What Will Be Scarce

Author: Alex Imas (Ghosts of Electricity, Substack, April 14, 2026) Subtitle: The economics of structural change and the post-commodity future of work URL: https://aleximas.substack.com/p/what-will-be-scarce One-line: If AI makes commodity production nearly free, scarcity relocates rather than disappears: rising real incomes shift spending toward a “relational sector” where the human who provides the good is part of its value, and mimetic desire keeps that demand from saturating.

Imas re-shared it on October 27, 2026 alongside a clip of Peter Thiel telling Walter Isaacson that humans’ “relational dimensions” will matter more after AI (tweet): “Peter Thiel might be onto something here… FWIW I think he’s missing important dimensions like desire for human connection, empathy, shared understanding, which will be important for the future of jobs in healthcare, education, etc.” The interview itself is The Builders — Peter Thiel (Walter Isaacson).

Key claims

• Starbucks as the canary. It automated to protect thin margins, concluded that was a mistake, and is rolling it back: CEO Brian Niccol credited handwritten notes on cups, ceramic cups and “the return of great seats” with getting customers to “sit and stay.” More baristas per store, less automation.
• The commodity form. Industrialization separated a product from its maker (“a table is a table”). Marx called that alienation; economists call it the engine of prosperity. Most people assume AI simply completes it and jobs vanish. Autor and Thompson argue instead that automation reshapes expertise (removing easy tasks raises wages, removing hard ones lowers them), with a starker scenario of Simon’s “intolerable abundance.”
• Structural change is mostly income effects. Farming went from ~40% of US workers in 1900 to under 2%. Comin, Lashkari and Mestieri (Econometrica, 2021) find income effects explain over 75% of sectoral reallocation; price effects about a quarter. Richer people want different things, not more of the same. Baumol’s cost disease amplifies it.
• Rich households already spend relationally. In the 2022 BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey the top quintile spent ~4.3× the bottom in total, with much larger ratios in in-person dining, entertainment and education. Hubmer finds the same tilt toward labor-intensive goods.
• Mimetic desire is the microfoundation. Following René Girard (and Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau’s amour propre, Dave Hickey’s Armani suit), desire is comparative and so hard to satiate. In Imas and Kristof Madarasz’s experiments, willingness to pay roughly doubled when a random subset of people was excluded from an identical product.
• AI erodes exclusivity. With Graelin Mandel: human-made art gained 44% in value from being one-of-one; AI-generated art gained only 21%. AI involvement makes a thing feel reproducible, an echo of Walter Benjamin’s “aura.”
• The relational sector. Teachers, nurses, therapists, childcare, hospitality, clergy, guides, tailors, live performers; together these categories employ nearly 50 million Americans. Baumol’s cost disease becomes “a feature, not a bug”: the stagnant sector is where spending and jobs flow (crediting Saffron Huang’s positive-scenario thread).
• Against demand collapse. Because mimetic demand is comparative, it acts as a release valve against the “AI shrinks the economy” scenario he modeled earlier. His claim is narrow: labor’s aggregate share may still fall, and the picture is worse for developing economies built on exporting commodities.

Notable quotes

Ultimately the answer to any question about the future economics of advanced AI begins with identifying what becomes scarce.

The economics of scarcity won’t disappear, it’ll just relocate.

The dominant force is actually pretty simple: as people get richer, they want fundamentally different things.

We want what others want, and we want it even more when they can’t have it.

The relational sector gets more expensive because the commodity sector is getting cheaper, and that’s what keeps people employed.

You don’t need to be Picasso. You need to be the person whose involvement makes the product feel like it was made for someone, by someone.

Replies worth keeping (Oct 27 re-share)

• Henry Shevlin: symbolic human jobs have the strongest moat; relational jobs depend on the domain (“teachers have a stronger moat than psychiatrists”); regulated sectors move slower; embodied work is safe “for now.” Imas: “Largely agree. I have an essay on this I’m tinkering with.”
• Dror Poleg quoted his own piece “AI Doesn’t Have to Replace You to Reprice You”: “In the end, the only thing distinctly human is being an actual person. People will pay a premium for human attention.”

How it connects

• Mimetic Desire, René Girard, Status Games: the preference theory the essay rests on. Thiel invokes the same “Girardian intuition” in the Isaacson interview.
• Future of Work, Herbert Simon: the labor-market question.
• The Builders — Peter Thiel (Walter Isaacson): the clip that prompted the re-share.