to afford basic survival. Quite a few are a traffic violation away from eviction. What leisure time had been won through labor struggles for the 8-hour day is receding before the onslaught of 24-hour digital connectedness. However, the searing scarcity of our present is no more unavoidable than were previous periods of the same. We are likewise the manufactured result of capitalism’s ravenous, unhinged pursuit of profit.

Thus, when economists assert the naked reality of scarcity, we should remind them that this “fact” is neither natural nor historical. Scarcity did not haunt the everyday lives of our premodern ancestors, nor is it inevitable still. Scarcity rather is a projection onto the past meant to preserve the present status quo. It is tied to the material interests of capitalists, whether early-modern or contemporary, and has always been caused by an excess of economic thinking. As such, it is perhaps economics rather than scarcity that we should struggle to overcome.