Artificial scarcity is definitely nothing new. Look at the diamond industry, for example. Diamonds are common as hell, but they regulate the supply so severely in order to sell these cheap chunks of carbon for thousands of dollars.
If there’s no competition in a market willing to race others to the bottom in terms of price, there’s no incentive to actually produce a reasonable amount of something people want. You can just withold supply and charge way more.
Or just the fact that grocery stores throw away thousands of tons of perfectly edible food every day while there are people dying of malnutrition. They aren’t starving, they are being starved.
Artificial scarcity is definitely nothing new. Look at the diamond industry, for example. Diamonds are common as hell, but they regulate the supply so severely in order to sell these cheap chunks of carbon for thousands of dollars.
If there’s no competition in a market willing to race others to the bottom in terms of price, there’s no incentive to actually produce a reasonable amount of something people want. You can just withold supply and charge way more.
Or just the fact that grocery stores throw away thousands of tons of perfectly edible food every day while there are people dying of malnutrition. They aren’t starving, they are being starved.
So we need cultured post-scarcity, the lab-grown stuff