Modern economies are built on the assumption that more is always better — more growth, more consumption, more throughput. But what happens when productive capacity begins to outpace genuine human need in key domains?

This chapter explores the uncomfortable question of “enough.” Not as a moral judgment, but as an economic design problem. If certain goods and services are approaching abundance conditions, the traditional scarcity pricing mechanisms that govern them may begin to produce distortions rather than efficiency.

The provocation is not anti-growth. It is structural: how should economic systems behave when marginal cost collapses in critical sectors? What happens when markets optimized for allocation under scarcity encounter domains where the binding constraint is no longer production but distribution, access, or institutional inertia?

These questions don’t yield easy answers, but ignoring them may prove increasingly costly as technological capability continues to expand.