The Scarcity Constant

A post-scarcity world is impossible, and that’s good news

For a field devoted to the distribution of finite resources, economists are remarkably naive about the nature of scarcity.

They’re not alone—our greatest futurists and science fiction writers get it wrong too.

There are really only two models for what a post-scarcity future looks like in the popular imagination. The Star Trek model: energy is free, replicators produce whatever you need, and people spend their time pursuing knowledge, art, and self-actualization because material want has been eliminated. Or, the Star Wars¹ model: technology is so advanced it might as well be magic, yet people are still poor, still struggling, still trading in black markets on desert planets. Neither of these models is right, but one’s closer. It’s not the one we want.

People feel pinched today, but the average American lives better than a Roman emperor ever did. We have jumbo jets and Netflix. Open-heart surgery and Amazon Prime. Central heating, GPS navigation, and antibiotics—luxuries that no amount of gold could have purchased even two centuries ago. By any absolute measure, we are already living in a post-scarcity world for most of the goods that defined scarcity for the previous ten thousand years of civilization.

And yet nobody feels post-scarce. That disconnect isn’t a failure of gratitude or a limitation of science. It’s the tell.

The standard economic framework has the causality backwards. We’re taught that scarcity is an external condition—a feature of the physical world—and that value emerges from it. Things are valuable because they’re scarce. But that’s not quite what’s happening.

Cancer cells are scarce, but I bet you don’t want any. Scarcity isn’t a condition that produces value. It’s the other way around. Value produces scarcity.

Wherever people want more control over their lives than they currently have—which is everywhere, always—we value whatever would give it to us. More money, sure. More power, more influence, more attention, more acclaim. What we crave is inherently “scarce,” whatever form it takes, because if it were plentiful we wouldn’t want it. When was the last time you thought about how much you want air to breathe?

But the second we get what we want, we don’t suddenly stop wanting. We just notice the next constraint down the stack. The word for this process is “progress.” The thing people keep expecting to eliminate scarcity is precisely what drives it.

The End of History

The history of human progress is, at bottom, a history of solving one constraint only to immediately discover the next. Each solution doesn’t eliminate scarcity—it reveals a deeper one that was always there, masked by the more urgent problem above it.

For most of human history, the binding constraint was calories. You spent your waking hours trying to acquire enough energy to not die. Farming solved that, more or less, which immediately surfaced the next constraint: land. When calories come from soil, arable territory becomes the thing you’ll kill for—and people did, enthusiastically, for the next several thousand years.

Industrialization broke the land constraint. Suddenly, value creation decoupled from acreage. A factory on a half-acre could out-produce a thousand-acre farm in economic terms. But this merely revealed that the true bottleneck had shifted to labor—specifically, higher-productivity labor capable of operating increasingly complex systems. The scramble for human capital replaced the scramble for territory, and the nation-states that industrialized first didn’t just get richer. They conquered the ones that hadn’t. More killing ensued.

Then came the information age, which ostensibly solved the labor constraint by making knowledge infinitely reproducible at zero marginal cost. Wikipedia alone would have been worth more than the Library of Alexandria and every medieval university combined, measured by information density. We now distribute the sum of human knowledge to anyone with a phone, for free. Problem solved.

Except it wasn’t. Because the moment information became abundant, the bottleneck shifted again—to attention. It turns out that an infinite supply of knowledge is worthless without an infinite mind capable of processing it. You can lead a civilization to Wikipedia, but you can’t make it think. The scarcest resource in the information age isn’t information; it’s the twenty minutes of uninterrupted focus required to do something useful with it.

Calories, land, labor, information, attention—each time we solved the top constraint, we merely established a new “top”.

The Next Abundance

Which brings us to the breathless promises of our current moment. AI, robotics, and fusion energy represent the most potent bundle of scarcity-killing technologies since agriculture itself.

The implications are real and genuinely transformative. Vertical farming fed by fusion power could make food production independent of arable land and weather patterns entirely. Desalination at scale—powered by energy so cheap it’s not worth the cost of the meter—eliminates water scarcity for every coastal civilization on Earth, which is most of them. Robotic construction could crash the cost of homebuilding the way industrialization crashed the cost of textiles. AI-driven drug discovery and diagnostics could make personalized medicine as routine as the antibiotics we already take for granted. Climate management becomes tractable when you have the energy budget to actually do something about atmospheric carbon other than just measuring it.

This isn’t science fiction. The component technologies exist. The engineering challenges are formidable but finite. Within a generation, possibly two, the material constraints that currently define middle-class anxiety—housing costs, healthcare costs, food costs, energy costs—could plausibly fall by an order of magnitude.

And it won’t matter. Not in the way people think.

The Scarcity Stack

Here’s where the techno-optimists lose the plot. Grant them everything—every breakthrough, every timeline, every breathless promise fulfilled. It still doesn’t get us where they think it does.

Maslow’s hierarchy is useful here, not because it’s a perfect model of human motivation, but because it reveals how far we’d have to go before material abundance even touches the constraints people actually care about. The base of the pyramid is physiological: air, water, food, clothing, shelter, warmth, sleep. AI and fusion and robotics could plausibly solve all of that, for everyone, within a generation or two. Genuinely miraculous. And entirely insufficient—because all you’ve done is clear the ground floor and force everyone to notice that the building has more stories.

One level up from physiology are safety and security—health, employment, property, personal stability. Even with unlimited cheap energy and robotic construction, a man whose industry just got automated isn’t comforted by having nothing useful to do. Material plenty doesn’t solve the constraints that actually keep people up at night. And that’s only the second floor. Health sits on this level, and its logical endpoint is mortality itself—you’d have to solve death just to finish the bottom half of the “needs” ladder. Everything that actually constitutes human flourishing lives above that line.

Besides which, there are plenty of people who can already buy all of the energy they want. People who can eat what they want, access the best healthcare, fly private. Why aren’t they living the post-scarcity utopia already? They’re not self-actualizing on the holodeck. They’re competing for status, chasing meaning, and getting divorced.

Elon Musk is the richest man on earth, and all that means is that now he wants Mars.

Because scarcity isn’t a quantity. It’s a value judgment. It’s the permanent condition of wanting more from life than you currently have—which is just another way of describing what it feels like to be alive.

The Structure of Desire

This is why the Star Wars model is closer. Not because its economics make sense—they don’t.²

But it captures what post-material-scarcity actually feels like: miraculous technology, and people still struggling. Star Trek assumed that solving material want would solve wanting.

The trust-fund kid with a cocaine habit and no direction isn’t suffering from a lack of resources. He’s suffering from a lack of constraints. Remove the relationship between effort and outcome and you don’t liberate desire—you make it aimless. He has everything except something to work toward.

AI and fusion and robotics may very well solve the next level of the material layer—and they should. But it won’t deliver the transformation that post-scarcity evangelists promise, any more than indoor plumbing delivered spiritual enlightenment. What it will deliver is a shift in what’s competed over. You can build more houses. You can’t build more Malibu. You can manufacture cheaper drugs. You can’t manufacture trust in the pharmaceutical industry. You can generate infinite content. You can’t generate the wisdom to decide what’s worth paying attention to.

The shape of scarcity in 2075 will be as unrecognizable to us as ours would be to a subsistence farmer in 1300. And whatever our grandchildren face, they’ll be convinced it’s uniquely urgent, uniquely unfair, and surely solvable with the right technology.

They’ll be wrong about the last part. But they’ll solve it anyway. And discover the next constraint just underneath.

1. Yes, I realize Star Wars was “a long time ago,” and technically not in the future.

2. I’ll never understand why Anakin couldn’t trade his record-breaking pod-racer for one middle-aged woman.