Abundance is presently the subject of some heeeaaaavvvvvy discussions among the intellectuals. I don’t know what they mean by it and don’t really need to know. Pinheads dancing on angels.
In reality, a feeling of abundance lets people relax, lets things remain abundant. When we feel a scarcity we rush to grab the last one, creating a shortage. Politicians and stock criminals use this fact to enrich the rich and ruin the poor. (See 2020.) When items are kept on a store shelf the principle is easy to manipulate. A well-stocked shelf relaxes us and stays nearly full. A nearly empty shelf gets emptied NOW and jacks up the price. The same trick works with housing on a larger scale. Larry Fink empties out the Zillow shelf by buying cheap, jacking up the price for the houses now owned by Larry Fink.
I picked up this idea in 1980 when I started teaching at a rather sleazy private tech school in Wichita. The school had been an auto tech school for years, and was well equipped for autos. Realistic repair stalls, toolboxes, modern engine analyzers. They had purchased the electronics course as a package from its founder who was running a school in OKC. He had one big idea, which reshaped the rest of my life. Teach by job experience and let the experience create the need for theories or techniques. When the student feels a live need for Ohm’s Law or impedance or algebra, the abstraction absorbs easily.
Unfortunately the founder hadn’t bothered to maintain the equipment. The lab benches and parts bins were appropriate for 1950 but way out of date in the era of ICs and printed circuits.** When we assigned the day’s experiment, the students flocked to the parts bins to pick up the big clumsy resistors and capacitors and wires. I noticed that they flocked greedily to the empty-looking bins, and left the full bins for last. Abundance in action.
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Sherri Olson’s medieval history shows us a vastly different notion of abundance in collective society.
For clarity, pound here means an impoundment lot in modern terms, not a weight or gold piece.
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We may understand the village pound as a concrete stable element of village geopolitics. Its immovable walls must have stood in sharp contrast to the movable hurdles and temporary fencing that were so essential to common field husbandry. The pound may be said to symbolize distraint, the practice where an object is taken and held temporarily in order to compel someone to meet an obligation. An item taken out of circulation will be palpably missed, and the pressure of being missed will help to elicit a response. Where everyone owns a piece of everything, the velocity of circulation creates an impression of wealth.
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Modern abundance measures voltage. Medieval abundance measures current.
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**Footnote: DeVry had up-to-date equipment and avoided the abundance problem. At the start of the semester each student bought a kit including an ample supply of the generic parts needed for the assigned tasks plus basic tools. He was responsible for keeping his own things in order. Occasionally an experiment required a special IC, which was passed out to everyone at the start of the lab hour.
Polistra's Mill 