Writing · Essay

From Contrived Scarcity to Collective Abundance

Brant Richards8 min read

The technology for abundance is arriving. The architecture around it keeps charging a toll.

  • Technology
  • Socioeconomics
  • Community

The Bounty at the Gate

In 2001, reading the complete genetic code of a single human being cost about $95,000,000.

By 2022, it cost about $525.

That is not a typo, and it is not an anomaly. It is a pattern—a quiet, accelerating transformation of our civilization.

Water. Food. Medicine. Knowledge. Connectivity. Energy.

The ingredients of a thriving life—not a luxurious one, a thriving one—are cheaper to produce today than at any moment in human history.

Three essentials, falling toward zero

Cost over time on a logarithmic scale, where each gridline is a multiple of the one below.

A watt of solar panel

US$ per watt, 2025 dollars

$0.10$1.00$10.00$10019762024$0.27

Reading a human genome

US$ per genome

$100$1,000$10k$100k$1M$10M$100M20012022$525

A terabyte of disk storage

US$ per terabyte, inflation-adjusted

$10.00$1,000$100k$10M$1B19802023$10.60

Sources: Our World in Data, Solar photovoltaic module prices; Our World in Data, Cost of sequencing a full human genome; Our World in Data, Historical cost of computer memory and storage.

In each of these cases, a fundamental human need, provisioned by technology, is on an exponential curve bending relentlessly toward zero.

What technology made cheaper

376×cheaper to make a watt of solar panel since 1976

181,000×cheaper to read a human genome since 2001

54 million×cheaper to store a terabyte since 1980

And yet…

The Weight That Remains

The exhaustion persists. The anxiety expands. The isolation deepens.

We work longer hours with more powerful tools and feel less fulfilled and secure than our grandparents did with almost none.

What we carry anyway

62ndin the world for life satisfaction among US Americans under thirty

+50%more people eating every meal alone than twenty years ago

745,000deaths a year from overwork, worldwide

Something is standing between the abundance that exists and the life we actually experience.

Two things, in fact.

The Deception of the Linear Mind

The first is the mind itself.

Human beings are extraordinary pattern recognizers, but we evolved in a world where nothing changed exponentially.

For a hundred thousand years, the life of a great-grandparent was essentially the life of their great-grandchild.

Our intuition, our imagination, and the expectations they allow, are calibrated for a linear world.

In 1975, the year I was born, the psychologists Wagenaar and Sagaria asked people to extend simple patterns of exponential growth, to find out how well we actually grasp it.

Try it yourself.

Make your own guess

Say that in 1975, one dollar bought one unit of computing power, and that computing power per dollar doubles every two years, roughly as it has.

197511977219794198181983162026?

How many units will one dollar buy in 2026, fifty-one years later?

Illustration assumes a steady doubling every two years; 47,453,133 units by 2026. Source for the study: Wagenaar & Sagaria 1975.

If you guessed low, you are in good company. In the 1975 study, it was common for two in three people to guess below ten percent of the correct answer.

Not slightly off. Catastrophically off.

This is not a failure of intelligence—it is precisely calibrated intelligence applied to the wrong century.

The change described in the charts above is not just fast. It is the kind of fast that the human mind cannot see.

The Toll on Abundance

But even perfect vision would not solve this. Because the abundance does not simply go unseen—it gets captured before it reaches us.

A vial of Humalog, one of the most widely used insulins, costs an estimated four to six dollars to make. Until 2023, its list price in the US was $274.70. That year, under Congressional pressure, its manufacturer cut the price to $66.40—confirming that the markup had been a choice all along.

The toll on one vial of insulin

US$ per 10 mL vial of Humalog.

List price until 2023$274.70
List price after the 2023 cut$66.40
Estimated cost to make$4–6

Sources: Gotham, Barber et al., BMJ Global Health (2018); Eli Lilly, March 2023 insulin price announcement.

The cost to build a square meter of housing has barely risen in fifty years. The price to buy one has more than doubled beyond inflation.

The average cost of a four-year college degree in the US is roughly $15,000. The same knowledge—the same lectures, the same textbooks, the same problem sets—is available for free on MIT OpenCourseWare, Khan Academy, and a hundred other platforms.

The pattern is the same in each case. The technology delivers abundance. The architecture intercepts it—through laws that privatize profit generated by public discovery, financial instruments that turn shelter into speculation, and institutions that sell access to signals rather than knowledge itself.

This is not a measurement problem. It is an architecture problem.

The social contract we inherited was structured—intentionally, legally, systemically—to concentrate value, not to circulate it.

And it is very good at its job.

The Clarity of a Name

I call this Contrived Scarcity.

Not natural scarcity—the kind that exists when there genuinely isn’t enough.

But rather, contrived scarcity—the kind that is manufactured, architected, chosen.

The sun is shining. The code is written. The food is growing. The knowledge is available.

And between all of that abundance and the life we actually experience, stands a tollbooth.

The Exploration of Paths Less Traveled

Luckily, tollbooths can be removed. In fact, some already have been.

In 1956, a priest and five workers in Spain’s Basque Country decided to build a business where the people who did the work owned the value it created. Seventy years later, Mondragon is eighty thousand worker-owners strong with fourteen billion dollars in annual revenue—in the region with the lowest inequality in Spain.

They did not change the technology. They changed who holds the keys.

In 1991, Estonia became a sovereign nation with fewer phone lines than people. They built their digital infrastructure from scratch—and coded transparency into the foundation. Today, every Estonian can see which government agency accessed their data, when, and why.

They did not invent new technology. They made a conscious decision about what the technology should be used for.

Cuba has a GDP per capita one-ninth that of the United States. In 1961, a hundred thousand teenagers moved into rural households and taught reading by kerosene lamp. Literacy rose from 80% to 96% in one year and now stands at 99.8%.

They did not have more resources. They organized differently.

Three very different places. The same lesson: when you redesign the architecture—the ownership, the code, the community structure—the same technology in the same world produces radically different outcomes.

The Seeds of a Shared Harvest

So the question was never whether abundance is possible. Mondragon answered it. Estonia answered it. A hundred thousand teenagers with kerosene lamps answered it. The question is whether we’ll choose it—because scarcity, after all, is not a law of physics. It’s a design choice. And design choices can be unmade.

That conviction is what I’ve given my life to. I don’t believe the shift from contrived scarcity to collective abundance gets engineered from the top down, or broadcast into being. I think it grows the way a forest grows—slowly, through relationships, one room and one shared meal and one honest conversation at a time. So that’s where I work: gathering the people who feel the same pull, building tools that hand agency back to the people who use them, and writing my way toward clarity alongside anyone willing to think it through with me.

I don’t have the whole map. No one does. But I know the direction, and I know the first step is refusing to believe the tollbooth is permanent.

If any of this resonates, I’d love to build it with you.

Sources

  1. Our World in Data, Solar photovoltaic module prices — US dollars per watt, constant 2025 dollars
  2. NHGRI, DNA Sequencing Costs: Data — Historical cost of sequencing a human genome
  3. Our World in Data, Cost of sequencing a full human genome — NHGRI data, US dollars per genome
  4. Our World in Data, Historical cost of computer memory and storage — Disk storage, US dollars per terabyte, inflation-adjusted
  5. World Happiness Report 2024 — Life satisfaction rankings by country and age
  6. ILO/WHO Overwork Mortality — Deaths attributable to long working hours
  7. Wagenaar & Sagaria 1975 — Research on human misperception of exponential growth
  8. Gotham, Barber et al., BMJ Global Health (2018) — Estimated cost to manufacture a vial of analogue insulin: $3.69 to $6.16
  9. Eli Lilly, March 2023 insulin price announcement — Humalog list price $274.70 per vial before the cut; $66.40 after
  10. NCES Tuition Data — Average undergraduate tuition in the United States
  11. Census Bureau / FRED Home Price Data — Median US home sale prices over time
  12. Mondragon Corporation — Worker-owned cooperative in the Basque Country
  13. Republic of Estonia e-Governance — Estonia's digital governance infrastructure
  14. WHO Cuba Health Profile — Cuba's health system and literacy outcomes