Product Description: We all know the proverb about teaching someone to fish, but if there are no fish left, knowing how to catch them won’t do you any good. And that’s the position businesses are in today. Resources are being depleted at an alarming rate and the cost of raw materials is rising dramatically...read more

Product Description: Why does a top-class chef, after years carefully perfecting her craft, create her best dish in just two rushed hours? Why are students less likely to miss tighter deadlines? Why are the terminally ill often happier than the healthy, and why do those struggling to make ends meet find it so difficult to escape debt? Here, economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir reveal that the answers lie in the new and surprising science of scarcity...read more

In the blockbuster tradition of Freakonomics, a Harvard economist and a Princeton psychology professor team up to offer a surprising and empowering new way to look at everyday life, presenting a paradigm-challenging examination of how scarcity—and our flawed responses to it—shapes our lives, our society, and our culture.Why do successful people get things done at the last minute? Why does poverty persist? Why do organizations get stuck firefighting? Why do the lonely find it hard to make friends? These questions seem unconnected, yet Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir show that they are all are examples of a mindset produced by scarcity. Drawing on cutting-edge research from behavioral science and economics, Mullainathan and Shafir show that scarcity creates a similar psychology for everyone struggling to manage with less than they need. Busy people fail to manage their time efficiently for the same reasons the poor and those maxed out on credit cards fail to manage their money. The dynamics of scarcity reveal why dieters find it hard to resist temptation, why students and busy executives mismanage their time, and why sugarcane farmers are smarter after harvest than before. Once we start thinking in terms of scarcity and the strategies it imposes, the problems of modern life come into sharper focus.

Product Description: Christian Bidard develops a theory of production prices that analyzes the exchange relationship between producers and consumers, emphasizing reproduction potential, rather than scarcity. Bidard compares and contrasts different studies of Sraffa's work and reviews the question of relationships between classical theory (Smith, Ricardo, Marx) and the general equilibrium theory (Walras, Arrow, Debreu)...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The dominant schools of neoclassical and neoliberal economics tell us that material scarcity is an inevitable product of an insatiable human nature. Against this, Costas Panayotakis argues that scarcity is in fact a result of the social and economic processes of the capitalist system...read more

Throughout much of history, a critical driving force behind global economic development has been the response of society to the scarcity of key natural resources. Increasing scarcity raises the cost of exploiting existing natural resources and creates incentives in all economies to innovate and conserve more of these resources. However, economies have also responded to increasing scarcity by obtaining and developing more of these resources. Since the agricultural transition over 12,000 years ago, this exploitation of new 'frontiers' has often proved to be a pivotal human response to natural resource scarcity. This book provides a fascinating account of the contribution that natural resource exploitation has made to economic development in key eras of world history. This not only fills an important gap in the literature on economic history but also shows how we can draw lessons from these past epochs for attaining sustainable economic development in the world today.

Scarcity is considered a ubiquitous feature of the human condition. It underpins much of modern economics and is widely used as an explanation for social organisation, social conflict and the resource crunch confronting humanity's survival on the planet. It is made out to be an all-pervasive fact of our lives – be it of housing, food, water or oil. But has the conception of scarcity been politicized, naturalized, and universalized in academic and policy debates? Has overhasty recourse to scarcity evoked a standard set of market, institutional and technological solutions which have blocked out political contestations, overlooking access as a legitimate focus for academic debates as well as policies and interventions? Theoretical and empirical chapters by leading academics and scholar-activists grapple with these issues by questioning scarcity's taken-for-granted nature. They examine scarcity debates across three of the most important resources - food, water and energy – and their implications for theory, institutional arrangements, policy responses and innovation systems. The book looks at how scarcity has emerged as a totalizing discourse in both the North and South. The 'scare' of scarcity has led to scarcity emerging as a political strategy for powerful groups. Aggregate numbers and physical quantities are trusted, while local knowledges and experiences of scarcity that identify problems more accurately and specifically are ignored. Science and technology are expected to provide 'solutions', but such expectations embody a multitude of unexamined assumptions about the nature of the 'problem', about the technologies and about the institutional arrangements put forward as a 'fix.' Through this examination the authors demonstrate that scarcity is not a natural condition: the problem lies in how we see scarcity and the ways in which it is socially generated.

Product Description: Most principles of economics texts are predicated narrowly on the concept of scarcity as a fundamental force, but that is only one aspect of economics. This supplemental text for basic and intermediate level undergraduates provides a serious discussion of the concept of abundance - what it means, how we can move toward it, and what keeps us from doing so...read more

Revisits the question of why a benevolent Creator would permit material scarcity in human existence, which was raised by Thomas Malthus in his celebrated Essay on Population, arguing that scarcity serves as an occasion for God to provide for people through one another and that there are strong metaphysical and scriptural warrants for enacting progressive social policies for a better sharing of the goods of the earth. Simultaneous.

Product Description: This work is a comprehensive analysis of the post-war fear of scarcity. It charts perceptions of and prescriptions for crises of population growth and resource shortage, which have had profound influence on agricultural, population and security policies from the Second World War to the present...read more

Product Description: These essays address one of the most pressing and significant issues that humanity has confronted to date - the lack of life-sustaining resources. Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann establish a disturbing but realistic scenario of the disastrous future that awaits humankind as surplus populations collide with dwindling resources...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The three major themes of János Kornai's work reflected in the title of this book -- planning, shortage, and transition, or transformation -- figure prominently in the essays. After a philosophical introduction by Edmond Malinvaud, the book is divided into three sections: Markets and Organizations, Theory of Transition, and The Transitional Experience...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Michael Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann have edited a book that, although ominous, is not a fatalistic look at the future. The Coming Age of Scarcity lays out the perils of not recognizing the reality of genocide or of acknowledging the full implications of warfare...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: The history of capitalism has long been thought to be a sequence of recurring crises that appear in various forms: crises in employing people, crises in obtaining resources, and financial crises. Marx's Crises Theory: Scarcity, Labor, and Finance provides a framework for interpreting Marx's theory of crises...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)