On scarcity, invented and real

The Anarresti have no money but they have scarcity — scarcity of approval, of status, of belonging. Le Guin's point seems to be that scarcity doesn't live in the material world alone; it lives in the social structures we build on top of material conditions, and those structures can outlast the conditions that created them.

I think about this a lot in the context of design systems work. The resource scarcity is usually gone — there's budget, there's tooling, there's headcount — but the hoarding behaviors remain. Teams protect their components, resist shared abstractions, treat contribution as threat. The scarcity mindset persists even when the scarcity doesn't.

The interesting question isn't how to redistribute resources but how to redistribute trust.