As an economist, I am especially pleased and amused by the expression make oneself scarce.

Although scarce can mean no more than rare, its principal meaning is of being in insufficient quantity to exhaust desirable use, and it is in this sense that economists employ the term. Actually, something can be quite rare without our having any use for it, and something can be fairly abundant and yet be less than we could use.

A rational decision maker values a potential increase or decrease in the supply of something in terms of what use would be gained or lost. If a resource is not scarce, then it has no further use, and an increase would be valueless. And any decrease that didn't result in scarcity would also be valueless.

Thus, when someone is told Make yourself scarce!, the implication is that, at present levels, there is no further use for him or her; indeed, the suggestion is that there's just too much of him or her as it is. He or she is being told to reduce his or her presence until it has some g_dd_mn'd value.

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It used to be fashionable in some quarters to claim that scarcity as economists understood it were a myth and that we lived in a post-scarcity economy. The essential claim there would be that we couldn't use any more of anything were it to become available. I regard that claim as offensively stupid. Not quite as dreadful were claims that we could soon have a post-scarcity economy. But the implication there would be that humans would be insufficiently clever to think of a further use for anything.

The people who made such assertions should have made themselves scarce.

Tags: scarcity

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