THE word that caught fire with policy types across much of the democratic world before the unfortunate, war-sparking attacks on Iran on Feb. 28 was “abundance.” That word is actually the title of a slim book by American journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which argues that the United States and the world should turn their backs on policies that deliberately cause scarcity in favor of policies that lead to abundance in material goods that make human lives either pleasurable or comfortable.
According to the book, pro-scarcity policies are mostly represented by outmoded regulations and unnecessary restrictions to increased productivity, and choke the supply of basic requirements such as housing, smart electric grids — internet connectivity included — and health care services, among others. And these supply gridlocks are mostly the byproduct of political gridlocks and boneheaded policies.
“Degrowth” policies and the follies of policymakers have been identified as the root cause of scarcity. This could be reversed by better policymaking and bipartisan agreements for the common good. The book urged policymaking along bipartisan lines to pursue surplus outputs in material goods and critical services, and the creation of a world of “abundance.”
Today, all those think tanks that have been hosting policy workshops to pursue the gospel of “abundance” through bipartisan legislation and the elimination of the gridlocks identified as barriers to the pursuit of abundance have mostly ceased hosting those workshops.
Since late February, Klein has stopped advocating “abundance” in his New York Times column. Thompson, who left The Atlantic magazine to start a Substack newsletter with “abundance” as its animating theme, has shifted to writing about other topics, as well. And with reason.
After Feb. 28, the pursuit of abundance through smart state policies has crashed and burned as the halls of policymaking have turned to an emergency concern: the looming scarcity of oil, natural gas, most fertilizer types that are the byproduct of natural gas, helium for chipmaking, and other critical minerals for the technology sector.
In retaliation for the Feb. 28 attacks that decapitated most of its theocratic leadership, Iran launched drones and missiles that have destroyed multiple and very critical oil and natural gas facilities in the Gulf areas, including the world’s biggest in Qatar. Tehran also limited the passage of vessels in the Strait of Hormuz to Iran-sanctioned cargo ships and tankers, thus choking off around a quarter of the oil and natural gas supply to the world, including oil-dependent Philippines.
The choked supply lines resulting from the strait’s de facto closure hit South Asian and Southeast Asian nations — again, including vulnerable Philippines — the hardest and with a double whammy: scarcity of oil supply and surging fuel prices. Plus, the worst thing that could happen to us, an agricultural country that cannot produce enough food for its people: surging fertilizer and pesticide costs.
Short supplies and surging prices provide the tragic environment that led President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to declare a state of “national energy emergency.” The declaration stressed the gravity of the short supply in critical goods and surging prices. It also emphasized what is painfully obvious: we now live in a world of scarcity.
On oil supply, an emergency purchase of 300,000 barrels of diesel was ordered by President Marcos before his declaration. A P20-billion fund will be drawn from the Malampaya fund to shore up dwindling oil supplies. The president also warned against a possible shortage in aviation fuel.
Short supply and surging prices of essential food items, such as rice, chicken and pork, will be inevitable if the Middle East war drags on. India, the world’s biggest rice exporter, is desperately sourcing urea for its paddies. Any decision by India to limit its rice exports due to drops in domestic production will surely destabilize the global rice market. Any reduction in the rice allocated for the global market by traditional exporters will greatly impact the rice supply of the Philippines, the biggest rice importer over the past five years.
Inflation and unemployment are right now rising, and their consequences on Filipinos at the bottom 50 percent will be hard and brutal.
Any conflict in the Middle East will also bludgeon an economic lifeline: the remittances of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in the Gulf areas. There are about 2.4 million Filipinos working in those areas and in Israel before the war began, and tens of thousands of them have been repatriated via emergency flights.
That will mean loss of income for the returning workers. Tragically, the promised “remunerative jobs” for repatriated OFWs is just a verbal scam from the government.
As they say, tragedies occur in combinations. The “greatest oil supply shock” in modern history that took place in the aftermath of the Feb. 28 attacks followed the “greatest trade shock” in history caused by the April 2, 2025, punitive tariffs imposed by the same man who initiated last month’s attacks: US President Donald Trump.
The current global malaise is the result of one powerful leader going off the rails, plunging much of the world into chaos unforeseen. The straightforward lesson the ongoing war taught us, and the rest of the world, is to reject autocrats and autocrat-wannabes like Trump and a Trump-lite figure who was our president from 2016 to 2022: Rodrigo Duterte, now detained by the International Criminal Court at The Hague.