Abundance

Abundance in Europe

Definition of Abundans Cautela Non Nocet

There is no harm done by great caution.

Definition of Abundance

In economical, as in popular, discussions, abundance is usually the correlative of scarcity and the synonym of plenty. If there is a distinction plenty is taken to mean a sufficient, and abundance a more than sufficient, provision for wants. Abundance taken absolutely, in the sense of an overflowing plenty, of all and every sort of goods is certainly one ultimate aim of economic effort; and Bastiat in the cause of free trade has done good service by his assertion and illustration of this axiom. As an overflowing plenty it implies the possibility of leisure; it is a provision secured without cost of labour. Though this is an unrealisable ideal, the economical progress of any society may nevertheless be measured by its approximation to it. In the introduction to the Wealth of Nations ” the abundance or scantiness of the annual supply of the necessaries and conveniences of life” is made synonymous with wealth and poverty. In ordinary language, however, abundance does not, like wealth or riches, suggest a contrast of more fortunate witb less fortunate men, but rather a relation of the wants of individual men to their means of satisfaction, without any idea of contrast with their neighbours.

Taken in a narrower sense, abundance, not of all and sundry, but of particular classes of goods, is less clearly a benefit than general abundance. To the seller, abundance (which lowers the value of his wares) is an evil. The paradox of QUESNAY and other physiocrats, “Disette et chertd est misere; abondance et chard eat opulence” (e.g. Daire’s Physiocrates, p. 98, cf. 391 ft.), meant, for example, that the agriculturist could only prosper if he had a good market for his crops as well as a large harvest of them. It is bad policy, they said, to create an abundance of necessaries in preference to an abundance of other goods, damaging one class of producers in order to benefit the rest. So it is a fact of common experience that abundance, when confined to one kind of goods, means an “over-production” or “glut” of them. The remedy (as Say pointed out) is not to decrease the abundance of the one kind but to increase the abundance of the others, and so bring the community nearer its ideal of general abundance. [1]

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Notes

  1. Robert Harry Inglis, Sir, Dictionary of Political Economy, 1915

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