Scarcity, understood as the condition where human desires outstrip available resources, stands at the center of both economic theory and human experience. While many economists and futurists envision the progressive alleviation of material scarcity as a mark of human progress, C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce offers a counternarrative. Through a depiction of Hell as radical autonomy enabled by abundance, Lewis highlights how material sufficiency alone may exacerbate isolation and disordered desire. Drawing on Lewis’s anthropology, recent work in humanomics and the moral philosophy of exchange, and insights from Christian economic thought, this paper argues that dependence – both on others and on God – is central to human flourishing. Scarcity, while no intrinsic good, may serve as a teacher that presses us into mutual care and humility, revealing the deeper ordering of desire that points ultimately toward communion with the divine.
John A. Robinson (Mon,) studied this question.