# Artificial Scarcity **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 6, 2014, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-scarcity/700596 "2014-10-06T22:47:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Ravenman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ravenman/32/2929_2.png) [@Ravenman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ravenman)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-scarcity/700596/21 "2014-10-07T17:20:15Z")
> [@Knowledgable](#): > > I have heard that today, we produce food enough to feed 10 billion people. > Yet there are _only_ 7 billion people today; 1 billion is starving; 3 billion is malnourished. > > Seeing these stats, it is pretty obvious that either, > us as a race are simple too dumb to figure a way to distribute food to everyone equally, > or we are cynically arrogant… How does “cynical arrogance” explain starvation, exactly? ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-scarcity/700596/22 "2014-10-07T17:44:33Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > Is logistics even the problem though? My understanding is that it is the government (or lack thereof) in the affected areas that is the problem. We’re pretty good at logistics. Some of the people being beheaded in Syria right now were trying to get aid to people who needed it. Logistics covers the entire process of transporting materials from point A to point B. It isn’t just weighing containers - it’s also dealing with all of the human bottlenecks along the way. And some of those bottlenecks like to chop off people’s heads. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-scarcity/700596/23 "2014-10-07T17:58:23Z")
One point I think that has been missed is food waste. IIRC in the developed world, something like 30-40% of food ends up in the trash. While there are certainly ways to cut down on that waste (e.g. supermarkets giving their just-out-of-date food to the homeless / soup kitchens), to cut that figure down significantly would require vast, and probably unworkable changes to how we all buy, store and eat food. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-scarcity/700596/24 "2014-10-07T18:10:20Z")
Reminds me of my grandmother’s story about being forced to eat her beets as a kid - her parents told her “eat them - remember the starving Armenians!”. The notion, of course, was that one should not waste food when others were starving. Grandma had no idea who the “starving Armenians” were, and heartily wished (though of course, did not come out and say - one did not talk back to one’s parents in those days) that her parents would simply ship them her unwanted beets. Naturally, this would be silly, as sending cooked beets from Nova Scotia to Anatolia in the early 1900s was hardly possible. Seems to me a similar issue is raised in this thread - noting that group A has too much food, and group B has not enough, so why not just give group B group A’s un-needed food? It’s as easy - or as difficult - as shipping unwanted beets to the starving Armenians. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-scarcity/700596/25 "2014-10-07T18:53:22Z")
Just popping in to say that beets are _delicious_. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-scarcity/700596/26 "2014-10-07T18:56:37Z")
Jeez, I thought this was going to be a thread about diamonds and iphones. Two essentially worthless items whose value largely derives from its artificial scarcity. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-scarcity/700596/27 "2014-10-07T18:59:36Z")
> [@Knowledgable](#): > > What do you think? > I finished 1984 for the 3rd time ☹ I think that most people think Nineteen Eighty-Four is about government surveillance. To a lesser extent, some people (like you) think that it’s about keeping people in poverty making shit just to blow it up through an artificially created state of war (which isn’t really based on any real economic theory AFAIK). What I take away from it is that human societies inevitably settle into a common structure with some figurehead (real or imagined) at the top representing their ideal, an “Inner Party” of elitist 1%ers who hold all the real power, an “Outer Party” of middle class middle manager suckups who get to enjoy a bit of a lifestyle improvement so long as they toe (tow?) the line and do all the bureaucratic work and the remaining 80% of “Proles” who are both at the bottom of the barrel, but also have the benefit of just sort of living their modest lives as anonymous interchangeable carbon blobs no one pays attention to. Regardless of how you try to structure society- communism, free market, democracy, theocracy, whatever, they all seem to follow that basic structure. In fact, people will violently defend that structure. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-scarcity/700596/28 "2014-10-07T19:02:49Z")
Speculation for profit is certainly a factor. Speculators buy up food and take it off the market. The resulting shortage of food results in a rise of food prices. The speculators can then sell their stored food for more than they paid for it. ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Tildrum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e95f7d/32.png) [@Tom\_Tildrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Tildrum)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-scarcity/700596/29 "2014-10-07T19:05:47Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > I think the novel _1984_ can inform us on this issue about as much as the TV show _Big Brother_ can. I think the point of the 1984 reference was that in the novel, the three governments used the ongoing war deliberately as a way to destroy surplus goods and food, to keep their populations in too much of a state of need to become restive. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-scarcity/700596/30 "2014-10-07T19:14:34Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > Jeez, I thought this was going to be a thread about diamonds and iphones. Two essentially worthless items whose value largely derives from its artificial scarcity. What’s scarce about iPhones, except for the ten days after release of a new model? ---
**Author:** ![The\_Joker\_and\_the\_Thief](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e79b87/32.png) [@The\_Joker\_and\_the\_Thief](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Joker_and_the_Thief)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-scarcity/700596/31 "2014-10-08T14:40:13Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > Jeez, I thought this was going to be a thread about diamonds and iphones. Two essentially worthless items whose value largely derives from its artificial scarcity. iPhones definitely aren’t worthless. If you’re alone in a forest, one’s not going to help you survive in the same way a knife or lighter would, but that’s not how we define value. The ability of a phone to perform advanced calculations (e.g. as graphing calculator) has obvious intrinsic value, and the increased productivity from increased ease of communication has value too. And the comparably high prices of iPhone competitors and second hand iPhones is a sure sign that they are not overpriced. Non industrial diamonds are certainly overpriced, but the value of a good is what people are willing to pay for it. If diamonds are worthless, so is art, fashionable clothing, interior paint, and so on. There’s no point in having an advanced industrial society producing a surplus of wealth if we don’t use that wealth to make people’s lives better. ---
**Author:** ![Finagle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/b19c9b/32.png) [@Finagle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Finagle)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-scarcity/700596/32 "2014-10-08T16:07:41Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > Jeez, I thought this was going to be a thread about diamonds and iphones. Two essentially worthless items whose value largely derives from its artificial scarcity. Is it possible to have spent a _negative_ amount of time thinking before generating a post? Because this is about the dumbest thing I’ve read in a long time. Diamonds are hardly worthless for industrial usage. And if you want to get into the value of jewelry in general, you really should include your scope to include not just diamonds but all gems, gold, silver, decorative objects, and any item of clothing more elegant than the plain white t-shirt and jeans. As for the iPhone, it’s kind of hard to imagine that a pocket-sized device that acts as a phone, general computer, GPS, MP3 player, accelerometer, game device, e-book reader and internet portal is _completely_ worthless. You might question its marginal value over competitors, but, in fact, most electronic devices of that ilk cost approximately the same, modulo some various subsidies. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-scarcity/700596.md?page=1)