Precautionary Scarcity (noun) When fear of concentrated power becomes so intense that society suppresses productive capacity itself and mistakes stagnation for safety. 20th-century version: fear concentrated capital so much that you impede capital formation. 21st-century version: fear concentrated superintelligence so much that you impede intelligence formation. The shared error is confusing capacity with control. Marx wanted the productive forces expanded, not abolished. Effective Altruism wants suffering minimized, yet can risk counting harms caused by AI more heavily than the cures, abundance, and lives lost when progress is delayed. The pathology begins when: “No one should control that much power” quietly becomes: “That much power should not exist.” The challenge is not to prevent abundance. It is to create abundance without creating unaccountable domination.