 Scarcity for us is always a relationship. It's not a mere fact of nature or a mere moment in time. So it's always a relationship between how we understand nature and how we understand desires or what's moving the economy. But there were a number of people in particular in England but throughout Europe who really thought of nature as capable of infinite expansion. It could go on exponentially. And here we are kind of in have a kind of double helix of infinities. So infinite desires and infinite nature. At any given moment, the world is still scarce. There's not enough to satisfy everyone but nature continues to move with desires in a direction of infinite or indefinite progress. The current planetary emergency is forcing us to confront the unsustainability of cornucopianism and having to embrace a different way of being in the world, a different way of thinking about desire and nature. And we call that planetary scarcity. If all we have to do is decarbonize the economy, perhaps there might be some technical solution but to also, at the same time, avoid a fixed mass extinction, which means setting aside land, which means possibly retreating or at least trying to repair what be damaged, it's a monumental challenge. Hello everyone and welcome to the Circular Metables and Podcast, the bi-weekly meeting where we have in-depth discussions with researchers, policymakers and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our societies or in other terms, their resource use and pollution emissions and how to reduce the environmental impact in a systemic, socially just and context-specific way. I'm your host, Aristide from Metabolism of Cities and today we're gonna go in-depth in a topic that we hear more and more. The topic is scarcity. We live in a period of polycrisis where carbon emissions and inequalities are abundant, whereas future natural and material resources are scarce. Yet it is not the first time our societies are facing serious environmental and injustices challenges. And the notion of scarcity has always been central to debate between word views or two opposing camps. We're gonna name them here two opposing camps which are cornucopians and finitarians. To better understand how our current understanding of the relationship between the economy and nature has been forged over the centuries, we should start looking at the past to guide us through this historical understanding and odyssey of scarcity and this relationship between economy and nature. I have the pleasure to invite Frederick Arbrichton Johnson, who is associate professor of British history at the University of Chicago and Carl Benefield, who is a professor of history at Barnard College. Together, they recently published their book called Scarcity, a history from the origins of capitalism to the climate crisis. With all that being said, welcome, Frederick. Welcome, Carl. Thanks for being on the podcast. Thanks so much, Aristide, thank you. Great, fantastic. Perhaps the easiest way to move is to just ask you, how did you become interested first in history? Because this is just a vast field and more specifically on, well, how did you get from history to this notion of scarcity? But perhaps, Frederick, let's start with you. You are interested if I'm not mistaken in British history, what is so interesting in British history? Well, Carl and I are both British historians, I should begin by saying. British history, especially in the period between 1600 and 1900, marks several of the great thresholds in not just European history, but global history, including, of course, a topic that Carl is a specialist in, a financial revolution of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, as well as the Scottish Enlightenment with Adam Smith and his colleagues. And, of course, also the beginnings of socialism, Robert Owen, for example, and industrialization. And then, of course, towards the middle of the 19th century, the hegemony of the British Empire, free trade imperialism, Pax Britannica. So you cover a lot of ground when you work in British history, yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't have thought that actually it covers all of the challenges of between colonialism and resource use and the notion of progress. But then, Carl, you're also interested if I understand correctly in intellectual and political history how ideologies are made if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, so I came out of economics. And the reason why I was drawn into economics is because I was interested in questions of poverty and equality and power. And I found fairly quickly that I was quite frustrated with the way that economists speak about these terms. And I spent my graduate school days trying to understand how economics, neoclassical economics emerged as an ideology, as a way of thinking about the world, as a way of approaching the world, whereas some questions are allowed to be asked, but other questions are kind of muted or silenced by the paradigm. And even back then, I felt like one of the assumptions that economists make that really shapes their worldview is this notion of perennial scarcity. And a scarcity that really has nothing to do with riches or poverty, it has nothing to do with whether there are enough environmental resources or not, it's just a blanket statement, a blanket assumption that's grounded in the idea of humans having insatiable desires for more and more consumption. And that commodities are fungible, one commodity can almost magically be transformed to another through the market. And if you have insatiable desires and the world is fungible, then we want more of everything all the time. And maybe that's an accurate description of how humans function within capitalism. But back then I was interested in the problems of applying that way of thinking to history when that was not the prevailing kind of modus operandi of most people and also to apply it to less developed areas of the world where that is not something that's been internalized. So that's really where the interest in economic, it's an ideological construct comes from for me. Yeah, that's fascinating indeed. And yeah, I was very of course pleased to read the book because indeed scarcity is, well, is a word view that is used by different people. We're gonna get to that, but how did you collaborate? What was the decision that you said, okay, let's make this book. Why was this missing? Or did you say this is just an opportunity to collaborate? Why this book? Is it just to do the yang to Pierre Charbonne's yin of abundance, we should make a scarcity or? But it's, so our first book, Freddie's book on the Scottish Enlightenment and mine on the English financial revolutions, both of them are bringing together a history of political economy with the history of science. So in these books, we're making more local interventions in the way that people think about science and economy, nature and economy. And we were both speculating as to what our next project would be. I had the idea of writing a book on, a more popular book on the history of scarcity and Fredrick had the idea of writing a more popular book on the history of abundance and cornucopianism. And we're both Swedes, both working on British history. We spend time in Sweden on occasion and on one of these walks, we're sitting there looking out of this beautiful part of Stockholm and we realized we're writing the same book at just a slightly different point of view. And it was just this kind of fortuitous circumstance where our skillset really complemented each other perfectly. So where I have some weaknesses, Fredrick has real expertise and strength and vice versa. So it really fit nicely as an intellectual puzzle. And then we started sketching ideas and things came together extremely smoothly and we felt like there's more and more of a reason to give a kind of long-duray analysis of different worldviews and different ways of thinking about scarcity. And it felt to us that it was more and more pertinent to historicize something in order to break through the way that neoclassical scarcity has become normalized and legitimized. It's funny because indeed, I mean, we will go through this two-headed approach which is the, well, the affluence or the abundance approach and then the finitarian approach. And you have different subcategories in each of them and some actually intermingle or composite. But within the book, you also have more tales of context about how life was in some parts of the world and how these worldviews arrived and felt very much when you mentioned long-duray, I could very much imagine like Brodell or someone like this explaining what the life was in the 16th century in England or something like that. So I felt that, well, not only you spent time into writing about ideas, but also about, well, for me, it felt like reading about the life back in different contexts somehow. Was that something important for you or was that kind of out of an accident or yeah? Not at all. Since I started training as an historian, I've been inspired by the Annals School, by Brodell and other great historians of the recent past always to think about ideas and intellectual developments in their material context, in their social and political context. It's not easy, but I think the payoff is great. And I should say, without being needlessly antagonistic, I think there are schools of intellectual history that are much more narrowly focused on minute developments in influence, intellectual influence, the exchanges between different thinkers. We don't, of course, we've learned an enormous amount from that more narrowly situated intellectual history. In fact, we could never have written this book without it. But I think Carl and I both are completely agreed that in order to understand then, as Carl was saying, denaturalize the neoclassical idea of scarcity, we have to situate that idea in its context. It's a very absurd and strange idea. Too often it's left as a self-evident reality. And the same goes for growth itself. We live in a world made of growth, or at least within capitalism, we live in a world of growth. But of course, if you step into other cultures or into the past, that is not so. But it seems, I think Carl will agree with me that whatever cornucopia andism is, it's not simply a kind of figment of the imagination of a few individual thinkers. It's also a great material and social movement. Sometimes the thinkers are running ahead of the material movement and they're visionaries. And we'll talk about that in a moment, right? They're anticipating a future that's not really, that's still speculative. But then comes the moment later on when thinkers and material processes are more in sync and we get a hegemonic worldview born out of that moment. Yeah, this is a fascinating, the fact of, well, apologies for me, it's new, but perhaps for you it's evident, but the fact of how scholars and ideologies are either proceeding, reinforcing, or even locking us into these material and economic realities, as you mentioned. Yeah, I mean, I can just add to what Frederick just said. What we're trying to think in this book pretty broadly what the context is. So we think about the kind of environmental context of these various ideologies, but also the social and the political context that all has a role to play. We fundamentally also as intellectual historians believe that ideas really matter. And that ideas shape how we understand the world. You know, when you walk around, you interact, you travel, you live in the world, you can't abstract from that lived experience. So you need ideas to kind of make sense of it all. And those ideas become very powerful in the way that we shape our behavior, shape the way we interact with others, how we talk about this reality with others. And if we continue down that line of how ideas shape us, you know, it also shapes how we vote. It shapes what kind of loss we pass. It shapes how we educate our children. So the worldview is shaped by these ideas. And, you know, after a certain point, these worldviews become really kind of self-fulfilling prophecies. They start to shape the way the world actually looks. So we create worlds, you know, on the basis of our ideas. Now, there's, and in our book, we try to make this clear. There's never just one dominant worldview or one dominant ideology. You know, ideologies come and go, but they never quite disappear. They're kind of, you know, as Frederick likes to put it, they're kind of nestled in the social fabric of society, right? So there's, but there's a sense here in our work that we really believe that these ideas are powerful and therefore necessary to be well understood in order. And in particular, now that we seem to be in need of, you know, a new way of thinking about the economy, nature and nexus. Yeah. Yeah. Before we continue on this, because I think it's important to kind of see also how, well, these two camps actually always, always, that's a question I would like to ask you, whether they always existed, co-existed, or were actually always clashing, but how or when did the term or the notion of scarcity emerged? Because I can imagine in, since the Neolithic, you know, it was difficult, it was tough to actually live. We needed a lot of labor to just satisfy primal needs. And so scarcity might have been always there, but when did it enter the mindset and the word view that this is a notion somehow that we mobilize and we talk about? Even if it wasn't the term scarcity, right? To answer that question, it's important to keep in mind the way that we've structured this book, that scarcity for us is always a relationship. It's not a mere fact of nature or a mere moment in time. So it's always a relationship between how we understand nature and how we understand desires or what's moving the economy, right? What's the impetus? So if we go back to Marshall Solence and Stone Age Economics, he talks about, you know, affluence and prosperity in a world that is very limited. But because desires are limited, the sense of scarcity is not overwhelming, is not present. So also where we begin the story in the 16th century, we use this concept called nearest Italian scarcity, which is also kind of in some ways trying to capture a much longer, agrarian Christian worldview. Here we talk about a nature that doesn't change much over time and it's not liable or amenable to much technological improvement or it's not flexible, it's not pliable, it's not malleable. You can't all of a sudden just start making more of it. It produces a fixed amount and that amount is in some ways also dictated by spiritual forces and perceived to be dictated by the deity. So in order for human societies to create a balance with that notion of nature, it was extremely important to curtail and limit people's desires. And that was done through some tree loss, but it was most importantly done through religion. The condemnation of, for example, of the seven deadly sins. A lot of those are about, you know, making sure that we don't want too much that we don't covet too much and that we're not envious of others who have more. And was also an idea of a geometric equality where everyone had what was needed for them to fulfill their role in society. So obviously it was not, you know, everyone didn't have the same because kings and nobility and priests needed more than the peasants, but everyone had just enough and the right moderation of what was needed. So in that world, you know, nature's fixed, but so are desires. So it's a balance of limitation. So that's a particular type of scarcity condition. And so what broke this cycle into, well, entering, when did abundance then enter the game and then made this bicephal schizophrenic understanding or society? Of course, it's possible to find moments of conspicuous consumption, especially in courtly settings in elite from the beginning of the first state, the first agrarian societies. But if you're looking for a broader movement if you like consumer society rather than courtly consumption, then it's pretty clear that the 17th century is a major threshold. And so if you're looking at the material forces, you know, long distance trade, the discovery of the new world, rival empires, interconnections between Asia, between Asian luxury consumption and European luxury consumption. So in some ways, the doors are opening. If you were just looking at the material side of things, there are doors opening in the 17th century. And again, that's not to deny that there's an earlier history to excess and abundance, but it never on such a large scale and never in a global setting is our argument, yeah? Just one very important caveat with the story we're telling here. Our categories are not, for the most part, they're not actors category. They are construct that we're imposing on the path. So when we talk about intellectual movement, we are, if you like, we are suggesting names and unities that would be recognizable to people in the past. If you told people in the 1690s, there's a new movement of thought, and we think this is a cornucopia moment, they might actually agree with us. But the point is that we are imposing, for the sake of clarity, analytical clarity, we are imposing a set of constructs, okay? So let me just add to what Fred has said there. So that kind of moment in which the consumption goods are just exploding and not just the elites have access to it, but also a little bit lower in the amongst the middling source, that was captured by people like Barbon and Mandeville, who basically said that it's these infinite desires, that they're unavoidable and they're actually good for society because they're driving the economy, right? And then the other aspect of this, so empire as Fred was saying, and international trade, hugely important, but also magic, alchemy. And we talk a lot in the book about this new movement in the 17th century of using alchemy as a worldview amongst scientists or proto-scientists who saw and understood nature differently. All of a sudden nature became this kind of treasure trove or treasure chest that God had given to humanity and all humanity needed to do was to decipher the source code of the universe. And the way to do that was through experimental and empirical science. We know that as, you know, we associate that with Francis Bacon and his, you know, vision for scientific project for progress, sorry, but there were a number of people in particular in England, but throughout Europe who really thought of nature as capable of infinite expansion, right? It could go on exponentially. And here we are kind of in, have a kind of double helix of infinities, right? So infinite desires and infinite nature. At any given moment, the world is still scarce, right? There's not enough to satisfy everyone, but nature continues to move with desires in the direction of infinite or indefinite progress. So that really is, you know, huge watershed. This, and opens up the possibility of cornucopia and thinking. And, you know, as Fredicus pointed out elsewhere as well, you know, this is a really transformative moment in world history in which what would have been perceived as a fairly absurd idea of infinite growth and infinite desires and infinite nature. All of a sudden, you know, and it doesn't become dominant right away. There's an immediate backlash, but the ideas are there and they will be picked up later on. And, you know, they of course, given a different shape, but that's the kind of origins of this kind of cornucopian worldview. Just one addition. The word cornucopia enters into English in the late 16th century, early 17th century. It's in the translation of the Bible, King James's Bible. It's also in a memorandum written by Francis Bacon to King James about the colonization of Ireland. And it shows up again in the writings of these Baconian scientists and alchemists that Carl was talking about. One of them publishes a work called cornucopia. So we use, again, our categories, not an actor's category strictly, it brings together two different sets of ideas about nature and desire, but it would have been recognizable to the people in the 17th century. Yeah. Yeah, that's fantastic. I love this because I remember, for instance, well, of course, we use the term of metabolism and Marxist metabolism as well. And just the term metabolism was just 20 years before Marx uses it. So the fact that new terms exist are also the zeitgeist of the era and kind of embody a number of notions that were ripe to be understood by people and to be mobilized for political endeavors, scientific endeavors, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, when reading about Bacon, and it's quite fascinating because a number of today's capitalism can be seen in his writings. So in terms of how science and progress are gonna make us, well, come out of a misery or ingenuity or the fact that nature is feminine and technicality is more masculine and we need to dominate somehow nature. But at the very same time, or well, not at the very same time, but beforehand there was also Thomas Moore with Utopia as well, which brought a completely 180 degree different story. And both had, when you mentioned the opening of trade, it also kind of underlines the importance of merchants and how they were seen in this entire story and how even, well, religion was kind of, there was this dichotomy with Luther and merchants as well. So we also see how some new reconfiguration of society kind of very splits into two camps and these two camps grow very strongly. And I don't know, do they vocally offend each other or do they coexist in isolation? How does that work in the past? I'll start, I mean, that's a very, very good question and a fascinating question. There's always been, since Aristotle, this kind of uneasy relationship to money and money making. Money is supposed to be a mediator of exchange, of use value, but if someone starts to use money for accumulation purposes, it upset the kind of carefully calibrated power balance in society. So when merchants are becoming more and more prominent, there's a real fear that they are going to upset the harmony of the body politic, right? And they're by many seen as a kind of cancerous growth who pursues infinite gain for gains sake and that that is really undermining justice and morality in society. So Thomas Moore, for example, thinks of the merchants as being the driving force behind the enclosures in England whereby the land was turned from a common property into one in which you graced sheep in order to produce wool for Flanders or Northern Italy because the British produce a high quality wool, but how those enclosures then led to the eviction of the general population, their birthright of access to land was eliminated, creating massive amount of poverty and massive amount of suffering and instability. So Moore and others were saying that this is in fact a new condition of scarcity whereby some people always want more because they're engaged in infinite accumulation whereas others, the poor always want more because they don't have anything at all. So they're locked in this kind of constant desire for more and more for very different reasons. So, you know, and there's a long, so we call that enclosure scarcity. There's a long tradition of that kind of thinking that goes up to our period. So that never really goes away. There's a very interesting relationship to how these new Baconians, how they understood that kind of scarcity vis-a-vis the one that they were talking about and for them, they were proponents of private property and enclosures, but they thought that by scientifically organizing the production and making use of new science in agriculture that they could expand the amount of goods and necessities and luxuries coming from the land on such a scale that, you know, everyone would be well-fed. The issues of poverty that so heavily weighed on England in the 17th century would be lifted. And here, you know, we should also add a kind of, you know, they're also millenarians, so they're deeply Protestant, right? So they believed that there was a kingdom of heaven on earth that would last for a thousand years in which abundance was possible, not even possible. It would materialize. So, you know, and that's a very different idea of Protestantism from the one we're accustomed to hearing from Weber, for example. Yeah. Maybe I could add one more thing to that, which is if you're looking at Francis Bacon himself, Carl is absolutely right. He is aware of this commercialization. He's aware of the enclosures. And he writes one of his most interesting books, seldom read, is the history of the reign of King Henry VII, which is a kind of very early, precocious description of the commercialization of England and the role of the state in that. But it's important to see that Bacon himself was not a merchant and that some of his inspiration comes from very different. There's no, what I'm saying is he's not simply some kind of mechanical reflection of a new mercantile mentality. He takes inspiration from natural philosophy, from alchemy. And in some sense, his imagination is theological. What I mean by that is when he thinks about human power and the possibility of mastering nature, he is actually drawing on the theological imagination. He asked, how is it that humans could rekindle how could humans rekindle the powers they had as their birthright with Adam in Eden, in the Garden of Eden. How can we re-conquer the tree of knowledge and the tree of life? So it's really a kind of breathtakingly, again, it's a religiously inspired project, the breathtaking ambition to imitate God, to acquire the divine knowledge of nature, what he calls the science of light. Can I just add one more thing to that? You mentioned the kind of gendered aspect as well. Francis Bacon has been seen very much as someone who wants to develop knowledge and knowledge is power and power leads to conquest. And it was very much the conquest of mother nature. And it was very much perceived as a kind of, in Bacon's terms, of a violent process. And Caroline Merchant and others have pointed out that the discourse here is a very patriarchy, violent discourse. What needs to be added to that as a nuance, I mean, and that's certainly a correct interpretation there's certainly that gave rise to a mechanical worldview as well, where nature will be subdued by machines and, you know, fours, but amongst the heart Libyans, these, you know, the disciples of Bacon who very much thought within the alchemical framework, alchemy was very much about trying to find nature's own attraction, trying to find different materials and energies that are attracted to each other. And the iconography and metaphors used in their discussion was always one of kind of masculine and feminine energies combining, giving birth to new materials, new powers. So it was a much more, much smoother and much less violent imagery of humans operating on nature, not contorting it, but really accelerating nature's own processes and making those natural teleologies come alive faster and thereby benefiting humanity, you know, more urgently than they otherwise would have. It's incredible how we can translate these challenges with today, such as how people were, well, we're scared of merchants today, this might be finance, what you just mentioned about, you know, the theological elements of nature with eugenics or whatever. So there is always this same kind of reappropriation or recontextualization of the same elements. But before we dive into this, perhaps we can just more clearly redefine these two categories and their subcategories because I think they hold a lot of richness to them. Perhaps we can start with the Finterian one and then, so you have six subcategories, the Neo-Iristotelian, the Utopian, Malthusian, Romantic, Socialist and Planetary. So they all come with, we have some desires that we need to keep at bay and we live within something of scarcity. What is the real difference as we go through the ages? I mean, of course, there's a kind of historical difference, but what are some other differences in these six subcategories? Yeah, so very important again to notice that these categories are all our categories. We have named them and constructed them to make the past a little more easily to grasp. So cornucopia, and if I can just contrast it with Finterian, cornucopia then is the word for a worldview or a whole family of worldviews oriented towards infinite desire and the mastery of nature. Finterian is the word for a whole family of worldviews and the word for a whole family of worldviews and Finterian is on the one hand, the worldview that precede cornucopianism, the 16th century neo-Aristotelian worldview that Carl described earlier. So a kind of orderly, static universe dominated by the idea of a great chain of being with a Christian prescriptive morality of curbing desire. In the 17th century, these early cornucopians, defenders of infinite desire and the mastery of nature, basically explode the idea of the finite universe and finite desires and endorse a more dynamic worldview. But they're not, they're still a minority. They're not a dominant current in society. And it won't be until the 19th century and the industrial revolution of the 19th century that cornucopian worldviews become really dominant. So we'll come back to that, but that's very important to understand the kind of the larger flow. Finitarian worldviews are opposing oppositional worldviews after the 17th century. They're never dominant again after neo-Aristotelianism. They're always the worldview of the heretic, of the utopian, of the dissident, of the socialist. Yeah, so now we are to kind of complete the arc, we end the book with a suggestion that the current planetary emergency is forcing us to confront the unsustainability of cornucopianism and having to embrace a different way of being in the world, a different way of thinking about desire and nature. And we call that planetary scarcity. Maybe just add one thing to that and maybe stop me if I'm getting ahead of myself. But one aspect in these in these phenetarian perspectives is there's a sense in a number of them that with time, humanity can actually transform itself to the point where their passions and pleasures and what they strive for changes. So amongst the Enlightenment philosophers, for example, in particular David Hume, there's a sense that as societies improve in advance that our minds will also become more refined and more sophisticated and we will therefore become less interested in mere consumption that will develop to the point where we take more pleasure in a poem or a conversation or a reading than consuming a new suit. And that therefore that will kind of easen or soften these infinite desires that Mandeville talked about. And with economic growth, that there's a possibility that there is material prosperity so that the absolute needs will have been met so that yes, there will still be a kind of scarcity tension between infinite desires and infinite nature, but it will be marginalized a bit. It won't be as felt as intensely. And similar ways, even if we talk about someone like Keynes who predicted that scarcity would be a thing of the past by the time we get to 2030. So we have seven more years. He used the term that John Stuart Mill and others used as well. They talked about the art of living where we develop as a society different type of passions, different types of interests that are not about consumption, that are not about resource use, intensive resource use. It's about forging a different culture of sorts. And that if that becomes the preoccupation of people, then we're no longer operating like Homo economicus constantly wanting more, constantly wanting the new fashion, constantly thinking of ourself first and foremost as consumers. Yes, of course we would consume, we would use natural resources, but it wouldn't be the primary kind of, our primary motivation. I think you could contrast that version of finitarianism. That's like a high end or high equilibrium finitarianism with a different, the romantic idea of scarcity, which is really about idealizing agrarian society and idealizing nature. And so rather than moving through commercial society to a kind of release or a sublimation of desire, we stay put at an earlier stage of development and we embrace the simplicity of desire, the finite forms of desire in that particular stage and we find meaning, not in human consumption of material goods, but in the experience of nature, in the experience of beauty. So you see how that's, so you can begin to see how within the family tree of finitarian scarcity, there's quite a bit of space and rooms for different variations. And that's something we see all the way back to Thomas Moore's utopia. There's a romanticist element there and he says at one point, for example, in utopia, no one desires more and more gold because why would you covet gold and silver when you get the sun and the moon that are infinitely more beautiful than gold and silver? Yeah, it's so funny to see how indeed you mentioned dissident and romantic as well, kind of the finitarian approach, whereas the other ones, cornucopia might be more optimistic and future-driven. So I think there's also a notion of, do they live in the present or in the future and also where do they draw richness from? What is the source of feeling accomplished somehow? And these are very different. I mean, if we look at Enlightened Scarcity, as you mentioned it, with the romantic one, the capitalist versus the socialist, they're really looking at value very differently, right? We should probably talk about socialism, shouldn't we? Yes. That's a particularly interesting variation on these things and we argue that in some ways socialism is a hybrid between the finitarian and cornucopian. One very important thing to recognize with socialism is that when it emerges with people like Robert Owen in the early 19th century, it really draws strength from the technological developments around Owen quite sincerely believes that universal abundance and affluence is now possible, that not just machinery in the manufacturing sector, but also food production will be revolutionized. So that we will live from now on, if we can just figure out an equitable social arrangement, we will live in a post-scarcity world where everyone's desires will be fulfilled. So that's the early, if you like, the utopian stage of socialism. Now, let Karl describe what happens next. Well, I mean, so there's also Fourier, right, who talks about people's pleasure profile and that there's certainly one out of 12 of those has to do with the consumption of goods, right? But then there are all these other pleasures, right? And very complicated psychological mechanisms that give us, that promotes well-being. And we should organize society in a way that takes the entire pleasure profile into account, not just the one that's about consumption and accumulation. So in Fourier's mind, it's a real reaction to what had become in the 19th century kind of middle-class values and middle-class ideas of success. And once we get to Marx, Marx, I mean, there are a hundred ways of thinking about Marx, of course, but the way that we characterize Marx is thinking about the driving force behind capitalism not being the general populations desire for more and more consumption, not even the capitalist class desire for more and more consumption, but rather that it's the capitalist class quest, never ending quest for more and more power. And power comes in the form of reproduction of class relations. So in Marx's worldview, scarcity is very much about power, about the capitalist class trying to impose work, which is the primary form of imposition of power and social control. And the workers trying to find ways to protect time and energy for their own projects, not necessarily consumption, but just freedom and praxis. The clash here that's creating the feeling of scarcity is very much grounded in power and it's a destructive form of power that in the future society needs to be lifted, needs to be transcended, that dialectic needs to be ruptured. And this, I mean, socialism has suffered this in the 20th century even today that doesn't find its foot holding anymore because before it was just a notion of equality, but not through scarcity necessarily, it was more productivity and we need to actually put everyone to work and everybody will have enough, but the idea was not to limit the desires necessarily, it was that everybody has the same share and today's socialism is struggling to find a place in this planetary scarcity where we need to redistribute, but we need to redistribute within planetary scarcity. And I think this incremental or iterative redefinition is very interesting for both currents, right? I mean, one of the aspects here that we don't actually talk much about in the book, but the Cold War plays a really important role both in the West obviously and in terms of shaping the scarcity notion in the West and shaping the scarcity notion in the East. And the idea of economic growth is not just about consumption, it's also about the state and it's about military development and it's about geopolitics. And again, if you come back to Marx's point of view if the governing dynamic is a power battle, power is always relative, so that means that it's infinite, it can continue forever, that dynamic. So I think what happens in Eastern Europe is that there's an idea of infinite nature and the application of technology to nature to produce as much as possible, but there's also a kind of infinite desire, not necessarily for consumption, but for engrandizement and power. And so that is another kind of cornucopian idea. It's not what Marx and Fourier and Owen envision, a world in which the desires wouldn't necessarily be curtailed but reorganized and redirected. We have followed the debate about Marx's ecology closely while thinking about social scarcity. And I think we land on the side of the skeptics. There are great, great arguments by John Bellamy Foster and others about the nascent ecological thinking in Marx, but on the whole, we tend to side with the people who see in Marx fundamentally a critique of social relations, as Carl has been saying, but not all that much thought about ecology. It's entirely possible Marxian theory could be amended with ecological perspectives. We don't deny that, but Marx himself, it seems to us, he is in some sense quite happy with the idea of the mastery of nature. And even his borrowings from soil chemistry, Liebig and others, imagine the soil as a kind of factory that can be scientifically managed. So that explains perhaps a little bit, the cornucopian current, the strong cornucopian and Promethean current in 20th century socialism. For this, I love history. I have to admit, because I spoke with Jason Moore, for instance, on the podcast as well, the recent book of Gohei Saito as well. And I asked to Jason, like, how does a historian function? Because how do you propose a theory? Because it's a recollection of past ingredients that you realign and then propose something, right? And he said, well, you propose and you just wait for counter arguments. There's nothing, I mean, you know, that's the validity or not of a certain theory is you, you of course need to assemble or have a constellation of facts and then propose a certain theory and then it gets dismissed or approved or something like that. And this, I would love to hear you in the same room as him and others and see what this discussion would feel like. We should turn now to the sort of the end of the book and this great battle that we see between neoclassical scarcity and planetary scarcity. That's really where we end up. So that's what we should talk about next, but maybe we should emphasize from the beginning that we don't, just like Jason, we're still waiting for the answer. We're not offering a recipe for a socialist world revolution or a neoliberal technical fix. We're just clearing a space for new thought and new action by looking to the past. The one thing just to add to that, you know, ideas are, you know, ideas are powerful weapons. They're powerful tools. You know, in some ways it's partly about whether our ideas or theories are true or not, but that's a very tenuous territory to enter into. So when we think about, you know, ideas about the economy, nature and nexus, you know, the way we think about these has a kind of strategic importance. It's not just an ideological importance that kind of like the Aula Minerva sets flight at dusk to survey the battlefield and tells us what it looks like and shapes the understanding of it. Certainly theory does that, but theory also shapes how we enter the future and how we guide ourselves into that future. What institutions we emphasize, what rules and laws that we implement. And that's why it's so important that we develop new ideas. And I think Jason Morris is one of the foremost most dynamic thinkers in trying to push us in a different direction, theoretically, intellectually and ideologically. And I think what we are hoping to do with this book is to provide a kind of smorgasbord of different approaches that can then be used by, you know, social theorists and others as they approach the future. And, you know, the problems that, you know, that we're gonna now pivot to. I mean, these are, you know, this is not just about ideology. This is much more serious, right? This is why we wrote this book because we, you know, the way that we understand and what we hear from climate scientists is that this is not just about liking capitalism or not liking capitalism or liking technology or not liking technology. These are, you know, this is a serious moment in history and I think we need the past to inform our future thinking about this. Frederick, you wanted to discuss the, well, neoclassical versus planetary scarcity, perhaps that would be a good moment, no? Yeah, yeah. I'll let Carl, Carl will help me with the intellectual side of this, but I'll just turn to the material for a moment because I think that really explains what's happening. So on the one hand, the industrial revolution and European imperialism reached new heights in the 19th century. And of course, fossil fuel, cheap energy from coal into steam-powered production and steam shipping really unshackled capitalism and turned it into a global force, a world-changing force. It's not a coincidence. This is exactly the moment where we leave behind the natural variability of the Holocene and we move into a new climate, which of course, you could call that the Anthropocene or you could call it the Capitalocene, doesn't really matter to us, but we've entered into a moment of anthropogenic climate change because of this world-changing transformation of capitalism and empire in the 19th century. So that's really underpinning the intellectual changes that we'll talk about next. First of all, the rise of marginalist economics and neoclassical economics and then planetary scarcity. Carl, do you wanna walk us through the intellectual side of that? Yeah, I mean, so what we talk about in the book is that there's kind of a weird moment when marginalism and neoclassical economics emerges. This is a moment as Fredic was describing when for the first time we actually have a cornucopia of commodities and we're able to tame or subjugate nature and make it produce this extraordinary amount of material wealth and the Crystal Palace exhibition in 1851 is, we use that as a kind of a watershed moment where people are congregating hundreds of thousands of people to Hyde Park to witness this industrial marvel, what this new steam engine powered economy, what it can produce. So it's abundance and the world is now integrated in a globalized network through steam shipping. It's really an extraordinary moment of abundance and economic growth and the economists at this point decide to focus on the marginal choice, the infinitesimal choice, choices on the margin, narrowing it down really on each firm and each consumer what they want at the particular juncture. So it does away with the global picture and just focuses on the nitty gritty of firms and consumers. The other aspect here is that the world in the 19th century is of course also becoming much more politicized. So there are all these working class movements, socialist movements, communist movements and the economists the way they understand the world is to abstract away from all of that. And they can do that by looking only at the minutia of consumer and profit maximizing choices. So as we enter into the 20th century, we have this very peculiar emphasis on the marginal, the small change, right? And scarcity when the world is changing on a scale and rapidity that the world had never seen before, right? So that is shaping a particular worldview that abstracts away from certain things and highlights other things. And the key here was really to make the most out of resources as possible to promote as much consumer welfare as possible. That's the fundamental logic of neoclassical economics. Also embedded in that, even though the neoclassical framework is a static framework, it's not dynamic, but the idea amongst Marshall and others was that you string together optimizing decisions by firms and consumers that are also generating the greatest amount of economic growth, right? Later on in the 50s and 60s, neoclassical economics adds a growth theory to this. But even before we argue that maximum resource use and maximum economic growth are the kind of mantras that come out of neoclassical economics. One other dimension of this that's worth emphasizing is that all of this happened, this move to the infantethnomal, it's probably driven at least in part by an eagerness to make economics more mathematical, we should say. But even in the examples in these economic texts, you see the world of the Crystal Palace exhibition, you see discussion of tea, right? A Chinese commodity, and you see an awareness of empire and long distance trade. So it's not that they, they're abstracting away from the world historical process, but they're certainly not, they're not unaware of it, they're not denying it. And this is also the moment when thanks to chemistry and thanks to engineering, to electrification, it becomes possible to think of the world as of European history, world history as a process of substitution, of moving from one frontier to another, from one invention to another. So we have a sense of acceleration and generalized substitutionism, right? Everything is fungible, everything can be replaced. It's very, very, it's an absurd idea, right? Because agriculture and ecology are still at the root of all of this, that the cash crops and the raw materials needed all come from the earth, but economists are led deeper and deeper into this highly idealized idea of nature where human power is taken for granted and ecology, the whole problem of ecology is put aside. And just to add to that quote by Robert Solo, one of the foremost growth theories, and he said in 1974, and I quote here, the world can in effect get along without natural resources. So exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe. That is, Frederick, just before you mentioned about economists and I had exactly the same thought of thinking, it's funny how when you mentioned infinitesimal, well, this probably started in the 17th century or the 18th century in science. Chemistry was, let's say, the 19th century, some part in the 18th century as well. And I was trying to remember when these elements in science appeared and therefore how they were reused by a newer science, which were economics, how they were to either to become more of a official science or to be more in par with their contemporary issues, they went and brought concepts from elsewhere to legitimize economics and to make it perhaps more dominant as well in a source of discourse. I think that, yeah, no, that's a fruit well, I think very important way to approach the problem is that there is, on the one hand, there's an invocation of the new energy physics of thermodynamics in marginalist economics, what Phil Mirowski has written about. But there's also a divergence, right? Right at the same moment that ecology is emerging, that evolutionary biology is emerging, we have a kind of disembedding of economic thought from the agrarian base. Now, evolutionary biology will show up in strange places in 20th century economic thought like Hayek. That's for sure, but the mainstream of economic thought is in some sense parting away from the agrarian base. Whereas if you go earlier, if you go to people like Smith, and of course, Malthus and Ricardo, the agrarian base is very much present in how they think about productivity, how they think about the limits, how they think about growth, right? Well, let me just add that. So there's a lot of writing on the classical economics and the emergence of the classical economics and people like Wal-Raw, Jevins and Manger, that, and they're very clear about that in their own writings that they want to turn economics into a science. And the way to do that was to use mathematical language and models. And there's a way to kind of gain scientific legitimacy. We are of the mindset that, we don't dispute that, but there is a clear underlying ideological and strategic interest in their writings as well. And one of the reasons why their paradigm is picked up and popularized is that indeed it is useful as a worldview in shaping society in the interest of certain people in society. So the ideas of marginalism were actually around from the 1840s, 1850s, but they're only really picking up steam in the 1870s and they become popularized in the 1890s. So it's not that it was the only new ideas around, but it was a set of ideas that were useful at that particular moment to certain people. If we're trying to reconverge, you mentioned at the beginning Carl, this double helix going on and off with scarcity and desires. When reading the book, I kind of feel that history repeats itself somehow, that we kind of have cycles, but perhaps there are helixes that we kind of are in the same challenges today. When reading about Moore's Utopia in Bacon's New Atlas, I kind of see the de-gross movement versus the eco-modernist movement word-by-word resurface somehow. When you read and write about these things, what are your feelings about this? Do you, how do you distance yourself from present when you read these past elements? Do you feel that there is a logical sequence until the present? Do you feel that we just are gonna perpetuate this debate for the next centuries? Or what are your feelings when you read about these and write about these? Well, I'll start and let Frederick conclude our thoughts here. It seems to me as though from the late 19th century that there's been such overwhelming belief and confidence in the power of science to enable economic growth so that the dominant debates in the 20th century was not about growth or not growth. It was all predicated on growth and then within that cornucopia worldview, there are of course, radically different and opposing ideas. What we're entering in now is this moment where that cornucopian idea of infinite nature, would be great if we could continue to grow because that's a really simple solution to a lot of economic and social problems and political problems. But we're now in that kind of phase of planetary scarcity where growth is simply impossible and we're pushing up against limits that we can't fix. We have power of a nature but a very limited power. There's so many unintended consequences of what we do in our interventions that we don't know how to fix. And I'll let Fredic pick up on this. Yeah, we end as Carl just suggested with what we call the condition of planetary scarcity, which is a material reality of the planet itself that is a relatively new discovery and that makes it particularly unsettling, right? We have been emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases for hundreds of years, but it's only now that the science has come together and conclusively shown us how dangerous this is. The question of course is, what else, what other dangerous consequences are we introducing into the earth system now? Clearly biodiversity loss is a clear and present danger and possibly an even more difficult problem to solve than climate change. If all we have to do was decarbonize the economy, perhaps there might be some technical solution, but to also at the same time, avoid a fixed mass extinction, which means setting aside land, which means possibly retreating or at least trying to repair what be damaged. It's a monumental challenge. Now, planetary scarcity is not Malthusian scarcity. We have a whole chapter devoted to Malthusian scarcity, where we discuss this idea of Malthus and others about the finite stock of land and resources and the problem of resource constraint. Planetary scarcity is the problem not of stock, but of sphinx, of overproducing pollution through overconsumption and straining the capacity of the earth system to absorb all the waste materials of our economy. Those things that we thought were infinite, the ocean and the atmosphere are turning out to be all too finite, right? Right, so that's the condition of planetary scarcity. Climate scientists and ecologists are now warning us about the present, the overflowing of the sink. We have yet to produce social theory, political theory and a new economic that sophisticated enough and powerful enough to meet the moment. So that's what I mean by looking back to the past to clear a space for new thought and new action. We have to tackle the problem of neoclassical scarcity first, to understand where it came from, how it became dominant, understand its flaws before we move ahead to a new kind of economics. And one more point about this. We are basically pragmatists and pluralists about the solution. We agree with the past Chakraborty that although the problem of the earth system is a unitary one, climate change affects the entire planet, albeit in quite unequally, but it's still the earth system is singular, right? It's not multiple things. Humanity is always divided against itself. And that's exactly why we're so interested in the plurality of the past, right? That's why it's worthwhile thinking about all the different versions of scarcity, sanitary and cornucopia and thinking through their limitations. If we were simply advocating for a socialist world revolution, we could have made the book much shorter. It could have been, it could have had three chapters, right? But we suspect whatever future we're looking at will be fragmented, will be divided between different regimes, different ideologies. The question is whether all of them might in some ways become or embrace a more affinitarian view of the world based on the new science. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks. This is absolutely great. I think that's, as you mentioned, like the next step forward and where we, we as scientists need to, well, start thinking about, start, well, standing on the shoulders of scarcity to develop new understanding models, but also analytical models and all of this. If people want to further explore the notions of scarcity, do you have any other books or films or novels that you would like to recommend them to, to read or to watch? Sure, sure. I think science fiction is a nice place to turn, to think about the future. I'm a big fan of Kim Stanley Robinson's novels. He's been thinking ahead of the curve. He's really been extraordinarily prescient in imagining the future. And obviously the, one of his most recent books, The Ministry for the Future is a good place to start, right? Which is sort of a near, near future science fiction fable about how the planetary emergency might produce new political and social forms of organization. And it's, you know, it's a surprisingly optimistic take in some ways, perhaps overly. I think he himself thinks he was overly optimistic when he wrote it. But yeah, science fiction might be a nice place to start. Carl, do you have a recommendation? Yeah, so there is one movie that's, it's a documentary of sorts, a kind of poetic documentary, and it's called The Hottest August. It came out in 2019, which is kind of, I mean, it's a very New York-specific experience of climate change. But it is one that brings in both kind of, you know, how this is being felt in the environment. There's a lot of discussion of the aftermath of Sandy Hook, for example. But it also really talks about the way that society is organized. And, you know, it handles both the sort of desire part and the environmental part. And then the other, this book that just recently came out that fits quite nicely with ours is by Gregory Claes, and it's called Utopianism for Dying Planet. Oh, well, yeah. We also, of course, want to mention, you mentioned Pierre Charbonnier in the beginning, our good friend Pierre Charbonnier, whose work is really compliment, really sort of complimentary to our point of view. And I understand Pierre has just signed a contract to write the sequel to Affluence and Freedom. So congratulations to Pierre. Yeah, so I think we're going to wrap this up. We have enough stimulating information to kind of bounce around. And I think not only your book was the necessary stimulation to actually have the discussion, but in any case, I would like to thank you both, Frederick, Carl, for this very nice conversation. I also want to thank all of you if you're still here and you're still watching and listening until the end. I know it's a more of a theoretical and history of ideas and history of life. Well, how people were living back in the day. But I think you will find it very interesting and stimulating to think about our future life. If you want to explore further topics, we mentioned Jason Moore, for instance. We have an episode with him, Neil Brenner. We also had an episode together. So please feel free and have a look at the recommendations that Carl and Frederick gave you as well. Many thanks again, and we will see you all in two weeks for another conversation.