What if scarcity is a special case, not the ground truth?
Traditional economics begins with Lionel Robbins (1932): 'Economics is the science of allocating scarce resources among competing ends.' Every downstream concept — price signals, opportunity cost, trade-offs, equilibrium — inherits this assumption. Scarcity is not discovered. It is presupposed.
Abundance Economics rejects this foundation. It begins instead with a different observation: intelligence — applied systematically — converts non-resources into resources. Sand becomes silicon. Sunlight becomes electricity. Nitrogen becomes food. The history of human civilization is not a story of running out. It is a story of relentless resourceification.
Intelligence is the meta-resource. Every physical constraint is a problem awaiting a solution. The binding limit of an economy is not the quantity of its inputs but the quality of its cognition.
This does not deny scarcity in the local or transitional sense. Oil is finite. Human attention is finite. Time is finite. But Abundance Economics treats these as temporary configurations — engineering problems — rather than permanent structural laws. The question is not 'how do we allocate what we have?' but 'how do we expand what's possible?'
Resources are finite → optimize allocation → equilibrium is the goal
Intelligence is expandable → optimize cognition → phase transitions are the goal