The era of abundance and the death of economics

Mankind is now dealing with a new kind of challenge.

KARACHI: The human race is standing on an epoch in its evolutionary history.

The history long problem of scarcity seems not like a problem anymore. For the first time in human history, we have become abundant in so many resources i e humans, food, clothing etc. Hence, we seem to have solved the eternal problem of scarcity.

However, now we face another challenge and we are clueless about it. This new challenge is the challenge of handling abundance.

Before we move ahead, let me make it clear that I am cognisant of the hungry tribes in Africa and the poor rural population which still faces scarcity but the problem of scarcity is receding ground and abundance is winning this evolutionary battle very fast

The world has become abundant in so many resources. South Asia faced several famines till independence. Most deadly of them was the famine of Bengal in the early 1940s. Almost 2 million people were reported dead due to unavailability of food. But we have largely solved this problem.



In these times, we have surplus stocks. Pakistan had surplus wheat, surplus sugar this year and we didn’t seem to handle the surplus very well. Wheat rotted in our silos while sugar was exported with a Rs10 per kg subsidy. Next year is supposedly a good year for rice. As with hybrid seeds, our productivity will increase manifolds. God knows how will we handle it

This abundance is not only an issue of economics. It is very close to us and our daily lives. After millions and millions of years of evolutionary journey, humans for the first time have resorted to the practice of dieting. Our bodies are wired to store extra food from wherever and whenever we can get the same. As in our past we were never sure if we would get our next proper meal.

But in today’s time, people are paying instructors to reduce the size of their stomach. They are buying expensive exercise machines to get rid of extra fat. This is a novelty in millions and millions of years of our evolutionary history. Similarly, we have so much of everything nowadays. In Karachi on my way back home every night, I see roads flooded with cars. Cars with seating capacities of four or more people and they are occupied by a single individual-again a testimonial to the wealth of abundance that we have.

People have so many clothes in their closets ad so many permutations and combinations are applied before leaving for a party or even leaving for work — again a sign of abundance.

Rich people are finding it hard to store their wealth and we have the Panama drama and likes happening every other day. Elon Musk is trying to populate other planets and soon we will be abundant in land, which we considered as the scarcest resource. All the above mentioned instances are just glaring examples of how abundance has taken over or how abundance is in the process of taking over our lives.



And we are not accustomed to it yet. For the last four hundred years, we have established economics as a science or art to deal with scarcity.

I believe economics is losing its ground in the arena of importance and this again due to the new realm of abundance. As a teacher of economics, this might not be a very promising prophecy for me, yet true it is.

The point to ponder is this. We need another art and science to deal with abundance. And we desperately need to wear all our creativity caps for it because we as a race have never faced this challenge in our history. We have learnt to deal with scarcity in millions of years how many million years do we need to learn to deal with abundance…No one knows. Yet the human race has surmounted so many challenges in history that I am hopeful that we will come up with an answer to this novel problem as well.

The writer is a corporate banker and teaches economics

Published in The Express Tribune, December 4^th, 2017.

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