We Built Everything for Scarcity. Now We Need to Rebuild It for Abundance.

Every major social institution in the developed world was designed around a single foundational assumption: resources are fundamentally scarce.

This is not a political assumption. It is not a conservative or a liberal assumption. It is simply an accurate description of the material conditions that prevailed when these institutions were built — and have prevailed for essentially all of human history until now.

Healthcare was organized around physician scarcity: there are never enough trained doctors to treat everyone who needs care, so we ration access through cost and queuing. Education was organized around teacher scarcity and credential signaling: there are never enough good teachers, so we concentrate the best ones in elite institutions and use degrees as proxies for capabilities employers cannot directly observe. Housing was organized around construction labor scarcity: building is slow and expensive, so access to shelter correlates with income. Retirement systems were organized around life expectancy scarcity: people did not live very long, so pension obligations were manageable.

The automation era invalidates the underlying scarcity assumptions that justified all of these systems. But the systems remain.

Healthcare: What Happens When Diagnosis Is Free

The American healthcare system spends approximately 18% of GDP on health — roughly twice the share of other wealthy nations — and does not achieve proportionally better outcomes. A significant portion of that cost premium reflects the extraordinary labor intensity of the system: the physicians, nurses, technicians, administrators, and coders whose wages represent the largest component of healthcare spending.

AI diagnostic tools are already matching or exceeding specialist physician accuracy across a range of conditions — radiology, dermatology, ophthalmology, pathology. Robotic surgical systems are reducing recovery times and complication rates. Automated drug discovery is compressing timelines from compound identification to clinical candidate by orders of magnitude.

These are not marginal improvements. They are structural cost reductions that will, over the coming decade or two, collapse the labor intensity of healthcare delivery. A system that costs 18% of GDP because skilled humans must perform most of the diagnostic and therapeutic work will not cost 18% of GDP when AI handles diagnosis and robots handle many surgical procedures.

The question is not whether healthcare costs will fall. The question is who captures the savings.

Currently, the answer would be: payers, insurers, and hospital systems — not patients or taxpayers. The system is structured to direct productivity gains upward, not outward. If we do not redesign the system deliberately, abundance in healthcare inputs will translate into continued scarcity in healthcare access.

Education: What Happens When the Best Tutor Is Free

The credential economy depends on scarcity. Elite universities are valuable partly because they are exclusive. The Harvard degree signals not just what you learned but that you were selected as someone capable of learning it — a sorting function that employers have come to rely on precisely because it is hard to fake.

AI tutoring systems are already providing personalized instruction that adapts to individual learning pace, style, and gaps in a way that no human teacher can at scale. A good AI tutor, available to anyone with internet access, can provide a level of customized educational support that was previously available only to students with private tutors — a privilege of the wealthy.

This is extraordinary and underappreciated. But it breaks the scarcity logic on which the credentialing system depends. If you can learn anything from a world-class AI tutor, the exclusivity value of elite educational institutions collapses. And if the credential signals selectivity rather than capability, the credential loses its practical value when employers can test capability directly through AI-administered assessments.

The education system needs to be redesigned around a different question: not "how do we allocate scarce access to good instruction?" but "what should humans learn when instruction is abundant, and how do we design pathways to demonstrate what we know?"

Housing: What Happens When Construction Is Automated

3D-printed housing can now produce a basic residential structure in under 48 hours. Modular construction using automated fabrication is reducing build times and costs dramatically. Robotic construction systems are entering the market that can lay bricks, pour foundations, and install systems without human labor at each step.

The primary constraint on housing abundance is not construction technology. It is land-use policy. Zoning laws, building codes, environmental review requirements, and neighborhood opposition to new development — these are artificial scarcity mechanisms that were designed for a world where construction was slow and expensive and where managing growth required careful rationing.

When construction becomes fast and cheap, these mechanisms do not become unnecessary. But their effect changes dramatically. Instead of managing genuinely constrained growth, they become mechanisms for excluding people from areas where they would otherwise be able to afford to live.

The reform agenda is not technically complex: allow higher density, streamline permitting, reduce minimum lot size requirements, enable prefabricated construction. But it is politically difficult, because the people who benefit most from exclusionary zoning — existing homeowners whose property values depend on artificial scarcity — are organized, and the people who would benefit from reform are diffuse and often have no voice in local politics.

The Common Thread

Healthcare, education, housing, retirement, immigration — each of these systems was built for a world of genuine resource scarcity. Each of them is encountering an automation-era reality in which the scarcity constraints are eroding or disappearing. And in each case, the existing system is designed in ways that will route the productivity gains to incumbent interests rather than distributing them broadly.

This is The Ladder Problem in its most general form. Automation creates abundance. Systems built for scarcity capture that abundance for those who already have access and exclude those who do not.

The answer is not to slow the automation. The answer is to redesign the systems — deliberately, systematically, and with an explicit commitment to ensuring that abundance reaches everyone, not just those who were already near the top of the ladder.

That redesign project is what the Abundance Series is about. Each book addresses one system. The common argument across all of them is simple: abundance is achievable. But it will not distribute itself. We have to design it that way.