Understanding Abundance, Part 4: What will not change

We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance. The control of products or distribution will no longer guarantee a premium and a profit.

All in all, real positional scarcity businesses take time to develop, especially loyalty businesses that are difficult to get off the ground before a retail or consumption environment is fully understood. But I’ll leave with this thought: as the mobile internet, e-commerce, and the transformation of retail continues onward, I think there’s an incre... See more

Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we’re used to, it can be disorienting to the people who’ve grown up with scarcity.