Can We Create An Economy Based On Abundance Rather Than Scarcity?

“Until we had shareable information goods,” writes Paul Mason in Postcapitalism: A Guide To Our Future, “the basic law of economics was that everything is scarce. Supply and demand assumes scarcity. Now certain goods are not scarce, they are abundant — so supply and demand become irrelevant. The supply of an iTunes track is ultimately one file on a server in Cupertino, technically shareable by everyone. Only intellectual property law and a small piece of code in the iTunes track prevent everybody on Earth from owning every piece of music ever made. Apple’s mission statement, properly expressed, is to prevent the abundance of music.”

Yet beyond the manufactured scarcity still practiced by capitalist corporations, “The internet is a participatory gift economy,” says Charles Eisenstein in Sacred Economics, “the P2P (peer to peer) network in which there is no consistent distinction between a producer and a consumer. When we share news, product recommendations, songs, and so forth with our online networks, we do not charge another for our ‘information services.’ It is a gift economy. The content of most websites is free as well.”

Or as Kevin Kelly points out in The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, “The internet is less a creation dictated by economics than one dictated by sharing gifts.”

As we open ourselves to the Wisdom Revolution, we have the capacity to realize that life is more abundant than the…