“We have to move from a mindset of scarcity to a mindset of abundance,” Andrew Yang echoes throughout auditoriums, diners and other contrived campaign pit-stops throughout the early primary states.

Though pundits and supporters alike tend to boil down Yang’s core message to his support for a Universal Basic Income, UBI is just one tool serving the broader goal of building an abundance mindset in our society.

The difference between abundance and scarcity defines all of our interactions in the marketplace today (and almost all of our interactions are, indeed, relegated to the marketplace). It’s on this margin where we make the choice to be generous or withholding, communitarian or solitary, mindful or suspicious.

“Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity,” Marshall Sahlins writes in The Original Affluent Society, his theory concerning the affluence of the hunter-gatherer society. This should come as no shock — after all, the allocation of scarce resources is presented as a central tenet of capitalist economic theory. No wonder a system predicated on pitting its adherents against one another for survival breeds contempt and untethered greed, as well as accelerating levels of anxiety and depression.

While our modern version of capitalism is excellent at increasing profits and raising GDP to unprecedented heights, and can be rightfully credited with lifting millions out of abject poverty, these are insufficiently supportive metrics for the full spectrum of human welfare. Of the three most vital dimensions of wellness — physical, social and spiritual — only our physical well-being is being addressed. We’ve allowed our most basic instincts (those which seek to provide physical sustenance) to manifest into an endlessly complicated web of anti-social interactions allowing more and more people to own more and more things, despite greatly diminished returns on our physical well-being and actively deteriorating outcomes in our social and spiritual lives.

It’s like a child who happily finds his square peg fits into the square hole. Then, with fervor, begins mashing his square peg into the circle and triangle holes. The difference, however, is that the child can be expected to learn pretty quickly that the peg doesn’t fit. The capitalist peg does not fit into the social and spiritual holes.

As inherently social creatures, the harmful nature of a mindset of scarcity is difficult to overstate. In Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book The Gift, he bemoans the isolating effect of commerce. Instead, he advocates for a return to our roots as a gift-giving people, a restoration which emphasizes an imprecise ledger over the exactness of a financial transaction. This bolsters social bonds as well as spiritual life, eschewing individual gains from competition for communal gains from cooperation.

Just as competitive marketplaces drive up economic gains, Hyde explains the perks of societies which still operate via less-skeptical transactive processes. His most striking explanation isn’t of an old tribal custom or a long-forgotten nugget from an obscure corner of the world as one may expect. Instead, it comes from the modern day scientific community. Surely, there is plenty of profit to be had in the scientific world these days, with money to be made on textbook sales, consulting and any number of other modes of knowledge-pimping. But, as Hyde points out, the highest honor for a scientist today is for their work to be published in a respected journal.

In return for successfully publishing their paper or study, the reward is rarely cash — instead it is the far more valuable benefit of increased esteem, social status and respect. This means the most important process in the scientific world is carried out through this theory of gift-giving. This system increases social cohesion, not least because the profit from labor can only be used within the community. It’s worth noting that there is an inverse relationship between cash and prestige in this regard, the more financially profitable scientific endeavors (such as those mentioned above) do little to enhance one’s group recognition. Hyde quotes sociologist Warren Hagstrom’s explanation: “One reason why the publication of texts tends to be a despised form of scientific communication [is that] the textbook author appropriates community property for his personal gain.”