Soula wrote:
> My first hunch is that all scarcity is socially construed.
Indeed. Saying that a "resource" or a "good" is scarce is the same as
saying that the productivity of the labor that (re)produces is a
finite magnitude. If labor productivity were infinite, then all goods
would exist in infinite abundance. Now, the productivity of labor is
social. As Marx and Smith showed, most productivity gains result from
social cooperation -- including here trade or cooperation mediated by
markets (so-called "gains from trade" are "gains from social
cooperation," it's the material process not its social form what leads
to those gains).
So, when the economists say that the price of goods reflects their
relative scarcity, they are just unconsciously admitting that the
price of goods is somehow connected to their values, which are the
reciprocal of their respective labor productivities. They rather talk
in terms of the attributes of goods ("scarcity") than in terms of the
relations among human beings (social labor, cooperation, labor
values).
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