fatvegan

The only radical alternative to the reality of scarcity caused by unsatisfiable needs would have to be based on a way of life that takes as starting point the reduction of individual needs. This is not a matter of academic analysis (and, for that matter, of wrong or right economic analysis), but rather one of individual choice and would take us into practices and religions of other cultures. The irony is that these cultures themselves have to a large extent succumbed to Western values of scarcity under conditions of abundance.

From a review of Gilbert Rist's The History of Development.

I started studying economics because I cared about scarcity, but now I wonder if scarcity is really our problem. This is potentially a rather glib idea, so I'm not entirely comfortable with it.