In economics, scarcity refers to material or practical finitude, and how we price that reality into a system of value exchange.

In other words, there's seldom, perhaps never, a literal, infinite amount of anything.

And given that reality, how do we quantify that availability ceiling so that our system of exchange is efficient and sensical?

Economics, arguably, wouldn't be a thing without scarcity, because if everything was infinite, if we could have whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted it, even if just on a practical,

rather than a literal level, there wouldn't be much need for money, and policies dictating

how money flows throughout a society.

We'd just have what we want when we want it, and that would be that.

So you could say that scarcity underpins a great deal of what we might

think of as human civilization. Pretty much all governmental models, historical conflicts,

and systems of laws have been predicated on the notion that there isn't enough to go around,

and we need to figure out a way to organize, distribute,

access, and generate, and refine the scarce resources we have. And sometimes that means printing

money so that we can work to generate value points and exchange those labor-generated value

points for other things that we want and need.

And in some cases, it means going to war with other groups to take their stuff.

Scarcity all the way down.

Lacking scarcity, society would almost certainly look very different than it does today,

and very different from how it has ever looked, because we've always

had scarcity, even if our approaches to dealing with it have differed substantially over time

and across geography. Psychologically, scarcity can cause us to perceive things differently.

Generally, we will perceive scarce things as being

more valuable than a similar or identical thing that is common and widely available. The Diamond

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