I hear and understand your point. It is not purely a social construct. But how much available farmland to allocate to grow food from the available farmland becomes a political issue. Pricing, distribution... same deal.

And considering our (humanity's) food production outmatches our total food calorie/nutrition requirements... any argument using food as an example for scarcity indicates that you may be working with incorrect, or outdated information.

And Is "money" a social construct, or is there 'natural' money, some platonic ideal from which all other instantiations of money arise? I'm betting on the former.

The amount of resources is not a social construct but how they are distributed is.

The mean American has a net worth of $620k. The median American net worth is $192k.

The global mean net worth is $95k. The median is $9k.

It's interesting that both the USA and China found that the prosperity maximum happened when capitalism was kept in line with a firm hand, even though China approached from the left and the USA approached from the right and later departed back to the right.

> That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit.

Indeed, but - human productive capacity has become so vast, that the only way for there to be scarcity is for it to be artificially maintained.

> The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources

Disagree, in the sense that a lot of what we consider "natural" is the result of social circumstances, emphasizing or encouraging the expression of some sentiments and tendencies over others. In other words, "natural" is usually rather artificial.

> That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit.

Hence resource allocation. If there were no physical limit, there would be nothing in need of allocation. Allocation is intrinsically bound to scarcity.

> If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it.

Hence resource allocation. If there were an infinite number of apples, there would be nothing in need of allocation. Allocation is intrinsically bound to scarcity.

> There is a large social element involved

There is only the human social element involved. There isn't a magical deity in the sky waving a magic wand or a group of space aliens from Xylos IV deciding who gets what. Resources are allocated only by how people, and people alone, decide they want to allocate them.

You being unable to afford something isn't some fundamental property of the universe. It is simply something people made up at random and decided to run with it. People could, in theory, change their mind on a whim such that suddenly you could become able to afford something.

> The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources

Now you're finally starting to get on-topic. So given that you see humans as being beyond terrible at allocating resources, why do you think, if they were relieved of having to handle resource allocation, that they would suddenly become not terrible at everything else in order to see all of those other problems magically disappear, per the contextual parent comment? Not going to happen. The harsh reality is that creating problems is human nature.

That's really funny