Scarce Resources Quotes

Love isn't some scarce resource to battle over. Love can be infinite, as much as your heart can open.

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

Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.

Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worth of punishment (sodomy, marijuana use, homosexuality, the killing of blastocysts, etc). And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing stem cell research, etc). This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics. It is time we found a more reasonable approach to answering questions of right and wrong.

Where does jealousy come from, if not an insecurity that I'll lose you because of him? But that's not how it works, no matter how many people believe it so. You're not something to be kept or taken, and love isn't some scarce resource to battle over. Love can be infinite , as much as your heart can open. I mean, when you think about it, love is fueled mostly by compatibility. Whether two people make each other happy by being close. So it'd be pointless of me to resent Shimin. However compatible you are with him, it doesn't have anything to do with how compatible you are with me.

The feeling of being in competition for scarce resources has powerfully motivating properties.

They are a testament not only to the Afghans' hunger for literacy, but also to their willingness to pour scarce resources into this effort, even during a time of war. I have seen children studying in classrooms set up inside animal sheds, windowless basements, garages, and even an abandoned public toilet. We ourselves have run schools out of refugee tents, shipping containers, and the shells of bombed-out Soviet armored personnel carriers. The thirst for education over there is limitless. The Afghans want their children to go to school because literacy represents what neither we not anyone else has so far managed to offer them: hope, progress, and the possibility of controlling their own destiny.

The pure (libertarian) socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The scarce resource is no longer money. It’s human ability.

Parents with dependents are somehow thought to count for more. If, for example, there is some scarce resource—a donor kidney perhaps—and of the two potential recipients one is a parent of young children and one is not, the parent, all things being equal, will likely be favoured. To let a parent die is not only to thwart that person’s preference to be saved, but also the preferences of his or her children that their parent be saved. It is quite true, of course, that the death of the parent will harm more people, but there is nonetheless something to be said against favouring parents. Increasing one’s value by having children might be like increasing one’s value by taking hostages.

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

With increasing distance, our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly. Eventually, we reach the dim boundary—the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation.

Meanwhile, time is one of our most scarce resources. At the moment, you are reading instead of working, playing with the dog, applying to law school, shopping for groceries, or having sex. Life is about trade-offs, and so is economics.

Those who favor a “grand plan” over experimentation fail to understand the role that failed experiments play in creating progress in society. Failures quickly and efficiently signal what doesn’t work, minimizing waste and redirecting scarce resources to what does work. A market economy is an experimental discovery process, in which business failures are inevitable and any attempt to eliminate them only ensures even greater failures.

Poverty is a mindset: It creates that sense of scarcity. You then become accustomed to it such that your life is hinged on protecting the scarce resources that you have. However, you can only create a mindset of abundance by investing what you have and not savings. Savings only becomes significant if it's done with a motive to invest.

Just as price fluctuations allocate scarce resources which have alternative uses, price controls which limit those fluctuations reduce the incentives for individuals to limit their own use of scarce resources desired by others.

No one could decrypt a mother better than her own children, who had shared her body and therefore knew all of her secrets, anxieties, shortcomings, and buttons to push. Estefania feared nothing more than the betrayal of someone she accommodated and gave life to with her scarce resources.

Felt-tip markers, always a scarce resource even on Earth, became objects of great value as people used them to mark directions on the walls of hamster tubes and habitat modules.

But pitting individuals against each other in a competition for scarce resources (such as bonuses) will destroy hivishness, trust, and morale.

It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion—to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious taboos, and religious diversions of scarce resources—is what makes the honest criticism of religious faith a moral and intellectual necessity. Unfortunately, expressing such criticism places the nonbeliever at the margins of society. By merely being in touch with reality, he appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.

Let’s call it the scarcity diversion. Here’s the playbook. First, allow elites to hoard a resource like money or land. Second, pretend that arrangement is natural, unavoidable—or better yet, ignore it altogether. Third, attempt to address social problems caused by the resource hoarding only with the scarce resources left over. So instead of making the rich pay all their taxes, for instance, design a welfare state around the paltry budget you are left with when they don’t. Fourth, fail. Fail to drive down the poverty rate. Fail to build more affordable housing. Fifth, claim this is the best we can do. Preface your comments by saying, “In a world of scarce resources…” Blame government programs. Blame capitalism. Blame the other political party. Blame immigrants. Blame anyone you can except those who most deserve it. “Gaslighting” is not too strong a phrase to describe such pretense.

When we believe there is not enough, that resources are scarce, then we accept that some will have what they need and some will not. We rationalize that someone is destined to end up with the short end of the stick.

To live means to experience-through doing, feeling, thinking. Experience takes place in time, so time is the ultimate scarce resource we have. Over the years, the content of experience will determine the quality of life. Therefore one of the most essential decisions any of us can make is about how one's time is allocated or invested.

Even in the wilderness with scarce resources, God mandates a pause for Sabbath for the community:

love isn’t some scarce resource to battle over. Love can be infinite, as much as your heart can open.

Where does jealousy come from, if not an insecurity that I'll lose you because of him? But that's not how it works, no matter how many people believe it so. You're not something to be kept or taken, and love isn't some scarce resource to battle over. Love can be infinite, as much as your heart can open. I mean, when you think about it, love is fueled mostly by compatibility. Whether two people make each other happy by being close. So it'd be pointless of me to resent Shimin. However compatible you are with him, it doesn't have anything to do with how compatible you are with me.

As I learned about the consequences of my food choices and as I recognized that I didn't have to eat animals, and that eating animals caused the animals to suffer, it caused an enormous footprint on our planet, and it wasn't healthy, it made since to go vegan. And, it's one of the best decisions I've ever made, and I think most people who've decided to go vegan share a similar experience. It's very empowering. And, when I went vegan I actually started eating a wide variety of foods I had never tried before. Different ethnic foods. You also start combining things in different ways, you start becoming more creative in the kitchen. But I went vegan just because it seemed to make sense, and it was aligned with my own values, because I didn't want to support this system that was so abusive to animals, and wasting and squandering so many scarce resources on our planet. And it was also healthier, so it was in my interest to eat food that was plant-based instead of animal-based. Living a vegan lifestyle makes a lot of sense.

In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident. As one who speaks on religion, I constantly hear how cruel and aggressive it has been, a view that, eerily, is expressed in the same way almost every time: “Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history.” I have heard this sentence recited like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics. It is an odd remark. Obviously the two world wars were not fought on account of religion. When they discuss the reasons people go to war, military historians acknowledge that many interrelated social, material, and ideological factors are involved, one of the chief being competition for scarce resources. Experts on political violence or terrorism also insist that people commit atrocities for a complex range of reasons.3 Yet so indelible is the aggressive image of religious faith in our secular consciousness that we routinely load the violent sins of the twentieth century onto the back of “religion” and drive it out into the political wilderness.

But for most trees, height is all about getting more sun. A forest is an intensely competitive place, and sunlight is a scarce but critical resource. And even when you’re a redwood, the tallest of all tree species, you still have to worry about getting enough sun because you’re in a forest of other redwoods. Often a species’ most important competitor is itself. Thus the redwood is locked in an evolutionary arms race—or in this case, a “height race”—with itself. It grows tall because other redwoods are tall, and if it doesn’t throw most of its effort into growing upward as fast as possible, it will literally wither and die in the shadows of its rivals.

If economies collapse and lawlessness rules and resources are scarce, many people who claim with their mouths that they follow Jesus... will abandon him with their lives.

Any degree of waste is too much.

Your most scarce resource is focus.

A right of free speech is not an “economically free” right. It uses scarce resources.

In running over the pages of our history for seven hundred years, we shall scarcely find a single great event which has not promoted equality of condition. The Crusades and the English wars decimated the nobles and divided their possessions: the municipal corporations introduced democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the invention of fire-arms equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post-office brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace; and Protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven. The discovery of America opened a thousand new paths to fortune, and led obscure adventurers to wealth and power.

until the late twentieth century—the scarce resource in business was financial capital. If you had it, you had the means to create more wealth, and if you didn’t, you didn’t. That world is now gone.

Investing scarce resources in large-scale public projects and capital goods does increase output, but it does not contribute to economic progress if these investments do not produce things people value.

How does the economist help? By promoting policies that rely, whenever possible, on self-interest rather than altruism or moral considerations, the economist saves society from squandering its scarce supply of virtue. “If we economists do [our] business well,” Robertson concludes, “we can, I believe, contribute mightily to the economizing … of that scarce resource Love,” the “most precious thing in the world.”49

What constitutes the practical and realistic limit to the quantity of any resource is always the amount of human time that is directed toward producing it, as that is the only real scarce resource (until the creation of bitcoin).

Since Garrett Hardin's challenging article in "Science" (1968), the expression "the tragedy of the commons" has come to symbolize the degradation of the environment to be expected whenever many individuals use a scarce resource in common.

Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on central coordination rahter than anarchy within the comunal body.

It's not that racism doesn't exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate because of color and gender, religion and national origin. It's just that I rarely worry about those things because there's a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every second of the day. Racism is a luxury in a world where resources are scarce, where economic competition is an armed sport, in a world where even the atmosphere is plotting against you. In an arena like that racism is more of a halftime entertainment, a favorite sitcom when the day is done.

The career world is like an ecological system: People occupy particular fields within which they must compete for resources and survival. The more people there are crowded into a space, the harder it becomes to thrive there. Working in such a field will tend to wear you out as you struggle to get attention, to play the political games, to win scarce resources for yourself. You spend so much time at these games that you have little time left over for true mastery. You are seduced into such fields because you see others there making a living, treading the familiar path. You are not aware of how difficult such a life can be.

Plenty of information leads to scarcity of attention. When people are overwhelmed with the volume of information confronting them, it is hard to know what to focus on. Attention rather than information becomes the scarce resource and those who can distinguish valuable information from background clutter gain power.

Years before this country had a significant black and immigrant presence, there was an entrenched class hierarchy. The people who maintain these class divisions didn't care about those on the bottom rung then, and they don't care now. But immigration blamers encourage you to point to your neighbour and convince yourself that they are the problem, rather than question where wealth is concentrated in this country and exactly why resources are so scarce. And the people who push this rhetoric couldn't care less either way, just as long as you're not pointing the finger at them. It isn't right to suggest that every win for race equality results in a loss for white working-class people.

The absolute authority of market forces would be enshrined as the ultimate source of imperative control, displacing democratic contest and deliberation with an ideology of atomized individuals sentenced to perpetual competition for scarce resources. The disciplines of competitive markets promised to quiet unruly individuals and even transform them back into subjects too preoccupied with survival to complain.

New York City manages expertly, and with marvelous predictability, whatever it considers humanly important. Fax machines, computers, automated telephones and even messengers on bikes convey a million bits of data through Manhattan every day to guarantee that Wall Street brokers get their orders placed, confirmed, delivered, at the moment they demand. But leaking roofs cannot be fixed and books cannot be gotten into Morris High in time to meet the fall enrollment. Efficiency in educational provision for low-income children, as in health care and most other elementals of existence, is secreted and doled out by our municipalities as if it were a scarce resource. Like kindness, cleanliness and promptness of provision, it is not secured by gravity of need but by the cash, skin color and class status of the applicant.

An animal moves as a coordinated whole, as a unit. Subjectively I feel like a unit, not a colony. This is to be expected. Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on central coordination rather than anarchy within the communal body.

immigration blamers encourage you to point to your neighbour and convince yourself that they are the problem, rather than question where wealth is concentrated in this country, and exactly why resources are so scarce. And the people who push this rhetoric couldn’t care less either way, just as long as you’re not pointing the finger at them. It isn’t right to suggest that every win for race equality results in a loss for white working-class people. When socially mobile black people manage to penetrate white-dominated spheres, they often try to put provisions in place (like diversity schemes) to bring others up with them.

When in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government. It would seem, by the exterior appearance of such countries, that all was happiness; but there lies hidden from the eye of common observation, a mass of wretchedness, that has scarcely any other chance, than to expire in poverty or infamy. Its entrance into life is marked with the presage of its fate; and until this is remedied, it is in vain to punish. Civil government does not exist in executions; but in making such provision for the instruction of youth and the support of age, as to exclude, as much as possible, profligacy from the one and despair from the other. Instead of this, the resources of a country are lavished upon kings, upon courts, upon hirelings, impostors and prostitutes; and even the poor themselves, with all their wants upon them, are compelled to support the fraud that oppresses them. Why is it that scarcely any are executed but the poor? The fact is a proof, among other things, of a wretchedness in their condition. Bred up without morals, and cast upon the world without a prospect, they are exposed sacrifice of vice and legal barbarity. The millions that are superfluously wasted upon governments are more than sufficient to reform those evils, and to benefit the condition of every man in a nation, not included within the purlieus of a court. This I hope to make appear in the progress of this work. It is the nature of compassion to associate with misfortune. In taking up this subject I seek no recompense - I fear no consequence. Fortified with that proud integrity, that disdains to triumph or to yield, I will advocate the Rights of Man.

How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred—by economic inequity—faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices.

Adults tend to forget – or perhaps never appreciated in the first place if lifelong non-readers themselves – what a vital part of the process rereading is for children. As adults, rereading seems like backtracking at best, self-indulgence at worst. Free time is such a scarce resource that we feel we should be using it only on new things. But for children, rereading is absolutely necessary. The act of reading is itself still new. A lot of energy is still going into (not so) simple decoding of words and the assimilation of meaning. Only then do you get to enjoy the plot – to begin to get lost in the story. And only after you are familiar with the plot are you free to enjoy, mull over, break down and digest all the rest. The beauty of a book is that it remains the same for as long as you need it. It’s like being able to ask a teacher or parent to repeat again and again some piece of information or point of fact you haven’t understood with the absolute security of knowing that he/she will do so infinitely. You can’t wear out a book’s patience. And for a child there is so much information in a book, so much work to be done within and without. You can identify with the main or peripheral character (or parts of them all). You can enjoy the vicarious satisfaction of their adventures and rewards. You also have a role to play as interested onlooker, able to observe and evaluate participants’ reactions to events and to each other with a greater detachment, and consequent clarity sometimes, than they can. You are learning about people, about relationships, about the variety of responses available to them and in many more situations and circumstances (and at a much faster clip) than one single real life permits. Each book is a world entire. You’re going to have to take more than one pass at it.

Forgiveness The wise are comparably realistic about other people. They recognize the extraordinary pressure everyone is under to pursue their own ambitions, defend their own interests, and seek their own pleasures. It can make others appear extremely mean and purposefully evil, but this would be to overpersonalize the issue. The wise know that most hurt is not intentional but a by-product of the constant collision of blind competing egos in a world of scarce resources.

Dinah said, “Ivy, you want to take this or should I?” “I’ll do it. You’re busy,” Ivy said. Dinah could hear her twisting around in the pilot’s seat to look at Julia. She spoke as follows: “Julia. Shut up. If you say another fucking word I’ll stave your fucking head in and put your corpse out the airlock. Nothing about this is acceptable. Starting with the fact that you are flapping your gums, posing a distraction to Dinah while she is carrying out a difficult mission-critical operation to protect the Cloud Ark. You just attempted to countermand a direct order from Markus, who is in charge of everything here under the PSAPS clause of the Cloud Ark Constitution. You are up here illegally. The Crater Lake Accord specifically barred the sending of national leaders to the Cloud Ark. You have violated that commitment and found a way to be launched up here anyhow, and judging from the looks of it there was no end of dirty dealing along the way. Your vehicle approached the Cloud Ark in a manner incompatible with our safety and security procedures, endangering the lives of everyone up here, and forcing arklets and Izzy itself to expend priceless and irreplaceable fuel to perform evasive maneuvers. We were sent here on an emergency basis, placing ourselves in harm’s way and expending more scarce resources to clean up the mess that you created by your cowardly and dishonorable act. For all of these reasons I am commanding you, by my authority as the commander of this vessel, to remain silent until we have docked safely at Izzy.

The great danger posed by the automation of production, in the context of a world of hierarchy and scarce resources, is that it makes the great mass of people superfluous from the standpoint of the ruling elite. This is in contrast to capitalism, where the antagonism between capital and labor was characterized by both a clash of interests and a relationship of mutual dependence: the workers depend on capitalists as long as they don’t control the means of production themselves, while the capitalists need workers to run their factories and shops.

In former days, when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a Minister or the passion of a King, when they were fought by small regular armies of professional soldiers, and when their course was retarded by the difficulties of communication and supply, and often suspended by the winter season, it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other, each individual severally embittered and inflamed—when the resources of science and civilisation sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, an European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.

In a Communalist way of life, conventional economics, with its focus on prices and scarce resources, would be replaced by ethics, with its concern for human needs and the good life. Human solidarity - or philia, as the Greeks called it - would replace material gain and egotism. Municipal assemblies would become not only vital arenas for civic life and decision-making but centers where the shadowy world of economic logistics, properly coordinated production, and civic operations would be demystified and opened to the scrutiny and participation of the citizenry as a whole.

Desert strategies are useful: In times of drought, pull your resources inward; when water is scarce, find moisture in seeds; to stay strong and supple, send a taproot down deep; run when required, hide when necessary; when hot go underground; do not fear darkness, it's where one comes alive.

From the 1960s on, Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh realpolitik, one based on her experience: Looks mattered. If you got cut off from access to men and money - and from men as the route to money - you were dead in the water. Women were one another's competition, always. For half a century, this dark comedy of scarce resources had been her forte: many hands grasping, but only one golden ring. Rivers herself had fought hard for the token slot allotted to a female comic, yet she seemed thrown by a world in which that might no longer be necessary. Like Moses and the Promised Land, she couldn't cross over.

Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment (sodomy, marijuana use, homosexuality, the killing of blastocysts, etc.). And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing stem-cell research, etc). This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics.

It is in light of such overwhelming (and interesting) research that Anne Campbell questions the myth of the “coy female” and the myth of the “nonaggressive woman.” Campbell writes: It is ironic that some of these myths have been supported by the feminist movement, which has tried to insist that women’s aggression is exclusively a response to male violence. The idea that females could have survived without the motivation and ability to compete for scarce resources is, from an evolutionary viewpoint, untenable. Nonetheless, it is a viewpoint that is congenial to the continuance of male protection and control over women.

So it’s democracy versus capitalism at this point, friends, and we out on this frontier outpost of the human world are perhaps better positioned than anyone else to see this and to fight this global battle, there’s empty land here, there’s scarce and nonrenewable resources here, and we’re going to get swept up into the fight and we cannot choose not to be part of it, we are one of the prizes and our fate will be decided by what happens throughout the human world. That being the case, we had better band together for the common good, for Mars and for us and for all the people on earth and for the seven generations, it’s going to be hard it’s going to take years, and the stronger we are the better our chances, which is why I’m so happy to see that burning meteor in the sky pumping the matrix of life into our world, and why I’m so happy to see you all here to celebrate it together, a representative congress of all that I love in this world, but look I think that steel-drum band is ready to play aren’t you” (shouts of assent) “so why don’t you folks start and we’ll dance till dawn and tomorrow scatter on the winds and down the sides of this great mountain, to carry the gift everywhere.

In 2017 India’s nationalist government hoisted one of the largest flags in the world at Attari on the Indo-Pakistan border, in a gesture calculated to inspire neither renunciation nor disinterestedness, but rather Pakistani envy. That particular Tiranga was 36 metres long and 24 metres wide, and was hoisted on a 110-metre-high flag post (what would Freud have said about that?). The flag could be seen as far as the Pakistani metropolis of Lahore. Unfortunately, strong winds kept tearing the flag, and national pride required that it be stitched together again and again, at great cost to Indian taxpayers.11 Why does the Indian government invest scarce resources in weaving enormous flags, instead of building sewage systems in Delhi’s slums? Because the flag makes India real in a way that sewage systems do not.

It is not easy to determine whether there are any who still adhere in good faith to the doctrine that traces back the depreciation of money to the activity of speculators. The doctrine is an indispensable instrument of the lowest form of demagogy; it is the resource of governments in search of a scapegoat. There are scarcely any independent writers nowadays who defend it; those who support it are paid to do so.

Instead of focusing on getting more resources, tipping point leaders concentrate on multiplying the value of the resources they have. When it comes to scarce resources, there are three factors of disproportionate influence that executives can leverage to dramatically free resources, on the one hand, and multiply the value of resources, on the other. These are hot spots, cold spots, and horse trading. Hot spots are activities that have low resource input but high potential performance gains. In contrast, cold spots are activities that have high resource input but low performance impact. In every organization, hot spots and cold spots typically abound. Horse trading involves trading your unit’s excess resources in one area for another unit’s excess resources to fill remaining resource gaps. By learning to use their current resources right, companies often find they can tip the resource hurdle outright. What

Barbara brings her chair close to mine. She says that, to the outside world, suicide could seem a rational choice for someone like her or me. After all, our shared diagnosis is terminal in many cases. “Anybody else contemplating suicide would receive intervention, because they’re assumed to be depressed and treatable. But you and me . . . ? Society is too quick to allow cripples to off themselves,” she says. In fact, society sometimes seems to encourage disabled people to get out of the way, stop being a burden or stop using up scarce resources, she goes on. It can push disabled people to the margins, where they naturally become depressed. And instead of identifying their depression as treatable—instead of creating opportunities that make their lives worth living—society (she calls it “the majority culture”) wants to push for the right to die before it’s established the right to live. “You know about Jack Kevorkian, right?” she asks.

One feature of our own society that seems decidedly anomalous is the matter of sexual advertisement, As we have seen, it is strongly to be expected on evolutionary grounds that, where the sexes differ, it should be the males that advertise and the females that are drab. Modern western man is undoubtedly exceptional in this respect. It is of course true that some men dress flamboyantly and some women dress drably but, on average, there can be no doubt that in our society the equivalent of the peacock's tail is exhibited by the female, not by the male. Women paint their faces and glue on false eyelashes. Apart from special cases, like actors, men do not. Women seem to be interested in their own personal appearance and are encouraged in this by their magazines and journals. Men's magazines are less preoccupied with male sexual attractiveness, and a man who is unusually interested in his own dress and appearance is apt to arouse suspicion, both among men and among women. When a woman is described in conversation, it is quite likely that her sexual attractiveness, or lack of it, will be prominently mentioned. This is true, whether the speaker is a man or a woman. When a man is described, the adjectives used are much more likely to have nothing to do with sex. Faced with these facts, a biologist would be forced to suspect that he was looking at a society in which females compete for males, rather than vice versa. In the case of birds of paradise, we decided that females are drab because they do not need to compete for males. Males are bright and ostentatious because females are in demand and can afford to be choosy. The reason female birds of paradise are in demand is that eggs are a more scarce resource than sperms. What has happened in modern western man? Has the male really become the sought-after sex, the one that is in demand, the sex that can afford to be choosy? If so, why?

Yet only the economic in the narrow sense will allow us to get beyond the economic. By redeploying the resources capitalism has so considerately stored up for us, socialism can allow the economic to take more of a backseat. It will not evaporate, but it will become less obtrusive. To enjoy a sufficiency of goods means not to have to think about money all the time. It frees us for less tedious pursuits. Far from being obsessed with economic matters, Marx saw them as a travesty of true human potential. He wanted society where the economic no longer monopolised so much time and energy. That our ancestors should have been so preoccupied with material matters is understandable. When you can produce only a slim economic surplus, or scarcely any surplus at all, you will perish without ceaseless hard labour. Capitalism, however, generates the sort of surplus that really could be used to increase leisure on a sizeable scale. The irony is that it creates this wealth in a way that demands constant accumulation and expansion, and thus constant labour. It also creates it in ways that generate poverty and hardship. It is a self-thwarting system. As a result, modern men and women, surrounded by an affluence unimaginable to hunter-gatherers, ancient slaves or feudal serfs, end up working as long and hard as these predecessors ever did. Marx's work is all about human enjoyment. The good life for him is not one of labour but of leisure.

The human brain's mechanism is intended to gather resources and seek threats, so anything that is repeated is likely to be ignored. Let's assume you're a very lovely and caring person, but you always feel that you don't get what you offer, that others don't appreciate you. It's because your act of compassion has been repeated, which a typical person's brain will automatically disregard. People who are highly conscious of how kindness is scarce are very unique, and those who are kind but aren't valued, don't ever change. Shine brightly.

it’s easy for businesses to increase supply in response to more spending. But as an economy moves closer to its full employment limit, real resources become increasingly scarce. Rising demand can begin to put pressure on prices, and bottlenecks can develop in industries that are experiencing the greatest strain on capacity. Inflation can heat up. Once the economy hits this full employment wall, any additional spending (not just government spending) will be inflationary. That’s overspending, and it can even happen if the government’s budget is balanced or in surplus.

The conventional understanding of meritocracy is that it is a system for awarding or allocating scarce resources to those who most deserve them. The idea behind meritocracy is that people should achieve status or realize the promise of upward mobility based on their individual talent or individual effort. It is conceived as a repudiation of systems like aristocracy where individuals inherit their social status. I am arguing that many of the criteria we associate with individual talent and effort do not measure the individual in isolation but rather parallel the phenomena associated with aristocracy; what we're calling individual talent is actually a function of that individual's social position or opportunities gained by virtue of family and ancestry. So, although the system we call "meritocracy" is presumed to be more democratic and egalitarian than aristocracy, it is in fact reproducing that which it was intended to dislodge. Michael Young, a British sociologist, created the term in 1958 when he wrote a science fiction novel called The Rise of Meritocracy. The book was a satire in which he depicted a society where people in power could legitimate their status using "merit" as the justificatory terminology and in which others could be determined not simply to have been poor or left out but to be deservingly disenfranchised.

I have not attempted to cover all aspects of the ethics of in vitro fertilization and embryo experimentation. To do that, it would be necessary to investigate several other issues, including the appropriateness of allocating scarce medical resources to this area at a time when the world has a serious problem of overpopulation. Further uses of IVF, such as donating or selling embryos to others, employing a surrogate to bear the child, using IVF to enable older women to have children (in 2008, a 70-year-old Indian woman used the technique to become the oldest woman reliably recorded as having had a child), or selecting from among a number of embryos for the one that meets some criteria of genetic desirability, raise separate ethical issues.

The United States must play a counterrevolutionary containment role in order to protect our national interests?' This is true only if we equate "our national interests" with the investment interests of high finance. U.S. interventionism has been very effective in building neo-imperialism, keeping the land, labor, natural resources, and markets of Third World countries available at bargain prices to multinational corporations. But these corporate interests do not represent the interests of the U.S. people. The public pays for the huge military budgets and endures the export of its jobs to foreign labor markets, the inflow of thousands of impoverished immigrants who compete for scarce employment and housing, and various other costs of empire.

Abundance and scarcity In a society where value is created by the manufacture of goods or the allocation of limited resources, it’s not a surprise that organizations seek scarcity. We hesitate to share, because if I give you this, then I don’t have it any more. We erect barriers and create rules to make it difficult for some people to have access to these limited resources. While we don’t set out to become miserly, it’s an economic instinct, because what’s yours is no long mine. Even though we give lip service to sharing when kids show up for kindergarten classes, most of school is organized around the same ideas. We rank students, we cut players from the roster, we grade on a curve. Success, we teach, is scarce. Our new economy, though, is based on abundance, the abundance that comes from ideas and access. If I benefit when everyone knows my idea, then the more people I give the idea to, the better we all do. If I benefit when I earn a reputation leading, connecting and creating positive change, then I’ll benefit if I can offer these insights to anyone who can benefit from them. With an abundance mindset, we intentionally create goods that can be shared. It’s not based on our traditional factory-based economy, but it works now (in fact, it’s just about all that works)… engaging with the mesh, building communities that benefit from sharing resources instead of destroying them is a strategy that scales. With an abundance mindset, we create ideas and services that do better when people share.

A consociational democracy exists when the class interests of the ruling elite in preserving a unitary multi-ethnic state prevail over countervailing interests to break the state down into ethnic components. The consociational democracy is a special case of bourgeois democracy, a state run by a capitalist technocratic, bureaucratic elite supposedly representative institutions elected officials and other paraphenalia of parliamentarism. In a plural society however, where primordial attachments to ethnic collectivities compete with class affiliation, the illusion of democracy can only be maintained if the elite itself is multi-ethnic and in proportion approximating those of constituent ethnes in the general population. If that condition is not met, then the political system is perceived by the under-represented group as undemocratic, dominated by the over-represented group or groups. Proportionality at the elite level is thus a key feature of consociational democracies, for it is true proportionality that preserve the democratic fiction of representativeness and thus its own legitimacy. If one accepts the principle of ethnic representation, then the ethnicity of a member of the ruling class contains a validation of the right to rule. An essential corollary of the ethnic proportionality of such systems is the muting of class conflicts to the extent that ethnic sentiments are politicized, class consciousness is lowered. If the main line of cleavage in a society is ethnicity or some feature of it like religion or language. If the political game is seen primarily as an ethnic balancing act and the allocation of scarce resources, if there are no glaring disparities in ethnic representation at various class levels, it follows that the significance of class cleavages within each ethne is correspondingly decreased. Under such circumstances, the class interests of the multi-ethnic elite are best served by a system. The more politicized ethnicity becomes, the ethnicized the polity, the more attention is deflected from class conflicts and re-directed.

What is scarce? Surely time is scarce? This is true in the sense that we get only one life, but yet again there are ways in which competition and how we use our time can make us feel an artificial sense of time scarcity. Each time we are able to build on the work of others with confidence, each time we use the elements of life pulled from our commonwealth of agricultural knowledge, we bundle time, and so get the benefit of having multiple lifetimes. Each time nature uses genetic code that has been developed over millions of years, millions of years of development are collapsed into something that works in our lifetimes. Each time we add to that collection, we are putting our lifetimes' work into a useful form for the benefit of future generations. At the same time, yes, we each have only our own single lives in which to pursue happiness. The goal is to spend as much of that time in a framework of sharing abundance rather than having it squeezed into a life of scarcity and competition. In contrast, we need not look far to find lots of frustrating examples in which our time is treated as abundant when we would rather have it be valued as scarce. It happens each time we must stand in line at the DMV, fill out redundant forms at the hospital, reproduce others' efforts by spending time searching for knowledge or data that already exists somewhere, create a report that no one reads. In those cases, we are creating and living in artificial and unnecessary time scarcity. Time is indeed one of the most curious elements of life, especially since our lifetimes and those of plants and animals all move at different rates. We know, for example, that the urgency to address climate change is really on our human scale, not geologic scale. The Earth has been through greater upheavals and mass extinctions and will likely go through them again, but for the narrowest of narrow bands of human history on Earth, we require very specific conditions for us to continue to thrive as a species. To keep our planet within a habitable and abundant balance, we have, as Howard Buffet noted, only 'forty seasons' to learn and adjust. That is why building on one another's work is so important. One farmer can have the benefit of forty seasons and pass some of that experience down, but if 1,000 farmers do the same, there is the collective benefit of 1,000 years in a single year. If a million people participate, then a million years of collective experience are available. If we are then able to compound knowledge across generations and deepen our understanding of human and natural history, we add even greater richness. It is in this way of bundling our experiences for continual improvement, with compound interest, that time shifts from a scarce resource to being far less of a constraint, if not truly abundant. However, for time to be compounded, knowledge must be shared, and real resources, energy, and infrastructure must exist and function to support and grow our commonwealth of knowledge.

Two kinds of development help explain how a readiness built up to kill all Jews, including women and children. One is a series of “dress rehearsals” that served to lower inhibitions and provided trained personnel hardened for anything. First came the euthanasia of incurably ill and insane Germans, begun on the day when World War II began. Nazi eugenics theory had long provided a racial justification for getting rid of “inferior” persons. War provided a broader justification for reducing the drain of “useless mouths” on scarce resources. The “T-4” program killed more than seventy thousand people between September 1939 and 1941, when, in response to protests from the victims’ families and Catholic clergy, the matter was left to local authorities. Some of the experts trained in this program were subsequently transferred to the occupied east, where they applied their mass killing techniques to Jews. This time, there was less opposition. The second “dress rehearsal” was the work of the Einsatzgruppen, the intervention squads specially charged with executing the political and cultural elite of invaded countries. In the Polish campaign of September 1939 they helped wipe out the Polish intelligentsia and high civil service, evoking some opposition within the military command. In the Soviet campaign the Einsatzgruppen received the notorious “Commissar Order” to kill all Communist Party cadres as well as the Jewish leadership (seen as identical in Nazi eyes), along with Gypsies. This time the army raised no objections. The Einsatzgruppen subsequently played a major role, though they were far from alone, in the mass killings of Jewish women and children that began in some occupied areas in fall 1941. A third “dress rehearsal” was the intentional death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. It was on six hundred of them that the Nazi occupation authorities first tested the mass killing potential of the commercial insecticide Zyklon-B at Auschwitz on September 3, 1941. Most Soviet prisoners of war, however, were simply worked or starved to death. The second category of developments that helped prepare a “willingness to murder” consisted of blockages, emergencies, and crises that made the Jews become a seemingly unbearable burden to the administrators of conquered territories. A major blockage was the failure to capture Moscow that choked off the anticipated expulsion of all the Jews of conquered eastern Europe far into the Soviet interior. A major emergency was shortages of food supplies for the German invasion force. German military planners had chosen to feed the invasion force with the resources of the invaded areas, in full knowledge that this meant starvation for local populations. When local supplies fell below expectations, the search for “useless mouths” began. In the twisted mentality of the Nazi administrators, Jews and Gypsies also posed a security threat to German forces. Another emergency was created by the arrival of trainloads of ethnic Germans awaiting resettlement, for whom space had to be made available. Faced with these accumulating problems, Nazi administrators developed a series of “intermediary solutions.” One was ghettos, but these proved to be incubators for disease (an obsession with the cleanly Nazis), and a drain on the budget. The attempt to make the ghettos work for German war production yielded little except another category of useless mouths: those incapable of work. Another “intermediary solution” was the stillborn plan, already mentioned, to settle European Jews en masse in some remote area such as Madagascar, East Africa, or the Russian hinterland. The failure of all the “intermediary solutions” helped open the way for a “final solution”: extermination.

We’ve combined the jurda parem with a sedative that makes them more biddable. We’re still working out the correct ratios, but we’ll get there. Besides, by the second dose, the addiction does the work of controlling them.” “Not the first dose?” “Depends on the Grisha.” “How many times have you done this?” Brum laughed. “I haven’t counted. But trust me, she’ll be so desperate for more jurda parem, she won’t dare act against us. It’s a remarkable transformation. I think you’ll enjoy it.” Matthias’ stomach clenched. “You’ve kept the scientist alive then?” “He’s done his best to replicate the process of creating the drug, but it’s a complicated thing. Some batches work; others are no better than dust. As long as he can be of service, he lives.” Brum placed his hand on Matthias’ shoulder, his harsh gaze softening. “I can scarcely believe you’re really here, alive, standing before me. I thought you were dead.” “I believed the same of you.” “When I saw you in that ballroom, I barely recognized you, even in that uniform. You are so changed—” “I had to let the witch tailor me.” Brum’s revulsion was obvious. “You allowed her to—” Somehow, seeing that response in someone else made Matthias ashamed of the way he’d reacted to Nina. “It had to be done,” he said. “I needed her to believe I was committed to her cause.” “That’s all over now, Matthias. You are finally safe and among your own kind.” Brum frowned. “Something is troubling you.” Matthias looked into the cell next to Nina’s, then another, and another, moving down the hall as Brum followed. Some of the captive Grisha were agitated, pacing. Others had their faces pressed up against the glass. Others simply lay on the floor. “You can’t have known about parem for more than a month. How long has this facility been here?” “I had it built almost fifteen years ago with the blessing of the king and his council.” Matthias drew up short. “Fifteen years? Why?” “We needed someplace to put the Grisha after the trials.” “After? When Grisha are found guilty, they’re sentenced to death.” Brum shrugged. “It is still a death sentence, just one a little longer in the making. We discovered long ago that the Grisha could prove a useful resource.” A resource. “You told me they were to be eradicated. That they were a blight on the natural world.” “And they are—when they attempt to masquerade as men. They aren’t capable of right thinking, of human morality. They are meant to be controlled.

Life is strewn with these miracles, for which people who are in love can always hope. It is possible that this one had been artificially brought about by my mother who, seeing that for some time past I had lost all interest in life, may have suggested to Gilberte to write to me, just as, when I was little and went first to the sea-side, so as to give me some pleasure in bathing, which I detested because it took away my breath, she used secretly to hand to the man who was to ‘dip’ me marvellous boxes made of shells, and branches of coral, which I believed that I myself had discovered lying at the bottom of the sea. However, with every occurrence which, in our life and among its contrasted situations, bears any relation to love, it is best to make no attempt to understand it, since in so far as these are inexorable, as they are unlooked-for, they appear to be governed by magic rather than by rational laws. When a multi-millionaire—who for all his millions is quite a charming person—sent packing by a poor and unattractive woman with whom he has been living, calls to his aid, in his desperation, all the resources of wealth, and brings every worldly influence to bear without succeeding in making her take him back, it is wiser for him, in the face of the implacable obstinacy of his mistress, to suppose that Fate intends to crush him, and to make him die of an affection of the heart, than to seek any logical explanation. These obstacles, against which lovers have to contend, and which their imagination, over-excited by suffering, seeks in vain to analyse, are contained, as often as not, in some peculiar characteristic of the woman whom they cannot bring back to themselves, in her stupidity, in the influence acquired over her, the fears suggested to her by people whom the lover does not know, in the kind of pleasures which, at the moment, she is demanding of life, pleasures which neither her lover nor her lover’s wealth can procure for her. In any event, the lover is scarcely in a position to discover the nature of these obstacles, which her woman’y cunning hides from him and his own judgment, falsified by love, prevents him from estimating exactly. They may be compared with those tumours which the doctor succeeds in reducing, but without having traced them to their source. Like them these obstacles remain mysterious but are temporary. Only they last, as a rule, longer than love itself. And as that is not a disinterested passion, the lover who is no longer in love does not seek to know why the woman, neither rich nor virtuous, with whom he was in love refused obstinately for years to let him continue to keep her. Now the same mystery which often veils from our eyes the reason for a catastrophe, when love is in question, envelops just as frequently the suddenness of certain happy solutions, such as had come to me with Gilberte’s letter. Happy, or at least seemingly happy, for there are few solutions that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment of such a kind that every satisfaction which we can bring to it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion that we are healed.

Exploitation: early entrants make use of the wealth of opportunity in their environment to multiply. Most fail, not least because they are poorly-connected individuals facing a dangerous world on their own, but some may eventually build a system with potential and connectedness. This is known as the r phase: r has for many years been used as a label for the rate of growth of the population of an ecology (example of phase: young trees).2 2. Conservation: the system persists in its mature form, with the benefit of a complex structure of connections, strong enough now to resist challenges for a long time, but with the weakness that the connections themselves introduce an element of rigidity, slowing down its reactions and reducing its inventiveness. This is the K phase, where the ecology reaches its carrying capacity (example: mature trees).3 In due course, however, the tight connections themselves become a decisive problem, which can only be resolved by . . . The back loop (moving from bottom-right to top-left in the diagram): 3. . . . release: at this point, the cost and complication of maintaining the large scale—providing the resources the system needs, and disposing of its waste—becomes too great. The space and flexibility for local responsiveness had become scarce, the system itself so tightly connected that it locked: a target for predators without and within, against which it found it harder and harder to defend itself. But now the stresses join up, and the system collapses (example: dying trees). This is the omega (Ω) phase, as suggested by Holling and Gunderson, and it is placed by them in its ecological context: The tightly bound accumulation of biomass and nutrients becomes increasingly fragile (overconnected, in systems terms) until it is suddenly released by agents such as forest fires, droughts, insect pests, or intense pulses of grazing.4 4. Reorganisation: the remains of a system after collapse are unpromising material on which to start afresh, and yet they are an opportunity for a different kind of system to enjoy a brief flowering—decomposing the wood of a former forest, recycling the carbon after a fire, restoring the land with forgiving grass, clearing away the assumptions and grandeur of the previous regime. Reorganisation becomes a busy system in its own right (example: rotting trees). This is the alpha (α) phase.5 In this phase, there is a persistent process of disconnecting, with the former subsidiary parts of the system being broken up. But our diagram is drawn on a graph of potential (increasing from bottom to top) and connectedness (increasing from left to right), which allows us to note a curious aspect of this back loop: the defining relationship of the fore loop—where more potential is correlated with more connectedness—is reversed. In the back loop (even) less connectedness goes with more potential. How can this be?

Edge of Chaos argues that liberal democracies of the sort prevalent in the West simply cannot deliver this growth without substantial reform. Without fundamental changes, democratic politicians will struggle to address the numerous headwinds the global economy faces today. Indeed, the myopia within democracy leads to the misallocation of scarce resources, such as capital and labor, and shortsighted investment decisions by politicians and business. Ultimately, the myriad economic challenges are a manifestation of a corrosive problem in the democratic political process.

I try to do my bit by husbanding scarce resources in imaginative ways. For example, I prefer not to use the windscreen wipers at fast speed, even during storm conditions, favouring the slowest operational mode in order to avoid wear and tear on the windscreen wipers and the unnecessary expense of having to purchase replacements. This is difficult as sometimes the Volvo has a mind of its own and likes to override what it sees as the less competent driver in a chilling reminder of what the future will be when we have ceded control to artificial intelligence.

There can be a reserve demand for a depletable resource, just as there is speculative reserve demand for any other stock of goods on the market. This speculation is not simple wickedness, however; it has a definite function, namely, that of allocating the scarce depletable resource to those uses at those times when consumer demand for them will be greatest. The speculator, waiting to use the resources until a future date, benefits consumers by shifting their use to a time when they will be more in demand than at present.

I walked out onto the stage and I started telling the tale of the “Untold Story of the Origin of Zombies.” And it went like this: Where do Zombies come from? Not many people know. But after some extensive investigative Zombie journalism, we’ve discovered the truth. It all began when the human government decided that they wanted to create stronger soldiers. They had lost too many battles, and now they wanted to win every war that they fought. So they approached some soldiers in their army to join a special secret project. The only requirement was that the soldiers they chose had no living relatives. This way, no one could claim their bodies in case something went wrong. So, they exposed these soldiers to an experimental virus to enhance their abilities and make them into super soldiers. The experiment seemed to be working. But then, something terrible happened... The soldiers went crazy, and they were horribly disfigured. Ultimately, the experiment claimed their lives. But, when the soldiers were being prepared for burial, they suddenly came to life. They were not only walking, but they had enhanced strength, enhanced sense of smell and enhanced hearing. They attacked the soldiers in charge of burying them. And the recently bitten soldiers also transformed into the living dead. Before long, the entire army base was contaminated with the virus. Once everyone in the base was exposed, the virus mutated and the soldiers began having an overwhelming craving for something warm and mushy. They longed for brains! Soon, the army of the living dead found their way to the next unsuspecting town in search of brains. They attacked that town, biting anything that moved both human and animal. Soon that town was overrun. The virus spread from town to town, and city to city, until the entire world was contaminated. It was the first Zombie Apocalypse. After hundreds of years had passed, the Zombies started to evolve and began developing intelligent thoughts. They began forming villages, and then towns, and then entire cities of Zombies were created. The Zombies made great advances in health and science, and became highly advanced technologically. But, eventually the Zombies’ appetite for brains and warm flesh gave way to an even greater craving... The craving for CAKE! Their overwhelming desire for cake resulted in an explosive rise in the baking industry. Cake shops began springing up on every corner of every Zombie city street. They just couldn’t get enough! The human race began growing again, too. Human villages of farmers and miners began springing up. And because the Zombies were a peaceful race, they coexisted with the humans by staying away from them. But soon, the Zombie’s resources began to become scarce, especially the cake. So Zombies began scaring villagers in order to get the supplies they needed, especially the highly valued resource of cake. Now Zombies send their kids to Scare School to train their children from a very young age. They train them on how to effectively scare humans in order to get their needed supplies, especially cake. And so it has been until today. Thank you.

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

What would happen if the parasites were removed from this picture? Would there be fewer birds in the sky, more fish in the sea? Lafferty doesn’t know, but the change would almost certainly have a domino-like effect on the food chain. In some fragile ecosystems where animals struggle to get by on scarce resources, manipulative parasites might even tip the balance toward the survival or extinction of a species. Lafferty recounted joining Japanese biologists who were studying a type of endangered trout in hopes of increasing its numbers. In the fall, the team noticed, the fish were unusually well nourished; their bellies were packed full of crickets. What had made this source of nutrients suddenly so plentiful? A hairworm closely related to the species Thomas has long been studying was sending droves of the crickets into the water in late summer. If it weren’t for the parasite, said Lafferty, it’s possible the trout might already be extinct.

that a corporate strategy represents a plan to effectively allocate scarce resources to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

It is important to record that the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster was never mass-produced until 2008. It is a historical object of a very peculiar sort. By 2009, when it had first become hugely popular, it seemed to respond to a particularly English malaise, one connected directly with the way Britain reacted to the credit crunch and the banking crash. From this moment of crisis, it tapped into an already established narrative about Britain’s ‘finest hour’ – the aerial Battle of Britain in 1940–41 – when it was the only country left fighting the Third Reich. This was a moment of entirely indisputable – and apparently uncomplicated – national heroism, one which Britain has clung to through thick and thin. Even during the height of the boom, as the critical theorist Paul Gilroy spotted in his 2004 book After Empire, the Blitz and the Victory were frequently invoked, made necessary by ‘the need to get back to the place or moment before the country lost its moral and cultural bearings’. ‘1940’ and ‘1945’ were ‘obsessive repetitions’, ‘anxious and melancholic’, morbid fetishes, clung to as a means of not thinking about other aspects of recent British history – most obviously, its Empire. This has only intensified since the financial crisis began. The ‘Blitz spirit’ has been exploited by politicians largely since 1979. When Thatcherites and Blairites spoke of ‘hard choices’ and ‘muddling through’, they often evoked the memories of 1941. It served to legitimate regimes which constantly argued that, despite appearances to the contrary, resources were scarce and there wasn’t enough money to go around; the most persuasive way of explaining why someone (else) was inevitably going to suffer. Ironically, however, this rhetoric of sacrifice was often combined with a demand that the consumers enrich themselves – buy their house, get a new car, make something of themselves, ‘aspire’.

Strategies that did well in competition with other strategies were not, however, those that maximized the returns to agents. Rather, we found a strong inverse relationship between the mean fitness of individuals in populations containing only one strategy, and that strategy's performance in the tournament. This finding illustrates the parasitic effect of strategies that rely heavily on OBSERVE. Strategies using a mixture of social and asocial learning are vulnerable to being outcompeted by those using social learning alone, which may result in a population with lower average returns. These findings are evocative of an established rule in ecology; this specifies that, among competitors for a scarce resource, the dominant competitor will be the species that can persist at the lowest resource level. An equivalent rule may apply when alternative social learning strategies compete: the strategies that eventually dominates will be the one that can persist with the lowest frequency of asocial learning.

Our resources are not limited and scarce. There is enough for everyone. Abundance attracts abundance. We can produce more. We can prosper together, not at others' expense.

Motivating desire: The “desire for mutual sympathy of sentiments,” which Smith believes all human beings have by nature. Market: What gets exchanged is our personal sentiments and moral judgments. Competition: Because we all want mutual sympathy of sentiments but we cannot all sympathize with everyone’s sentiments, mutual sympathy becomes a sought-after scarce resource. Rules developed: standards of moral judgment and rules determining what Smith calls “propriety” and “merit”—or what we might call virtue and vice, good behavior and bad behavior, and so on. Some of these rules are relatively fixed, like the rules of justice, whereas others, like beneficence, are more variable. Resulting “spontaneous” order: commonly shared standards of morality, moral judgment, manners, and etiquette. Objectivity: the judgment of the impartial spectator, which is constructed inductively on the basis of people’s lived experience with others.

Humans are adaptable precisely because they’re unfinished; the baby responds to her environment by “building” a brain that will best help her to flourish in that environment. If she has optimal conditions—physical nourishment, warm arms to carry and soothe her, a responsive caregiver who engages with her—she’ll build a brain that’s geared for prompt self-soothing, happy moods, and intimate connection. If the environment doesn’t offer her what she needs, or it seems dangerous—for instance, loud noises without accompanying reassurance—the brain she builds may be hypervigilant and distrustful, primed for fight-or-flight and competition for scarce resources.

True scarcity and scarcity-thinking are different phenomena as well. There are regions of the world where resources are locally scarce, where people lack for their most fundamental needs. However, scarcity-thinking is an attitude as prevalent among the well-heeled as among the down-at-heel, and remains unaltered by a change in circumstances. It is a fatalistic outlook, as profiled by the English economist Thomas Malthus in his 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population” that predicts that supplies—which appear fixed and limited—will eventually run out. This attitude prompts us to seek to acquire more for ourselves no matter how much we have and to treat others as competitors no matter how little they have.

The state is competing with its subjects for the use of the scarce resources that is the liberty and property of each. It restrains them in what they may or not not do and forces them to devote part of their efforts and goods to the state's purposes rather than to their own.

Regurgitating stories of suffering seems to be part of the process to access any kind of support, whether it be a bursary, deadline extension, therapy, social housing it asylum. I want no longer to see this as natural, as just how things are.

FIND CORROBORATING EVIDENCE Are you dealing with a pebble or a boulder? How expensive, risky, time-consuming, or controversial is the change you’re asking people to make? How can you provide more proof? Like interventionists, by making sure people hear from multiple sources saying similar things? What similar but independent sources can you call on to help provide more evidence? How can you concentrate them close in time? Making sure people hear from multiple others in a short period? For larger-scale change, should you use a fire hose or a sprinkler? Concentrate scarce resources or spread them out?

Evolutionary psychologists believe this tendency evolved to help humans survive in an inhospitable world where resources were scarce and intergroup competition was fierce. Because a couple of hundred thousand years is a mere blip on our evolutionary timeline, humans still have some of this primitive wiring, which manifests itself in doubts—usually harbored by the fixed more than the fluid—about people from other racial, ethnic, and religious groups.

If you can’t locate a piece of information quickly, in a format that’s convenient and ready to be put to use, then you might as well not have it at all. Our most scarce resource is time, which means we need to prioritize our ability to quickly rediscover the ideas that we already have in our Second Brain.

How many times have we all heard legislators and academics and pundits begin their remarks with the phrase “In a world of scarce resources …,” as if that state of affairs were self-evident, obvious, as unassailable as natural law, instead of something we’ve fashioned? The United States lags far behind other advanced countries when it comes to funding public services.

Two factions consistently arise because coalition-forming behavior is game-theoretically optimal. That is, when fighting over any scarce resource, if one group teams up and the other doesn’t, the first group tends to win. This is a fundamental reason why humans tend to consolidate into two factions that fight each other over scarce resources till one wins. The winning team enjoys a brief honeymoon, after which it usually then breaks up internally into left and right factions again, and the battle begins anew. After the French Revolution, factions famously arose. After World War 2, the once-allied US and USSR went to Cold War. And after the end of the Cold War, the victorious US faction broke down into internal hyperpolarization. A strong leader might keep this from happening for a while, but the breakdown of a victorious side into left and right factions is almost a law of societal physics.

The flip side of the coin was the positive imagination of Ashkenazi immigrants as diligent and productive members of the middle class holding great value to the state-building enterprise. The fusion of ability, class, and ethnicity thus worked either way. American immigrants in particular were exempted from selection policies. Immigrants from Poland received privileged treatment when they were competing with Moroccans for scarce absorption resources in 1956. The state and the Jewish Agency leadership also deliberated on various occasions about how to actively promote Western immigration and/or “middle-class immigration,” especially after the liberal bourgeois General Zionists had participated in the government for the first time in December 1952, and in subsequent years.115 This happened at a time when great effort was made to restrict the bulk of Moroccan immigration.