People are the scarce resource. It's not buildings, it's not printing presses, and it's not factories that are the scarce resource.

When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our worldview.

When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they're mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our worldview.

The point is this: When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they're mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our worldview.

The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity.

The administration of scarce resources is influenced by the standards of civilisation and by the organisation and institutions of the society in which men live. The influence is a two-fold one. The wants which the resources serve to satisfy are produc of standards of civilisation historically developed in society. The ways in which scarce resources are procured, adapted to various purposes, distributed among different persons are all results of social organisation and social institutions. Forms of ownership, institutions like corporations and banks, technical knowledge acquired in institutes of research and transmitted by schools, regulation by government agencies, habits and moral standards all influence the ways of administering scarce resources.

Resources are always limited. It’s just about how judiciously you use them. Use them smartly, and in the best way possible, where they will have the greatest impact.

In order to have enough of the raw materials...which will be lacking in wartime, we should plan to acquire and use foreign resources existing in our expected sphere of influence, such as Sakhalim, China, and the Southern Pacific.

When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they're mainly inaccessible.

In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

In an essay describing peoples with few possessions as the original affluent society, anthropologist reminds us that, "modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest peoples." The shortage is due not to how much material wealth there actually is, but to the way in which it is exchanged or circulated. The artificially creates scarcity by blocking the flow between the source and the consumer. Grain may rot in the warehouse while hungry people starve because they cannot pay for it. The result is famine for some and diseases of excess for others. The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings: this is a economy.

The problem with basing your entire economy and raison d’être on a constrained resource was that eventually you ran out of the resource in question. Decisions which had seemed canny two centuries ago during the bright days of the port’s founding and initial construction were now foolhardy in the blindingly obvious light of hindsight.

For a population of field mice in overshoot, the critical resource might consist of small plants whose unusually robust growth has been triggered by high levels of rainfall. For humanity currently, the critical resource is fossil energy. Temporary energy abundance has led to many good things (for some of us, anyway): more food, more people, more commercial products, more knowledge, more comfort, and more convenience. But we are about to become victims of our own success.

our incestuous fixation on combat with our own kind has left us ill prepared to face many of the larger perils of the situation in which we find ourselves: the possibility of drastic climatic changes, the depletion of natural resources, the relentless predations of the microbial world. The wealth that flows ceaselessly to the project of war is wealth lost, for the most part, to the battle against these threats. In the United States, military spending no longer requires a credible enemy to justify it, while funding for sanitation, nutrition, medical care, and environmental reclamation declines even as the need mounts. In the third world and much of the postcommunist world, the preparedness for war far surpasses the readiness to combat disease-witness Zaire's fumbling efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak of 1995, or the swiftly declining life expectancy of the former Soviets.