Resource Scarcity Quotes & Sayings

We therefore have a good chance of overcoming the problem of resource scarcity. The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology. In — Yuval Noah Harari

Despite its growing scarcity and preciousness to life, ironically, water is also man's most misgoverned, inefficiently allocated and profligately wasted natural resource. — Steven Solomon

The antiquated rhetoric of 'having it all' disregards the basis of every economic relationship: the idea of trade-offs. All of us are dealing with the constrained optimization that is life, attempting to maximize our utility based on parameters like career, kids, relationships, etc., doing our best to allocate the resource of time. Due to the scarcity of this resource, therefore, none of us can 'have it all,' and those who claim to are most likely lying."1 — Sheryl Sandberg

There is only one important resource which has shown a trend of increasing scarcity rather than increasing abundance. That resource is the most important of all - human beings ... [An] increase in the price of peoples' services is a clear indication that people are becoming more scarce even though there are more of us. — Julian Simon

If orange trees grew all over the country, you couldn't sell oranges. Do you understand that? So, all our decision making is based upon scarcity or the availability of resources. If we have a shortage of any kind of resource, we put all the labs to work on making substitute materials. People always worry about 'What if we run out of a certain material?', but we have enough technology today to make thousands of different substitutes. — Jacque Fresco

The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity. — Thomas Love Peacock

But there is another case for curating as a vanguard activity for the twenty-first century. As the artist Tino Sehgal has pointed out, modern societies find themselves today in an unprecedented situation: The problem of lack, or scarcity, which has been the primary factor motivating scientific and technological innovation, is now joined and even superseded by the problem of the global effects of overproduction and resource use. Thus, moving beyond the object as the locus of meaning has a further relevance. Selection, presentation, and conversation are ways for human beings to create and exchange real value, without dependence on older, unsustainable processes. Curating can take the lead in pointing us toward this crucial importance of choosing. — John Brockman

Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity. — Pope Francis

Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity. — Steven Pinker

One of the drivers of displacement and potential conflict over the next 10 to 20 years will be climate (change) - resource scarcity, climate change is going to compound the cocktail that's driving war and displacement. — Ed Miliband