Artificial scarcity is the manufactured branch of the kinds of scarcity, singled out because AI makes it the live one. When machines can build housing cheaply but land restrictions, ownership concentration, and speculation keep it unaffordable, the binding constraint is no longer productive capacity — it is institutional allocation. When AI makes tutoring nearly free while elite credentials stay rationed, knowledge becomes abundant while legitimacy stays scarce. The shortage is real, but its cause has moved from the world to the rules.
This gives the framework a question to keep asking as capability rises: is this resource actually scarce, or has scarcity become institutionally preserved? Because scarcity does not simply vanish under abundance — it tends to shift upward, from goods toward access, land, legitimacy, and jurisdiction. A society that measures only falling production costs can congratulate itself on abundance while exclusion quietly relocates to the layers production cannot touch. Naming artificial scarcity is what keeps reducing exclusion as scarcity falls from being silently blocked by the rules.