Abundance

Overview Page

Concepts and Typology

See: Abundance - Typology

1. Derivative Abundance
2. Massive Abundance
3. Multiplicative Abundance
4. Pseudo Abundance
5. Psychic Abundance
6. Reproductive Abundance

See also:

• Demand Side of Abundance

Discussion

The three factors of contemporary abundance

David de Ugarte:

"In classical economics, starting with Adam Smith and his famous example of the production of pins, specialization is understood as part of the social effort for the improvement of productivity. That is, it was part of the road towards abundance. Dividing work into precise tasks and substitute people with machines, to the extent technological development made it possible, was the heart of the Industrial Revolution that transformed the world between the 18th and 20th centuries.

From the manufacturing to the robotic factory, the specialization of tasks not only revolutionized productivity, but also encouraged the specialization of knowledge, and just as it had never been possible to produce so much, neither had so much knowledge been developed ever before.

falansterio de ugineBut with the development of services and the massive incorporation of information technology, knowledge becomes a direct tool of production on a new scale. Production processes are confused with marketing and communication. Businesses begin to demand people with more than one specialty. What had, until then, been reserved for engineers and a few technicians, was multiplied by all of the knowledge that the new industries understand link their more and more sophisticated tools and products. Initially, this tendency, which Juan Urrutia called multipecialization, appears above all in the new technology sector that becomes consolidated in the ’70s.

But the innovation industry linked to personal computing first and the Internet later, is a very particular industry: in the US, its pioneers are openly influenced by hippy understandings of abundance, and in Europe, by a new work ethic centered on knowledge that soon will be expressed in free software.

...

The prophecy will begin to come true scarcely a decade later with the nascent reality of the first industry linked to abundance: free software. Connected to it is the appearance of the first businesses that break with the obsessive hierarchies of the industrial enterprise. As Pekka Himanen argued in 2000 in his famous essay about the hacker ethic, in knowledge industries, work in self-managed teams is simply more productive. Also, by that time, the Internet was already restructuring the forms of relationship. Hackers, used to equality in conversation and to working in networks like equals, practiced “flat” forms of organization based on conversation between “multi-specialized” individuals. Also, networks of relationships between peers that occur in a conversational space will tend to be transnational, limited perhaps by linguistic borders.

This incipient movement will not stay in the world of software: consulting, digital publishing, graphic design, and generally all the services that were first commercialized directly via the Internet are the natural point of departure for these first experiments of transnational communities of multispecialists, but not their destination. The development of productivity and new forms will reach the industrial world in their most radical way as the “direct economy“: small groups of friends design products, finance them with pre-sales and crowdsourcing within communities of affinity, send them to be built by the old industry (now converted to 3D printers), and distribute them through the network.

As a result, traces of abundance appear in more and more places in our lives. The tendency can be summed up today as: multispecialization, transnationality, and non-heirarchical organization of business." (http://english.lasindias.com/abundance-is-the-end-of-divisions-in-production)

Discussion 2: Themes

Abundance vs. Scarcity

For an extensive discussion, see these pages:

• Abundance vs. Scarcity
• Scarcity

Also:

1. Abundance vs. Scarcity Mentality
2. Abundance Logic vs Scarcity Logic

Abundance in User Ownership theory

Patrick Anderson:

"Abundance means plenty for everyone.

Abundance can occur when Competition is perfect.

Competition is perfected by insuring every Consumer owns enough Physical Sources and has access to Virtual Sources for the production they need.

But abundance through perfect competition would also cause Profit to be zero because owners could not hold Price Above Cost.

So, a Mode Of Production that assumes or requires Profit cannot endure abundance, for as the society as a whole approaches success, the owners of the productive organizations that depend upon profit approach failure."

Resources

Articles

1. Roberto Verzola on Undermining vs. Developing Abundance
2. Beyond Information Abundance Essay: 21st-Century Political Economies: Beyond Information Abundance. by Roberto Verzola

An overview of the most important articles and essays published on the P2P Foundation blog:

Series 1:

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/an-introduction-to-the-economics-of-abundance-1-the-supply-side/2009/12/05

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/an-introduction-to-the-economics-of-abundance-2-the-demand-side/2009/12/06

Series 2:

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/abundance-as-a-field-of-study-1/2008/11/21

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/abundance-as-a-field-of-study-2-a-typology/2008/11/22

Series 3

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-war-against-abundance-in-the-physical-world-1/2008/11/15

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-war-against-abundance-in-the-physical-world-2-towards-policies-for-abundance/2008/11/16

Miscellaneous

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/roberto-verzola-finite-demand-makes-relative-abundance-possible/2009/01/31

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/from-gain-maximization-to-risk-minimization/2008/12/03

Books

1. Introduction to Economic Abundance Book: Economic Abundance: An Introduction. Authored by: William M. Dugger; James T. Peach

Key Books on Scarcity

Recommended by Dougald Hine [1]:

• In Illich's own work, Toward a History of Needs (1978) marks the emergence of a theme which runs through his later work. By focusing on "the sociogenesis of needs" (as he puts it in this article, written for the 20th anniversary of the Whole Earth Catalogue), he brings a historical perspective to the demand side of the scarcity equation.
• Michael Perelman, Marx, Malthus, and the Concept of Natural Resource Scarcity (1979).
• John Kincaid, 'Of Time, Body, and Scarcity: Policy Options and Theoretic Considerations' (1983).
• Nicholas Xenos's Scarcity and Modernity (1989).
• The Limits to Scarcity: Contesting the Politics of Allocation, edited by Lyla Mehta, is a collection due out in late 2010 which looks very interesting.

Movements

1. Abundance League

More Information

1. The Post-Scarcity Economics/Culture of Abundance Reading List v2.2
2. Post-Scarcity