Human history could be plotted on a curve which compares our wealth with our technology, with technology roughly serving as a measurement of time in this historical period and wealth measuring the whole physical potential of society as a whole. In this mapping, the conflict between learning and scarcity could be understood. When "scarcity" is used in this context, it means the degree to which physical resources are inaccessible for general use.
While scarcity is a measure of our adaptation to our natural environment, and a semi-triumph over that adaptation with technology, it is also the basis of our economic system. Because not everyone can have the same resources, we have various ways of portioning them. The two major ways are an egalitarian method, as the USSR attempted to use, and an individual accrual method, as the United States continues to use. Neither form works in its unadulterated form but both can be adapted easily using fragments of the other.
The advantage of the accrual method is that only a few get to exhorbitantly abuse resources, while the rest are kept from doing the worst of the damage possible with greater resources present. It also serves to keep those who are less capable of earning a living, at least, away from the sorts of technologies that could do great harm. The problem with this method is that by its natural goal of accruing wealth, it engenders friction between those who have material wealth and those who do not.
The egalitarian method on the other hand treats its individual citizens as equals, enforcing a conformity from which few can rise and consequently, few attempt to. The resulting culture becomes inherently self-parasitic in much the same way that an unbridled accrual regime will, and disintegrates proportionately. The way to conquer this obstacle appears to be a middle path of providing a basic level of subsistence from which people can rise, and rewarding those who rise either economically or intellectually with increased income.
As Nietzsche once said, "If you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss starts to stare into you"; this statement is doubly true here because if we stare too long into the abyss of scarcity, it is all we see. And through that thought process it becomes the only goal of a society, in the same way modern religions are dominated by fear of death and thus direct all of their energy at pacifying that fear, consequently missing out on many other aspects of spirituality. In the case of scarcity workarounds, one can in a capitalist state produce a parasitic empire where only those who are determined to get wealthy at all costs rise, and in a communist-style system, create a state where demands of equality crush any hope of innovation beyond the status quo.
Scarcity may well be humanity's abyss. The question of its handling contributes to political bipartisanship. On one side, the people who find the problem abhorrent prefer to take a religious, moral or humanistic path and endorse squashing the problem at the expense of all else; those on the other prefer to work within the situation but as a result are often blind to experience outside of it. Possibly scarcity isn't the target of our planning, but an obstacle over which we crawl to discover a new kind of planning.