The human brain is a product of natural selection. In the face of scarcity, our hominid great-great-uncles were unable to compete against our sapient great-great-grandparents' abilities to build more elaborate mental models and orchestrate their bodies' movements in more sophisticated ways.
Since scarcity is the basic economic problem, if it does not exist then there is no reason for my economics course. Devoting time to the study of how people use limited resources to fulfill unlimited wants and needs should help us to discover how to best utilize the resources we have at our disposal.
Many creative people are finding that creativity doesn't grow in abundance, it grows from scarcity - the more Lego bricks you have doesn't mean you're going to be more creative; you can be very creative with very few Lego bricks.
Maybe poverty is a special case of something else. That something else is 'scarcity,' and anyone who has the experience of 'having very little' experiences the same psychology.
It's hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread.
The Internet is programmable information. The blockchain is programmable scarcity.
