The economics of abundance

Contributors: Name(s)
Al Chang?, Jessica Margolin, Richard Adler?, Patrick Kiernan?, Chuck Sieloff?, Jerry Michalski?

FC Abundance Minutes March 28 2006

Summary:
A core shift in economics will challenge the “science of allocating scarce resources” and the scarcity meme, in general. This shift will reshape many of the basic frameworks we use for thinking about business models, innovation, and markets.

John Hagel and John Seely Brown: www.johnseelybrown.com/pushmepullyou4.72.pdf

Robert Wright's
Nonzero is an excellent resource in regard to non-zero-sum games and their significance

James Carse's
Finite and Infinite games has an excellent first couple paragraphs

Eileen Clegg:
The old zero sum paradigm does inhibit potential contributors to the 'learning commons' and also I think it (mis)shapes how we assess for learning. These all need re-thinking and it's hard to imagine how the change would occur but it's a happy thought: Learning Abundance.

Jessica Margolin:
I came up with a different way to think about this today; I invested a whopping 10 minutes, so please feel free to add, delete, or summarily dismiss (or counterexample) as you see fit:

Given the conflicting ideas of the physical scarcity of things like oil and what abundance and scarcity mean in that context vs.the idea of the artificially imposed scarcity of bandwidth licenses or educators in a community, I thought, let's just hold off on the terms "abundance" and "scarcity" for a moment since they're heavily connotative and go back to the original concept behind them, which to me seems to be that what we're calling abundance is really instances where things replenish themselves (or even replicate themselves) and scarcity is meant as a fundamental physical truth: conservation of mass/energy/momentum, and time flows forward. (I'm undecided as to whether the number of people/biodiversity counts in this sense; although people are plentiful, there is a discretely limited number of them.)

So in each "dilemma" area, public policy could talk about the ways in which the system can be self-replenishing and the ways in which the system is affected by mass conservation and time sequentiality. Then even though time really is limited, we could talk about useful methods of leveraging time (e.g. doing things in parallel, etc.)

Then a further step might be to define four categories instead of two: Abundant, pseudo-abundant, pseudo-scarce, and scarce. The advantage of doing this is to see explicitly in what way there's a limiting construction. (Again, just as an exercise; it might be meaningless or useless.) So for example:

Abundant: Knowledge
Pseudo-Abundant: Access to knowledge (need search engines)
Pseudo-Scarce: Access to matter (economically efficient oil fields), bandwidth, access to experts (people with skills, knowledge; includes teachers)
Scarce: Matter (oil), people(?)

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