A short piece about scarcity models

A scarcity model—as opposed to an abundance model—is a set of beliefs that there is not enough happiness, not enough recognition, not enough love, not enough money, not enough work, not enough (fill in the blank) to go around, and that we will lose—we won’t get what we need—if we don’t fight for everything. That blank can be used for anything the individual believes they are short of (though usually, at root, it is love, usually sublimated as money).

Most people running a scarcity model look for some way to acquire that which they believe they lack.

If/when that doesn’t work, they seek a substitute for what they feel they lack. This might be political power, or power in some other sphere. (Of course, some people who seek political power—and particularly those who don’t get it—do so for a variety of reasons.)

But, overwhelmingly, the quantity used to substitute for a lack of something emotional, something deeper, is money. Whether as an employee, as a specialist in a financial area (see my blog about Warren Buffett) or as a business owner or director, it is money which becomes the focus of the individual’s scarcity model.

And this is good—according to western business culture.  The acquisition of a money is, per se, a good thing apparently (“[I am] intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes”—Peter Mandelson, supposedly socialist UK business secretary, 1998).

It is unsurprising that, if a large number of people are running the same model of life, they collude with each other to maintain social and business structures which enable the model to be validated.

So, put simply, a scarcity model often uses money as substitute for something else in the belief that acquisition of money is an acceptable substitute for the acquisition of that something else.   However, because money isn’t love, no amount of it will equate to the missing love.  The person is unable to replace the scarcity model with something more useful, and the money keeps rolling in—often at the expense of other people, many of whom are themselves running a scarcity model.

Related material:
>  How the scarcity model affects sales
>  How the scarcity model affects business
> This article is an adequate description of the scarcity model as it affects people generally [external link]

by Jeremy Marchant . © 2015 Jeremy Marchant Limited . uploaded 14 june 2015 . image:  Free images
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