A flawed premise of economics

I am reminded that this year is the 75th anniversary of a famous essay (PDF) on economic methodology by Lionel Robbins of the London School of Economics. In it he defined economics as “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between scarce means which have alternative uses”. The starting point of scarcity is one of the key problems with contemporary economics. To put it in colloquial terms its emphasis is on how to share out the cake rather than how to make it bigger. A key premise of contemporary economics is flawed.