And it's at these external points that brilliant people have consistently shown how they can work together to overcome the limitations imposed by them. For instance, as technology progresses, even "natural scarcity" is removed. For instance, the oil we fail to find today might one day be easily synthesized by custom-built bacteria. That's already beginning. A real example is how genetically modified crops can currently support a population of 12 billion, where before, we could only support say 6 billion. This fits in with the larger trend of the quality of life improving across the board, for every measurable metric, throughout the entire course of human history. Scarcity is not an example of zero sum in the aggregate. It's an externality that has been overcome in the past, and will be overcome even more in the future.