Here I will use a different meaning of scarcity, one not based on price. I will call something scarce when there is less of it than we require to meet our needs. If people are starving because not enough food has been produced (or made available), food is scarce. Insofar as more knowledge would allow this problem to be solved, this can be thought... See more

Importantly, if something is no longer scarce, it isn’t necessarily abundant—there is an intermediate stage, which I will call ‘sufficiency’. For instance, there is sufficient land on the planet to meet everyone’s needs, but building housing and growing food still requires significant physical resources, and hence these things are not abundant. I... See more