Abundance: The Definition of Economics

    Man moved from mud not because he had to, but because he wanted to. As the cold ravaged man’s body, he envisioned a state where this discomfort was absent. As hunger weakened man’s body, he envisioned a state where this hunger was sedated. Man’s entire life is about striving to move from a state of greater discomfort to a state of perceived lesser discomfort. In order to sustain man’s life, or rather act, man must implement means, or scarce resources, to reach his desired end goal. Without these resources, it would be impossible for man to act, and therefore man would die.

In the economic sense, abundance is not about having more “stuff.” Someone could have a pile of rocks, but this abundance could not satisfy his thirst for water directly. Abundance, rather, is the condition in which a human actor has the proper resources to move from a greater state of uneasiness to a lesser state of uneasiness. An important part to remember is that humans act because they perceive a better future, but a human can still implement resources and act to reach a state in which they are worse off than before. Scarcity, the opposite of abundance, is what causes this. A scarcity of knowledge causes the actor to not know how to reach their desired goal. A scarcity of resources creates the impossibility of reaching the end goal.

Abundance is a result of production, which is driven by self-interest, otherwise called greed. A person who desires to improve their condition must reorganize the elements around them to achieve their goal. Due to each person having different goals and limited knowledge, markets, specialization, and price signals must form. Participants within the market signal their wants through prices, telling producers how to organize resources which ultimately would satisfy the participants ends. Specialization is needed due to the fact that nobody knows how to make a single pencil. The creation of a pencil requires the cooperation of millions of people: loggers, waitresses, factory workers, teachers, etc. Each performs a small task, indirectly or directly knowing that they are contributing to the manufacturing of one pencil. None of them care about the pencil itself; they act out of self-interest, knowing when they trade their labor or resources, they are able to unlock new resources which can be used to achieve their own goals. The creation of in-demand resources is what causes abundance, as actors now in the world have the proper means to reach their intended ends. 

Preventing people from achieving their ends, or hampering abundance, is caused by bad philosophy, specifically, anti-human philosophy. These ideologies value anything over human prosperity, and rather see man fall into a state of destitution. The most prevalent of these today is environmentalism. Its followers would rather see man freeze, starve, or suffer than see a tree cut down or a resource extracted. Environmentalists want to preserve the resources around them, rather than have them used by man to better his own life. They romanticize nature and demonize action. They worship the untouched over the improved. But abundance comes not from worshiping the forest, but from harvesting its wood to build a home.

    Man sees suffering and acts. He imagines a better state and acts towards that state. That idea, powered by dissatisfaction and enablement by resources, is what creates abundance. Not the quantity of material, but the proper means to achieve an end. Abundance is not the pile of things a man owns, but whether what he owns can move him from discomfort toward fulfillment.