"Abundance is the opposite of de-growth.

"It reorients politics away from redistributing scarce resources, away from moralising about people’s consumption, to focus instead on production.

"Abundance 'speaks of a cornucopia, all good things for everybody. But the world of abundance has trade-offs, and trade-offs require choices' ... It asks: can we solve our problems with more supply? 

"If there aren’t enough houses, make construction cheaper and build more. The trade-off is that house prices might go down for existing homeowners. If we need more windmills, accept you can’t hold them up with consenting regulation. ...

"The scarcity advocates miss the role of economic growth in solving environmental problems as much as creating them. Rich countries have more re-forested green spaces than poorer countries because they’re not worried about having enough to eat.

"Without exception, countries do better at protecting their ecology as they get richer. If we hadn’t wiped out moa and dodo when we were poor, we would be trying to save them today when we are richer.

"It was scarcity, not abundance that drove them to near extinction.

"Scarcity versus abundance ... [is] the next fault lines of politics."

~ Josie Pagani from her op-ed 'Embracing the opportunities of abundance politics'

"Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterised by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, they then will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy."

~ Francis Fukuyama: the unread part from his book The End of History, i.e., his forecast of what would happen after the Cold War was won [hat tip Scott Sumner]

[Courtesy of the translator, W. H. F. Altman, here is the text of Martin Heidegger’s speech, delivered on the occasion of a 25th anniversary reunion in Konstanz, May 26-27, 1934.] Martin Heidegger, The Reunion Speech Twenty-five Years after Our Graduation, Reunion in Konstanz on May 26-27, 1934 Dear classmates! Our reunion—after twenty-five years and more—might […]