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pose to the old and declining feudal regimes of Scarcity the time. Occasional and were, of course, much older phenomena; what Nathan F. Sayre was new was the extensive mediation of the University of California, Berkeley, USA food supply by intra- and interstate commerce and the dynamics of that Scarcity poses a paradox. If, according to the this entailed. High could no longer so Merriam-Webster Dictionary, scarcity means “the easily be blamed on climatic vagaries or divine quality or state of being scarce; especially: want misfortune if hoarding, speculation, , of provisions for the support of life,” then and were potential alternative culprits. presumably actual scarcity has grown ever less In the 10 years beginning with 1795, a series of common over the past 200 years, as industrial spikes in the of grains in United Kingdom has expanded global supplies of food prompted a flurry of polemical speeches, pam- and other material to unprecedented phlets, and treatises dedicated expressly to the levels in both absolute and per capita terms. But, topic of scarcity. Some viewed the deficiency of duringthesameperiod,theidea of scarcity has grain as a natural result of unfavorable weather, grown increasingly pervasive in both obvious basing their arguments on personal observations and obscure ways. Modern takes of harvests in various parts of the kingdom. scarcity as its fundamental theoretical premise Others blamed farming methods and the quality and raison d’être, and major strands of environ- of various soils, or referred to data on imports mentalism likewise find motivation in the idea and exports and pointed to disruptions in inter- that natural are not only finite but also state trade caused by the Napoleonic Wars. But, increasingly scarce. The prospect of imminent in the absence of comprehensive agricultural scarcities of food, energy, water, or other key statistics – both for the United Kingdom and for resources has been a leitmotif of modernity, countries whence grain was imported – actual and chronic economic inequality and poverty supplies of food were difficult to judge, and the have left significant numbers of people lacking causes of price increases were subject to spec- basic necessities, apparent victims of scarcity. It ulation and debate. Merchants and middlemen is as though society cannot produce abundance were widely accused of hoarding, monopoly, without constantly thinking about – and in some and speculation to create the appearance of (and places producing – its opposite. to from) scarcity, regardless of real supplies. Although the English word dates back to the Some extended this criticism to landowners fourteenth century, scarcity’s prominence as a who were consolidating their holdings into modern concept coincides with the ascendance fewer and larger farms, which critics viewed as of in northwestern Europe in more prone to monopoly and more vulnerable the latter half of the 1700s. Scarcity was associated to unfavorable weather than smaller farms. first and foremost with food, and especially with While nominally about scarce food supplies, the political threats that high food prices could the debates were more fundamentally concerned

The International Encyclopedia of Geography. Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0725 SCARCITY with how government should relate to the he argued that the price increases were out of market . Two other pressing issues lent proportion to these shortfalls. Monopoly was not great urgency to this question: the specter of the cause of this disparity, however: in Malthus’s the French Revolution and the emergence of view, the market for food was too large and had widespread poverty among commoners, many of too many players for anyone to monopolize it. them recently displaced into urban centers by the Rather, he diagnosed the problem as stemming Enclosure Acts. In a time of growing national and from the Poor Laws, which since 1795 had guar- imperial prosperity, the masses of impoverished anteed supplements to at levels pegged to laborers were a paradoxical and ominous novelty, the price of bread (Polanyi 1957): and elites feared that high prices – whatever their the attempt in most parts of the kingdom to cause – might result in riots, rebellion, or revolu- increase the parish allowances in proportion to tion. In Karl Polanyi’s (1957/1944, 111) words, the price of corn … is, comparatively speak- “When the significance of poverty was realized, ing, the sole cause, which has occasioned the the stage was set for the nineteenth century.” price of provisions to rise so much higher than ’s Wealth of Nations provided the degree of scarcity would seem to warrant. (Malthus 1800, 4–5) the intellectual ammunition for those, such as , who argued that free trade Giving the poor simply added to the and private were the best – indeed, for food without increasing the only – way to solve imbalances between supply, further raising prices, even if it did also producers and consumers of food. “Labour is a help diminish suffering by spreading the impact like every other, and rises or falls across a larger number of people. The only real according to the demand. This is in the nature of solutions were increased production and imports, things,” Burke (1800/1795, 6) insisted. Middle- both of which would come about in response men “are to be left to their free course; and the to higher prices; in the shorter term, large more they make, and the richer they are, and the farmers and middlemen were to be thanked for more largely they deal, the better for both the raising “the corn to that price which excluded a farmer and the consumer” (Burke 1800/1795, sufficient number from their usual consumption, 24). By this logic, government measures to cap to enable the supply to last throughout the year” prices or ban hoarding would only make the (Malthus 1800, 15). problem worse by preventing market signals from At the end of his pamphlet, Malthus shifted the operating effectively. “Of all things, an indiscreet question from food prices to the growing depen- tampering with the trade of provisions is the dence of United Kingdom on food imports. most dangerous, and it is always worst in the Asserting (without evidence) that domestic agri- time when men are most disposed to it: – that is, cultural production could not have “gone back- in the time of scarcity” (Burke 1800/1795, 1). wards” in the preceding 20 years, he deduced Thomas Malthus weighed in with An Inves- that “the present inability of the country to sup- tigation of the Cause of the Present High Price of port its inhabitants” could only be due “to the Provisions (1800), echoing many of Burke’s posi- increase of population” (Malthus 1800, 27). He tions in defense of landowners and middlemen referred readers to his Essay on the Principle of Pop- and in opposition to government intervention. ulation, originally published in 1798, which he Malthus saw bad weather as responsible for was in the process of almost completely rewriting short-term declines in agricultural output, but for the more famous second edition of 1803.

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Two points about Malthus’s Essay are key wrote, has prevented Malthus’s followers from to understanding its outsized influence on seeing virtually any environmental or natural subsequent thinking about scarcity. The first resources-related problem as a function of pop- is that it was fundamentally a moral argument ulation. Neo- can be understood about the nature of good and evil, virtue and as a body of thought that ignores the moralism vice – what LeMahieu (1979) termed a “theol- and political context of Malthus’s arguments ogy of scarcity.” Although Malthus dampened in order to take – and mistake – his principle his theological claims in the second (and subse- of population as a “scientific” insight based on quent) editions, he continued to view humans “natural” laws. as naturally “inert, sluggish, and averse from By the end of the nineteenth century, the labour” (Malthus 2004/1798, 115–116), and he meaning of scarcity had shifted from anoma- considered moral and physical deprivation to be lous and transient episodes of (people necessary, divinely sanctioned spurs to virtuous spoke of “a scarcity” as a period of time) to a activity. High food prices were therefore actu- normal, universal condition of human life and ally a good thing, or at least served as a kind activity. The leading proponents of this shift of medicine whose effectiveness required an were such as , unregulated market economy: Leon Walras, and Carl Menger, who developed marginal theory on the basis of “what has There are some disorders, which, though they come to be known as the scarcity postulate, an scarcelyadmitofacure,orevenofanyconsid- erable mitigation, are still capable of being made assumption of the universality of the condition of greatly worse. In such misfortunes it is of great scarcity that at once gives importance to know the desperate nature of the its focus and provides the legitimacy of its claim disease. The next step to the alleviation of pain, to science” (Xenos 1989, 68). (In his study The is the bearing it with composure, and not aggra- Coal Question, Jevons also developed the famous vating it by impatience and irritation. (Malthus 1800, 1) paradox that bears his name: When per unit costs are reduced, gains in the efficiency of use LeMahieu (1979, 474) concludes: “Here at last of a will increase, not reduce, its overall was the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capital- use. Scarcity thus becomes self-reinforcing.) ism.” Lionel Robbins (1984/1932, 15) summarized The Essay’s second key contribution was the postulate succinctly: “Scarcity of means to interpreting scarcity as ultimately a function satisfy ends of varying importance is an almost of human population – this was the underly- ubiquitous condition of human behaviour. Here, ing “disease.” Malthus defined his principle then, is the unity of subject of Economic Sci- in terms of food: “the power of population ence, the forms assumed by human behaviour in is indefinitely greater than the power of the disposing of scarce means.” Earth to produce subsistence for man” (Malthus In contrast to the of Smith, 2004/1798, 19). But neither the reductive cir- Marx, and Mill, neoclassical economics was cularity of his logic (Engels famously pointed unconcerned with wealth and . The new out that even two people would constitute science understood human needs as “constructed overpopulation by Malthus’s argument), nor the solely out of the individual’s preferences, without empirical fact that food production has indeed any trace of social determination” (Xenos 1989, increased more rapidly than population since he 70), expressed through individual calculations

3 SCARCITY of economizing self-. In one sense this of Homo economicus, but this very tractability reduced economics to the narrow world of presupposes that individuals always already appro- commodity exchange, with scarcity as its funda- priate property through markets. The question mental premise. Anything that was abundantly that preoccupied Burke and Malthus – the available to all was not worth economizing, and extent and legitimacy of a , with therefore irrelevant to the discipline: minimal government interference – vanishes by conceptual fiat under the postulated universal Economics is the science which studies human condition of scarcity. behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses … It The realization and extension of markets – and does not attempt to pick out certain kinds of therefore the applicability of economic science behaviour, but focuses attention on a particular understood in this way – is of course a histori- aspect of behaviour, the form imposed by the cally and geographically specific process attended influence of scarcity. (Robbins 1984/1932, by contentious political struggles. Markets are not 16–17) pregiven by nature but must be produced, and the state necessarily plays a major role in that produc- But this formalism also contained the potential tion. It is in this role that Michel Foucault (2007) for almost infinite expansion as scarcity came to identified the origins of modern governmental characterize – or could be understood to charac- power – government based on an “apparatus of terize – a proliferating diversity of phenomena. “Economics is entirely neutral between ends security” rather than on a juridical-disciplinary … in so far as the achievement of any end is system – which he traced to debates about food dependent on scarce means, it is germane to scarcity in eighteenth-century France. There, as the preoccupations of the ” (Robbins in United Kingdom, older measures to keep food 1984/1932, 24; emphasis in the original). Even prices low began to backfire by inhibiting pro- exchange was “subsidiary to the main fact of duction and trade; what was needed was policies scarcity” (Robbins 1984/1932, 20): an individ- to foster and manage circulation. According to ual’s time, for example, could be economized in Foucault (2007, 41–42), a profound shift in the choices about how to “spend” it, provided time meaning of government pivoted on scarcity: were made or perceived to be scarce. Modern also rests on the scarcity pos- It means allowing prices to rise where their tulate, applied at the scale of aggregate output, tendency is to rise. We allow the phenomenon which is constrained by of dearness-scarcity to be produced and develop to capital and labor (Cobb and Douglas 1928; on such and such a market, on a whole series Solow 1956). of markets, and this phenomenon, this real- ity which we have allowed to develop, will Scarcity in neoclassical economics naturalizes itself entail precisely its own self-curbing and more than just a particular model of rationality: self-regulation. So there will no longer be any “It also universalizes a particular set of insti- scarcity in general, on condition that for a whole tutions – property and markets – which are series of people, in a whole series of markets, deemed to be natural results of scarcity” (Xenos there was some scarcity, some dearness, some dif- 1989, 72). Focusing on exchange-value (price) ficulty in buying wheat, and consequently some hunger, and it may well be that some people die to the exclusion of use-value affords neoclassical of hunger after all. But by letting these people economics the apparent objectivity of quantita- die of hunger one will be able to make scarcity a tive methods based on the universal abstraction chimera and prevent it occurring in this massive

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form of the scourge typical of the previous commodity form is imposed on an ever-growing systems. array of inputs and outputs. As Kloppenburg (1988) shows in the case of seeds, scarcity need For Foucault, this was not merely a question not be based on actual physical dearth: all that of markets and economics. It also shifted the is required is that private property claims be target or focus of government actions from established to some good, and that others be individuals to the population; individuals were compelled by law, technology, or other circum- henceforth “no longer pertinent as the objec- stance to recognize those claims and purchase tive, but simply as the instrument, relay, or that good in the market. condition for obtaining something at the level Actual physical dearth can also be produced by of the population” (Foucault 2007, 42). Mod- the very market processes that benefit from it, ern power seeks not to dictate or to proscribe and the neoclassical economists’ narrow focus on specific individuals’ actions, but to establish price plays an instrumental role in this dynamic. general conditions that encourage behaviors that Resources that are abundant or freely available, collectively ensure the smooth operation of a and therefore not economized, can nonethe- market society. This suggests that the Malthusian less be brought into production for exchange, emphasis on population was not coincidental but directly as raw materials or indirectly as condi- internally related to both scarcity and political tions of production (e.g., sinks for pollution), and economy. Foucault’s idea of “governmentality” these actions can cumulatively degrade or reduce is strikingly parallel, in the realms of law and the resources in question to the point that they government, to the scarcity postulate of neoclas- become scarce at local or larger scales. Or, short sical economics, extending it into the subjective of actual scarcity, such actions can prompt mea- dispositions suited to a society structured by the sures to enclose the resources and assign property economizing logics of market exchange: rights to them, effectively turning them into eco- scarcity operates as a principle of rule and of nomic goods subject to the logic of scarcity. Such personal conduct. Indeed, one might say that measures are often taken under the sign of the scarcity represents a sort of precondition for “tragedy of the commons” thesis, according to the modern, an epistemological principle on which the absence of property rights, rather than which our lives are built. It operates as part of a powerful discursive formation of the modern the market forces that motivate overexploitation, world. (Watts 2005, 99) is the cause of environmental degradation. Neoclassical economic theorizing about mar- The Enclosure Acts are the most famous instance ket effects on unenclosed (uneconomized) of what Marx termed “primitive” or original resources has often employed fisheries (Gordon accumulation, which can be understood as 1954) and pastures (Coase 1960) as exemplars the making scarce of the means of production and touchstones from which to draw con- (including land) and subsistence (including food) clusions for broader application. In a more through commodification (including the com- recent variant, economists understand free or modification of labor, which brings scarcity to nonpriced “ecosystem services” as “exter- bear on time itself). But as Foucault suggests, nalities” that should be “internalized” into the realization of scarcity encompasses much market signals through the assignment of prices. more. Scholars have shown that primitive accu- Costanza et al. (2014), for example, calculate mulation is an ongoing process by which the that the value of the world’s ecosystem services

5 SCARCITY dwarfs official global economic output, and the international family planning programs (includ- Millennium Ecosystem Assessment prescribes ing coercive sterilization campaigns in places like internalization as the solution to addressing India). Paul Ehrlich’s famous book The Population global environmental problems (even though it Bomb (1968), commissioned and published by the attributes most of those problems to industrial- Sierra Club, helped consolidate population as a ization and globalization). The related concept defining concern of emergent environmentalism. of “natural capital” equates the ecological with Economists countered with studies that showed the economic: nature becomes capital, and vice declining real costs for natural resources based versa, and the conservation of one becomes on technological innovation and substitution; identical with the conservation of the other. But Barnett and Morse (1963), for example, could as Robertson (2006) has shown, the practices not find evidence of increasing scarcity in US of measurement and abstraction necessary to natural resources except in the case of forestry. commodify nature are riddled with weaknesses In the 1970s, neo-Malthusians turned to and may well make matters worse. systems analysis and computer-based modeling Neo-Malthusianism arose in parallel to, but to assess the prospects for continued economic distinct from, the consolidation of neoclassi- growth at a global scale. The most famous result cal economics in the mid-twentieth century. was The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), Broadly speaking, neo-Malthusians focused on which predicted the collapse of the modern the use-values of the natural world, beginning world economy within a century. Although from the axiomatic observation that the Earth more sophisticated than Malthus’s principle of is finite, and deducing that a growing human population, the Limits model ultimately reflected population must inevitably run up against the the same mathematical disparity between arith- limits thereof. Progressive era conservation and metic and geometric (or exponential) growth. the emerging science of ecology, coupled with The book provoked raging debates, in which the catastrophic spectacle of the Dust Bowl, pro- mainstream economists attacked the model on vided intellectual and political traction for these technical grounds while insisting that economic views, often expounded (then and now) in the progress would solve environmental prob- rubric of carrying capacity (Sayre 2008). In Road lems and extend the limits of available natural to Survival, William Vogt (1948) defined carrying resources. Growing prosperity, they argued, capacity as the ratio of “biotic potential” to would also lead to growing concern about envi- “environmental resistance” – more encompass- ronmental quality and political momentum to ing, but otherwise analogous to Malthus’s pairing protect it – the so-called environmental Kuznets of population growth and agricultural produc- curve. In response, the original Limits authors tion. Early neo-Malthusians were also strongly twice refined and updated their model, reaching influenced by eugenics, which subsequent broadly similar conclusions as before. Others proponents euphemized and transmuted into have built similar models to calculate the “eco- theories of modernization and development. logical footprint” of human activities, calibrated During the Cold War, fears that population by the number of planets identical to Earth that growth and resulting food shortages would would be needed to support those activities favor communism in the developing world indefinitely; values over 1.0 were reached, they helped motivate both the Green Revolution claim, in the late twentieth century (Wacker- (to modernize agriculture and raise yields) and nagel and Rees 1996) – a conclusion that critics

6 SCARCITY might understandably see as proof that the model that, whether real or imagined, scarcity makes must be wrong. people “less insightful, less forward-thinking, The dominant debates about scarcity today less controlled” (Mullainathan and Shafir 2013, cleave along the same lines as they did circa 1970: 14). The idea of scarcity causes people to either has already exceeded misapprehend their and misallocate (or will inevitably exceed) the limits of a finite their attention and resources, leading to self- Earth, or human ingenuity, motivated by market perpetuating “scarcity traps”: the poor become and opportunity, will extend those poorer, the busy become busier, and so on. This limits indefinitely. What both sides of the debate is presented not as a threat to the fundamental share, perhaps unwittingly, is an obsession with premise of neoclassical economics, however, nor scarcity as the unquestioned lens through which as a critique of the society that scarcity thinking to examine modern society. Lost are the voices has helped to produce, but as a useful insight that of those who have challenged scarcity itself, whether as a flawed basis for economic reasoning “sheds new light on how we might go about and policy (e.g., Leon Keyserling, who helped managing our scarcity” (Mullainathan and Shafir design the New Deal) or as an anachronism 2013, 15). Scarcity is taken not as a postulate, but rendered obsolete by the miracles of modern as an unavoidable, ubiquitous, universal reality technology (e.g., ecological anarchist Murray of the modern world. Bookchin). Equally invisible are the views of the The most prominent challenge to scarcity man who designed the original Limits to Growth thinking was mounted by , who model, pioneer systems analyst Jay Forrester insisted that any shortage – whether of food, (1971) of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, land, income, or jobs – could only be understood who concluded in a separate monograph that in relational terms, and that the root cause of industrialization was the root cause of both pop- imbalances in capitalist society was not scarcity ulation growth and environmental problems, and but overabundance or surplus. If there were too that restraining economic development might many people relative to available jobs, it was not therefore be the best solution. Demographers due to any “natural” human propensity to breed, have concluded that there is no fixed carrying but to excessive amounts of capital that had capacity of Earth for humans; their projections been amassed and transformed into machinery indicate, with significant confidence, that the that displaced laborers. The resulting oversupply human population will stabilize this century for of laborers – the industrial reserve army of the reasons unrelated to food supplies. Yet main- unemployed – depressed wages, rendering the stream debates continue to focus on “feeding 9 billion by 2050,” as though alleviating hunger poor vulnerable to high prices for food and were a matter of increased production rather other necessities. Even for capitalists, the threat than more equitable . of overproduction – which can cause prices In this light, it is supremely ironic that the to collapse and profits to evaporate – has been emerging field of , con- a greater threat than scarcity in the history of ducted squarely within the neoclassical tradition, capitalist natural resources extraction, as Huber has produced clinical evidence that the per- (2011) has shown for the case of oil. Perhaps ception of scarcity can interfere with rational the path to addressing modern scarcity begins by thought. A large body of research indicates thinking about its opposite.

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SEE ALSO: Commodification of nature; LeMahieu, D.L. 1979. “Malthus and the Theology of Environment and resources, political economy Scarcity.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 40: 467–474. of; Environment and the state; Environmental Malthus, Thomas Robert. 1800. An Investigation of the degradation; Environmental valuation; Cause of the Present High Price of Provisions. London: Environmentality and green governmentality; Davis, Taylor, and Wilks. ; Food security; Governmentality; Malthus, Thomas Robert. 2004. An Essay on the Prin- ciple of Population, 2nd edn (ed. Philip Appleman). Modernity; Natural resources; New York: Norton. (Original work published in and the environment; Population growth; 1798.) Population and natural resources; Poverty; Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Property and environment Randers, and William W. Behrens III. 1972. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books. Mullainathan, Sendhil, and . 2013. References Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.New York: Times Books. Barnett, Harold J., and Chandler Morse. 1963. Scarcity Polanyi, Karl. 1957. The Great Transformation: The and Growth: The Economics of Natural Resource Avail- Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: ability. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Beacon Press. (Original work published in 1944.) Burke, Edmund. 1800. Thoughts and Details on Scarcity. Robbins, Lionel. 1984. An Essay on the Nature London: Bristol Selected Pamphlets. (Original and Significance of Economic Science, 3rd edn. New work published in 1795.) York: NYU Press. (Original work published in Coase, R.H. 1960. “The Problem of .” 1932.) Journal of ,3:1–44. Robertson, Morgan M. 2006. “The Nature that Cap- Cobb, Charles W., and Paul H. Douglas. 1928. “A ital Can See: Science, State, and Market in the Theory of Production.” American Economic Review, Commodification of Ecosystem Services.” Environ- 18: 139–165. ment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24: 367–387. Costanza, Robert, Rudolf de Groot, Paul Sutton, Sayre, Nathan F. 2008. “The Genesis, History, and et al. 2014. “Changes in the Global Value of Limits of Carrying Capacity.” Annals of the Asso- Ecosystem Services.” Global Environmental Change, ciation of American Geographers, 98: 120–134. 26: 152–158. Solow, Robert M. 1956. “A Contribution to the Forrester, Jay W. 1971. World Dynamics.Cambridge, Theory of Economic Growth.” Quarterly Journal of MA: Wright-Allen Press. Economics, 70: 65–94. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Vogt, William. 1948. Road to Survival.NewYork:W. Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978 (ed. Sloane Associates. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell). New Wackernagel, M., and W.E. Rees. 1996. Our Ecological York: Palgrave Macmillan. Footprint. Philadelphia: New Society. Gordon, H. Scott. 1954. “The Economic Theory of a Watts, Michael. 2005. “Reflections: Scarcity, Moder- Common-Property Resource: The Fishery.” Jour- nity, Terror.” In Making Threats: Biofears and Envi- nal of Political Economy, 62: 124–142. ronmental Anxieties, edited by Betsy Hartmann, Huber, Matthew T. 2011. “Enforcing Scarcity: Oil, Banu Subramaniam, and Charles Zerner, 99–106. Violence, and the Making of the Market.” Annals Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. of the Association of American Geographers, 101: Xenos, Nicholas. 1989. Scarcity and Modernity. Lon- 816–826. don: Routledge. Kloppenburg, Jack, Jr. 1988. First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492–2000.Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press.

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