For centuries, a lineage of thinkers ranging from Utopia author Thomas More in 1516 to economists like John Maynard Keynes in 1930 homed in on scarcity as both a force and a cultural logic that distorts not only mental bandwidth in the present, but also the potential futures of individuals and society at large.

Sociologist Aaron Benanav, author of Automation and the Future of Work, sees these thinkers as part of the “post-scarcity tradition,” where they imagine what human development would be when liberated from the gravitational, detrimental pull of scarcity.

Rather than focusing on meeting everyone’s basic needs and reducing the workweek, the American economy set course to free the markets with a laissez-faire approach to competition, privatizing public services in the name of efficiency, lowering taxes, avoiding deficits, and fastening work requirements to welfare programs.

Progressive economists today like Mark Paul argue that wealthy economies such as the US have already amassed enough resources to achieve post-scarcity, echoing Bookchin (if all US household wealth were distributed evenly across the population, everyone would have about $450,000).

From Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516 through to Keynes, Bookchin, and Benanav today, post-scarcity has been more modestly focused on unconditionally meeting everyone’s basic needs, which excludes the more expansive, infinite range of human desires.

Whether the growing support for universal basic services, the Green New Deal’s inclusion of economic rights, or the national experiment with unconditional cash transfers for poor children, elements of a post-scarcity agenda are increasingly in play.

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