When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world.

The problem is that abundant resources...are too often treated as scarce....the funny thing about waste is that it's all relative to your sense of scarcity.

...If you're controlling a scarce resource...you have to be discriminating....But if you're tapping into an abundant resource, you can afford to take chances, since the cost of failure is so low.

...We're good at scarcity thinking--it's the 20th century organizational model. Now we have to get good at abundance thinking too.

Chris Anderson. "WASTE IS GOOD" in WIRED. excerpted from FREE:THE FUTURE OF A RADICAL PRICE.