Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough

by Michael Easter

In the United States, levels of six air pollutants including carbon monoxide and lead have declined by 77 percent since 1970. Meanwhile, our GDP and population grew by 285 percent and 60 percent, respectively. We’ve reduced our total carbon dioxide by 13 percent since 2007. That’s thanks to simple economics and smart government environmental regulations. Not only are we using resources more efficiently, but we’re also seeing old innovations merge into one. For example, in one of my lectures, I show students a famous RadioShack advertisement from 1991. It featured all sorts of products on sale at the store: a computer, a telephone, a clock radio, a stereo, a calculator, a police scanner, a camcorder, a camera, a voice recorder, an answering machine, and more. And the original advertisement was, of course, printed in a newspaper. “All of those items have now vanished into smartphones,” explained McAfee. Put these two phenomena at scale and combine them with wise government interventions that reduced pollution and protected wildlife, and we’ve been able to improve the human condition while treading more lightly on the planet. We’re now consuming fewer resources, using less land, polluting less, and even bringing back species we’d nearly pushed to extinction. All as our population grows and living standards rise. McAfee said he’d bet that in a decade we’ll be using fewer resources than we are today, regardless of how much our population and economy grow.