Scarcity

What is so poignant is that things could be otherwise. We don't in fact live in a world of Malthusian scarcity. Far from it. I mean - and please forgive me for this abstraction but you know why I use it - think of "nature's mighty feast". And yet the history of modernity is the history of enclosure, of the cutting off of people from access to land, to the common treasury and to the fruits of our own labour. Excluded by fire and sword and now "structural adjustment". Everywhere you look, there nothing much natural about it, this kind of scarcity. It's a story of artifice and force. No wonder the fables offered us by modernity's clerisy are the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons. The premises of economics are a disgrace, and so are all the proliferating offspring of Malthus.

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