What is the difference between a limited resource and a scarce resource?

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Permalink Reply by zoupic on September 23, 2009 at 11:47am

I'm going to try, but I don't speak the truth, so take it as my opinion, or belief.

Limited and scarce are for me the same thing. Scarce ressources or limited ressources means you will have to organise it well to distribute it in a fair way.
The difference is that you can create scarcity artificially: the ressource is probably not scarce in its core definition, but you put some barriers (limits) and you reduce the access to it to make it scarce. I would call that controled (or conceived) scarcity, against natural scarcity.

About the future currencies, they can be scarce (again..) or suffisant (suficiente?) depending on the rules you agree on. Some things can be created and given in abundancy: bits and digitalised stuff in general has such a low marginal cost that it is considered as free, but for currency design, if you allow the currency mass to be abundant, then the relation between wealth creation and money creation loses its sense and you have something similar to inflation or deflation.

The link between wealth created and money created is really important and will determine how much money creation you should implement into your architecture and who controls it.

conventional money should be sufficient, not scarce. create when wealth comes, destroyed when it is destroyed. This is the whole game that makes a system thrustfull or not: transparency and link between the money mass and the wealth mass.

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Permalink Reply by Eliane Fierro on September 24, 2009 at 8:07pm

Lovely to listen to you!!! Thank you...
I see we must diferenciate from true limited resources and mentally created scarcity.... I agree that it is very important to differentiate wealth from money, the rules of the game define our invisible architectures. Won´t we come back to the same scarcity? Isn´t it inbedded in us?

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Permalink Reply by zoupic on September 25, 2009 at 3:06pm

Hum, I would say the opposite: I believe we are naturally made to share in abundant ways, to cooperate, to help the next one and to give away without counting. But our society based on this scarcity changed us into private property monsters: we buy, we protect, we keep, we use and always hide or protect instead of sharing with others.

Why aren't we spending our time helping others and giving all our love to the others? because you need to live, and you need money to live, and money is scarce, so you fear tomorrow. This is the trick of scarcity putting barreers that keeps you doing stupid jobs because you need the money to be able to live. And only the time left can be used for your real projects, if your job didn't suck all your energy yet.

Being born in this system, we have to understand its properties and play its game as long as we want to, or as long as we can. If we want to reinvent the game, we have to redefine the rules, at some point you are right that we often do the same mistakes thinking in the old paradigm, re-creating things as they were before.

It asks a deep inner reflection to get rid of the scarce reflex, to learn to live without using the models that have been so common in our everyday life. Creating something new is mostly about not repeating the old model, and it's hard because the path doesn't show any footsteps or trail to follow, we have to make our own and try. It is a de-learning.

I've been studying for 5 years in my business school how to put barreers to make profit from scarcity and now I want to spend my life breaking those scarcity locks. To get rid of the scarce reflex, the best way is to embrace fully the abundant paradigm.

It's a perpetual fight, but once we recognize and acknowledge the properties and benefits of abundance, the last thing that keeps us into scarcity-mode is the fact that we are still in a scarce environment and we will need to pay the rent tomorrow in scarce money.

The final step is to enter fully in an abundant system and refuse to live in systems using scarcity: it pushes us to develop multiple abundant alternatives.

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Permalink Reply by Eliane Fierro on September 26, 2009 at 12:54am

Love to listen to your words... ..... So tell me how do you connect everyday to the abundant paradigm when life happens? :)

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Permalink Reply by Eric Harris-Braun on November 16, 2009 at 3:45am

Interesting question Eliane. When I think about scarcity and limitation in terms of future currency design, I find it helpful to think in terms of the particular forms of wealth that the currency is designed to help build. Wealth (or well-being) of the social organism exists at many levels (see http://openmoney.info/sophia/index.html for a quick overview). These levels correspond to truths about systems.

The systemic level at which we are used to thinking about currency an money, is the level of inputs/outputs, and parts and products of systems. Any system needs certain inputs to survive, and those inputs may indeed be scarce or limited, and a currency which is designed to facilitate the flow of those limited parts of systems may indeed be scarce or limited to match their true scarcity.

The problem is that the well-being of systems requires coordination on all the other levels, and also even in the realm of inputs and outputs to system, not all of them are scarce, but yet their flows into and out of systems still need to be coordinated. Future currencies are all about recognizing the vast ecosystem of coordination of flows that make for healthy living social organisms. Some of the currencies we use will be scarce and limited because they are there to reflect a true scarcity. But others won't. And none of them will be universal. The most important thing is to jump out of the idea of a single money or currency. Think of your body. You have many different interlocking information systems that regulate many different types of flows, all of which together add up to a living healthy organism. Currencies will be like that but for social organisms.

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Permalink Reply by Phyrezo on November 18, 2009 at 6:33pm

Hi Eliane,

I'll be much short and pragmatic.

A scarce ressource is limited, but a limited ressource is not always scarce, it can be sufficient.
Oxygen is limited everybody has enough, it is not scarce. A meal is limited, but we can share it between many people, and everybody will have enough. It is not scarce.

Precious stones are scarce, there is not enough for everybody. If you want one, you'll need to compete against all the other who want one. On the other hand, the food produced in the world is sufficient to feed every single living being, it is limited but sufficient. It is only not accessible to everyone because the money is scarce.

If you have multiple currencies, some of them maybe scarce to trade scarce items as jewels, other could be sufficient to share sufficient items as food, other could be abundant to represent gratitude.

That how I understood it.

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