ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how a number of forward-thinking and influential economists and others have considered the abundance concept, and its implications for society. Most of those who have written about abundance take the view that a post-scarcity society would also be a utopian one. The rapid growth of productivity and the spread of mechanization and mass production in the early years of the twentieth century, particularly in the United States, led some visionary economists and thinkers to look far into the future and speculate about the longer-term consequences for society of sustained economic growth. Some of those who did look ahead, such as John Maynard Keynes, Stuart Chase and Buckminster Fuller took a highly optimistic, positive attitude, emphasizing the benefits of growth, and envisaging a utopian future of abundance and equality, while others, such as J. K. Galbraith, Vance Packard and Robert Theobald, stressed the more problematic aspects and the darker side of abundance, such as waste and materialistic values.
