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Patrick Colquhoun (1745-1820): Without poverty wealth becomes worthless

A very insightful quote from Jason Hickel's “Less is More:How Degrowth Will Save the World” (Chapter 1: Sec: The paradox of artificial scarcity): The essential point to grasp here is that the emergence of the extraordinary productive capacity that characterises capitalism depended on creating and maintaining conditions of artificial scarcity. Scarcity – and the threat of hunger – served as the engine of capitalist growth. … This was a conscious strategy on the part of Europe’s capitalists. In Britain, the historical record is full of commentary by landowners and merchants who felt that peasants’ access to commons during the revolutionary period had encouraged them to leisure and ‘insolence’. They saw enclosure as a tool for enhancing the ‘industry’ of the masses. … Patrick Colquhoun, a powerful Scottish merchant, saw poverty as an essential precondition for industrialisation: Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus…


A very insightful quote from Jason Hickel's “Less is More:How Degrowth Will Save the World” (Chapter 1: Sec: The paradox of artificial scarcity):

The essential point to grasp here is that the emergence of the extraordinary productive capacity that characterises capitalism depended on creating and maintaining conditions of artificial scarcity. Scarcity – and the threat of hunger – served as the engine of capitalist growth.

This was a conscious strategy on the part of Europe’s capitalists. In Britain, the historical record is full of commentary by landowners and merchants who felt that peasants’ access to commons during the revolutionary period had encouraged them to leisure and ‘insolence’. They saw enclosure as a tool for enhancing the ‘industry’ of the masses.

Patrick Colquhoun, a powerful Scottish merchant, saw poverty as an essential precondition for industrialisation:

Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.

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