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In Victorian times - at the apex of the repression of the Great Mother - a Scottish schoolmaster named Adam Smith noticed a lot of greed and scarcity around him and assumed that was how all "civilized" societies worked. Smith, as you know, created modern economics, which can be defined as a way of allocating scarce resources through the mechanism of individual, personal greed... If a society is afraid of scarcity, it will actually create an environment in which it manifests well-grounded reasons to live in fear of scarcity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy!

— Bernard Lietaer on Adam Smith

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "In Victorian times - at the apex of the repression of the Great Mother - a Scottish schoolmaster named Adam Smith noticed a lot of greed and scarcity around him and assumed that was how all "civilized" societies worked. Smith, as you know, created modern economics, which can be defined as a way of allocating scarce resources through the mechanism of individual, personal greed... If a society is afraid of scarcity, it will actually create an environment in which it manifests well-grounded reasons to live in fear of scarcity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy!" in the context of "Bernard Lietaer, Beyond Greed and Scarcity, YES! A Journal of Positive Futures , (Spring 1997)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

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Source: Wikiquote: "Adam Smith" (Quotes about Adam Smith, A-L) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Bernard Lietaer

About Bernard Lietaer

Bernard Lietaer (7 February 1942 – 4 February 2019) was a civil engineer, economist, author, professor and philosopher who studied monetary systems and promoted the idea that communities can benefit from creating their own local or complementary currency, which circulate parallel with national currencies.