MADE BY MANY: The Arrogance of Scarcity
**This column originally appeared in our May 2026 issue**
There is a thing that happens to places when they've been hurting long enough.
They start protecting what they have, even when it isn't enough to protect. They build invisible walls around mediocrity. They develop a finely-tuned radar for anyone who might outgrow the room, then make sure the room stays small enough that leaving looks like the logical conclusion. This is not malice, usually. It's something more insidious than that.
Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir spent years studying what scarcity actually does to a mind. Their finding, documented in Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, was blunt: not-enough doesn't just create hardship. It tunnels you. It narrows your cognitive field until the only thing you can think about is holding on to what you've got. Future planning degrades. Creative capacity shrinks. The scarcity trap, as they named it, is self-reinforcing:
"With scarcity, less efficient decisions create more scarcity."
They were writing about individuals. Cities are no different.
Across mid-size America, a specific reckoning is playing out in slow motion. The Congressional Joint Economic Committee tracked it in a report called Losing Our Minds — an analysis of how educated, creative, and skilled people are moving away from regions that can't or won't make room for them, toward cities that decided to treat their builders as infrastructure rather than inconvenience. The departure isn't just demographic. It's institutional. When a region steadily loses its most restless people, the organizations left behind start to calcify. The talent base contracts. The options narrow. The places that needed to open up doubled down on being closed.
This is not a coastal phenomenon or a problem reserved for the so-called forgotten cities of the Midwest. It is happening in regions that consider themselves culturally alive, historically rich, and on the verge of something. The verge is where the trap is sprung. Close enough to momentum that institutions feel justified in being selective. Far enough from real abundance that the selectivity is a slow bleed nobody wants to name.
What makes it devastating in places like ours is that we know better and do it anyway. This region is not naive about what it is. It is loud about wanting change, quietly committed to the conditions that prevent it — functional enough to keep going, too calloused to feel what it's costing. We have everything we need to be something different. We just keep choosing the familiar pain over the unfamiliar work.
What makes that choice so dangerous right now is that we are making it with the posture of a city that has something to protect. We don't. We are not flush with creative infrastructure. We are not overrun with visionaries competing for the same rooms. We cannot afford to sideline our most interesting people, our most unconventional builders, the ones whose work doesn't fit the existing categories of bar, government contractor, or developer. And yet.
The gatekeeping persists. The commitments made and unmade. The institutional instinct to reward the familiar and eye the different with suspicion. The slow math of who gets supported and who gets tolerated until they're gone. It shows up as the grant that goes to the safe application. The partnership that never quite materializes. The meeting that gets scheduled and rescheduled until the person stops asking. None of it dramatic enough to call out. All of it adding up to the same result.
That behavior has a body count.
We are not in a moment of theoretical risk. Federal funding is disappearing in real time. Healthcare is one lost client away from being gone for a significant portion of the creative workforce. The floor keeps dropping on what it means to survive here. The person your institution deprioritized last quarter, the builder operating without a net, the creative running on conviction and not much else, that person might be uninsured by next quarter, homeless by next year, or just done. Gone to a city that at least pretended to want them.
That is not drama. That is Tuesday.
What Mullainathan and Shafir would recognize immediately is this: the institutions making those calls are tunneling too. So consumed by the scarcity of their own resources that they cannot see the cost of what they're discarding. This is how the trap closes. Everyone protecting their piece of not-enough, nobody stepping back far enough to see that the math only works if it gets bigger. And it only gets bigger if the people with the most to offer are treated as the asset they actually are.
The Losing Our Minds report put it plainly: "Social segregation weakens the sentiment that, as Americans, we share something important in common with each other regardless of our other commitments."
Read it again and think about what that looks like one block over. One organization over. One bad decision over.
The regions that turn this around don't wait for a better economy or a developer with a vision or a federal program to change the calculus. They make a decision, a conscious one, that the people already here are the resource. That the builder who doesn't fit the existing mold is not a problem to manage. You cannot extract value from people you refused to invest in. That means showing up before the project is finished. It means honoring commitments when it's inconvenient. It means understanding that the creative workforce in this region is not a pipeline to be tapped when needed and ignored in between.
Khalil Gibran wrote: "Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears."
We've been drinking the remedy for a while. The question is whether we're ready to stop calling it poison.
Who are the builders in this region operating without the support they've earned? And which institutions are ready to change that? Hit me up: patrickharris@themetroland.com