Disrupting Scarcity for Good

Last week, two very different pieces caught my attention.

The first was a paper called Fixing the Holes in Economics, which argues (in the most British policy-wonk way possible) that much of mainstream economics is based on outdated assumptions about human behaviour. It calls for new models that account for factors such as trust, institutions, and our actual social lives. In other words, things that don’t always appear in spreadsheets, but nonetheless shape how we interact and make decisions, including financial ones. 

To quote the author:
Economists have long been bothered by a ‘problem’ that, for most people, seems like a good thing. Humans are a lot more cooperative than economic theory implies. You might call it ‘nice’. …Excessive cooperation appears to be widespread.

Honestly, not something I’ve thought much about.

The second was a podcast episode from Money with Katie, all about social wealth funds. (I just found her recently, and I enjoy her hot takes on personal finance in the much-broader-than-usual context of social norms, unbridled capitalism, etc.) Social wealth funds are public investment vehicles. Katie and her guest discussed Norway and Alaska’s oil funds. Unlike Alberta, where private investors, mostly non-Canadian, reap most of the profits from oil reserves (check out Linda McQuaig’s The Sport and Prey of Capitalists for a history of Canada selling off public goods to private interests), these jurisdictions consider oil a public good. They collect the returns from these publicly held resources and return the gains back to the people, either through annual dividend cheques or through well-funded social programs. It’s a way of organizing money around collective benefit rather than individual accumulation. 

Most interestingly, they made a case for publicly held shares in profitable companies over trying to collect a share of this wealth through taxation. For example, while countries struggled to collect taxes from Apple, Norway held shares of Apple and received its dividend payments on time and in full. 

Interesting, right? I had never considered it, but taking shares in wealth-generating companies instead of collecting taxes from the shareholders might be a brilliant move.

My brain was tickled by how both of these pieces—whether explicitly or not—challenge the story of scarcity that underpins so much of our economy, and, by extension, so much of our nonprofit and advocacy work.

So today’s post is about that - not a fulsome examination of these two concepts, but a quick look at one place they intersect. One of the essential shifts, albeit one I haven’t written as much about here: from scarcity to sustainability.

Scarcity in non-profits
If you’ve spent any time in nonprofit work, scarcity thinking is familiar. We talk about limited resources as if they were an unavoidable truth. There’s never enough money, time, staff, political will, housing units, or space in the shared fridge. We compete for crumbs with other organizations helping THE SAME PEOPLE. We treat burnout as inevitable.

And it’s not just operational. It’s embedded in our culture! We celebrate scrappiness. We praise doing more with less. Exhaustion can be a badge of honour.

This makes sense inside the economic frame most of us inherited as fact: that people are selfish, resources are scarce, and systems are neutral.

But what if none of that is actually true?

Challenging Dominant Economic Theories 
Behavioural economics challenges one of scarcity thinking’s core pillars: that people are selfish and purely rational actors. Turns out, we’re messier (and more generous!) than that. 

We actually care about other people. We seek out trusting relationships, not just transactions. We participate in systems we believe in, even when it’s not strictly in our self-interest. These truths about humanity are not captured in the classic models.

The Fixing the Holes in Economics report argues for updating our theories to reflect how people and institutions actually function. If we assume mutuality and social connection are part of the economy, not irregularities to explain away, we can build economic models that don’t rely on extraction. We might even stop designing systems that exhaust everyone.

The concept of social wealth funds builds upon this idea. These funds are based on the assumption that shared resources should generate shared benefits. Wealth isn’t a zero-sum game, and sustainability is a crucial component of a healthy economy. 

They offer a radically practical vision of what a post-scarcity framework could look like, recognizing that we create value collectively, so maybe we should share it collectively too.

A New Narrative
So what does any of this mean for us, the advocates, changemakers, and organizers?

It means replacing the story of scarcity with a new narrative that better serves us and the people we care about.

A narrative that says:

• There is enough wealth in our communities to make sure everyone has what they need.
• Our alignment is more powerful than our competition, and we are stronger when we collaborate.
• Good work can be well-resourced, stable, and life-giving. 
• Sustainability frees us to put our energy into the real work of systems change. 

As the Fixing the Holes report notes, economics often overlooks how institutions shape behaviour. When we assume scarcity is a permanent condition, we build systems—inside and outside our organizations—that are optimized for burnout and competition.

But we can tell a better story. Social wealth funds are one example. As Katie put it, these funds “acknowledge that wealth is created collectively and should be returned collectively.” 

That’s not charity, it’s structural equity.

The same is true in our organizations, our campaigns, and our communities. We don’t have to stay trapped in scrappiness. We can organize around sufficiency, sustainability, and solidarity. Not someday—now.

Let’s stop building futures on fumes.

Let’s disrupt scarcity, for good.