VOLUME V, CHAPTER 9, SECTION 2

VOLUME V, CHAPTER 9, SECTION 2

The Several Forms of Scarce Resources

The last section set the root proposition, that law exists because output falls short. But scarcity is not one thing. This section breaks it open and finds four kinds, material, position, relationship, and culture, each more hidden than the last. And the layer that matters most is this. The more abstract the kind of scarcity, the finer the robe the law wears over it, and the greater the force it quietly spends sorting out a person's life.

The first kind is material scarcity, and it is the most solid and the most honest. Land, grain, water, houses, money, the things a person can touch and count. When these are short, everyone can see they are short. A famine is visible. An empty granary is visible. A house no one can afford is visible. And because material scarcity is visible, the law over it is the most plain-spoken. Laws about property, theft, tax, land, debt, all speak fairly openly about who gets the scarce material thing and who does not. This is the scarcity the next section walks in full, through the line of land across three thousand years, so here it is only named and set first, the base of the four, the one all the others finally rest on. A person with no food does not worry about the subtler scarcities. Material scarcity is the floor.

The second kind is positional scarcity, and it is already a step more hidden. Position means the good seats in a society, the places that command more, the rank, the office, the credential, the standing that lets a person draw more of everything else. There are only so many good seats, far fewer than the people who want them, so position is scarce, and the law over position governs who may climb into a good seat and who may not. But notice how much less plainly it speaks than the law over material things. It does not say only these people may have good seats. It says here are the rules of the examination, the qualification, the license, the ladder, and the rules look open to all, and yet they sort people as surely as any wall. Positional scarcity is framed by tools like the imperial examination, which the next chapter opens, a ladder that looks open to every climber and in fact admits very few, and admits them along lines that favor those who already had enough to prepare. The robe is finer here. The sorting still happens. It just does not announce itself.

The third kind is relational scarcity, and it is more hidden still. Relationship means the ties that connect a person to others, marriage, kin, network, the web of who knows whom and who owes whom. These ties are scarce too, for a person can only be bound closely to so many, and the good ties, the ones that open doors, are scarcer than the ordinary ones. The law over relationship governs who may bind to whom, and the plainest instrument is marriage, which the next chapter opens as well. Most people live their whole lives inside the rules of marriage and kinship without ever once noticing them as rules, because they feel like nature, like love, like family, like simply how things are. That is exactly how hidden this scarcity is. The law over it does not feel like law at all. It feels like the heart's own choosing. And yet who may marry whom, what a marriage joins, what property and standing flow along the tie, these have been governed, in every society, by rules that sorted people and moved the scarce thing along the lines of existing advantage. The robe here is so fine it is nearly invisible, worn as feeling.

The fourth kind is cultural scarcity, and it is the most abstract and the most stubborn of all. Culture means the deep things, the language, the learning, the ways of seeing, the whole inherited apparatus by which a group understands the world. This is scarce because it takes generations to build and cannot be handed over in an afternoon, and a group that holds a body of culture others lack holds an advantage that money cannot quickly buy. The law over cultural scarcity is the hardest of all to see, because it works through what gets taught, what gets written down, what gets honored as knowledge and what gets dismissed, whose account of things becomes the account. Once a group holds cultural scarcity, it can carry on for centuries, because the very tools a person would need to see the holding are themselves part of what is held. The robe here is not even felt as a robe. It is felt as truth, as the way things simply are, as what any educated person knows. And that is the deepest holding of all, the one that does not need a wall or a law-book because it lives inside the way people think.

Now the layer that binds the four. The more abstract the scarcity, the greater the force it spends sorting out a life, and the harder its holding is to see through. Material scarcity sorts crudely and openly, you have land or you do not, and everyone can see the sorting. Positional scarcity sorts through ladders that look open. Relational scarcity sorts through ties that feel like love. Cultural scarcity sorts through what feels like plain truth. As the scarcity climbs from material to cultural, two things happen at once. The sorting gets more powerful, reaching deeper into a person's fate, and the robe over it gets finer, until the sorting is no longer felt as sorting at all. This is why the abstract scarcities are the more dangerous. A person can see and resent a wall. He cannot easily see, let alone resent, a way of thinking he was raised inside, a marriage rule that feels like the heart, a ladder that feels like fair competition. The finer the robe, the less the sorted person even knows he has been sorted, and the more complete the holding.

See this and a whole set of things a person took for the natural order shows a different face. The good seats going, generation after generation, to a certain kind of family, is not merely talent finding its level. It is positional scarcity sorting along old lines. The doors that open through the right marriage, the right connections, are not merely the luck of the heart. They are relational scarcity moving the scarce thing along the web of prior advantage. The account of the world that a person absorbs as simply true, and by which he measures himself and finds himself short, may be cultural scarcity held by others and worn by him as his own mind. This is not to say every tie is a plot or every belief a chain. It is to say that under the visible material scarcity run three more, each more hidden, and each spending real force to sort out who rises and who does not.

So this section sets a twenty-seventh layer. Scarcity is not one thing but four, material, position, relationship, and culture, each more hidden than the last. Material scarcity sorts openly and the law over it speaks plainly. Position sorts through ladders that look open. Relationship sorts through ties that feel like love. Culture sorts through what feels like truth. And the more abstract the kind, the greater the force it spends sorting a life and the finer the robe the law wears over it, until the sorting is no longer felt as sorting. This is not to have a person see a conspiracy in every tie and belief. It is to have him see that under the visible scarcity of things run deeper scarcities that shape his fate more, precisely because he cannot see them. The next time a person meets a rule that feels perfectly natural, a ladder, a tie, a plain truth, he can ask the one question that lifts the robe, what scarce thing does this sort, and along whose advantage does it sort it.

The next section walks the largest and most solid of the four, material scarcity, through its longest line, land, across three thousand years, China from the well-field to the merging of the head tax into the land tax, the West from the Twelve Tables to the enclosures, two long lines set side by side. Let the reader carry these four forms of scarcity into the section that follows.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.