Scarcity is deliberately manufactured to sustain perceived value.

Evidence

Scarcity is manufactured to sustain value through the artifice of desirability. The more available something or someone, the less desirable, and so the less likely to be valued. If a consumer is kept waiting or wanting, even for no apparent reason, it must be made to seem like it’s due to competing demand or the failure of nature, human or otherwise. The point is to play the marginal utilities, to determine the moment just prior to diminishing returns. The supplement of production on demand is just in time delivery, recognizing the bounded moments between perceived need and desperate desire. Disposability is supposed to mediate between delivery and desperation, between invisibility and conflagration, ensuring the former before the tinderbox of smoldering dreams ignites into incendiary nightmares. New Orleans buffeted by Katrina. Parisian banlieue set alight. Gaza’s permanent nightmare, relief from which can only ever be temporary. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1879

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to ‘On Sacrifice’ theme: disposability as the tinderbox between delivery and ‘configration’ maps to how the disposable are rendered sacrificable in the racial order.
• DEEPTHINKING: The equation of manufactured scarcity with racialized disposability — ‘disposability mediating between delivery and desperation, between invisibility and conflagration’ — compresses a whole political economy of race into one image; genuinely paradigm-shifting.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1879
• XREF: connects to: Attention scarcity is a capitalist construction, not a universal given — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 25; Manufactured scarcity and disposability sustain value by regulating perceived demand — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1879; Scarcity is manufactured by circulation systems, not real material shortage — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1391 (+1 more)