Scarcity and its Alleviation

Thurston Howell III: What is this slop?
Skipper: It's Gilligan's own creation, Mr Howell. It's coconut pot pie.
--Gilligan's Island

Although it abounds with life and 'natural resources,' the earth in its natural state does little to advance human life. Human advancement requires people to transform earth's unconsumable resources into those that are. Man must work to alleviate a natural state of scarcity.

Imagine dropping a group of men and women into the middle of the wilderness with no supplies--including clothing. It will be difficult for them to survive. Extreme poverty is their default condition. There is only one way that they will survive and, over time, improve their standard of living: production, trade, and saving.

Production is work that alleviates scarcity. In the beginning, production for our struggling group will involve purely manual labor aimed at scavenging to convert readily available resources that are not consumable in their natural state into resources that are. Even edible berries growing on bushes are not consumable until they are picked.

Our group will naturally divide work, because it is intuitive that division of labor improves productivity. Some might pick those berries for food. Others might gather wood for shelter and heat, or hunt animals for food and clothing.

The workers will then naturally engage in trade--because productivity gains from specialization can not be realized unless specialists trade with each other to acquire from others what they did not produce themselves.

Because humans are blessed with reason and ingenuity, it will not take long for people in our group to realize that productivity can be further improved with tools such as shovels, axes, bows and arrows, etc. that can increase output per hour for each specialist. But tools require production just as consumable resources do. As such, some of those consumable resources must be saved to fund the production of tools.

Stated differently, food, clothes, shelter, etc need to be set aside for those who forego scavenging in order to make tools, lest they will be unable to survive on tool-making alone. It should be clear that, absent such saving, advances in standard of living will be limited.

Production, trade, and saving are natural responses to alleviate scarcity in the world.