causes of scarcity are limited to demographics and market competition and the early results are driven by enshittification and shrinkflation. As markets shrink and market share erodes, businesses and products that people have used for decades first resort to enshittification and shrinkflation to attempt to drive margins back up to a sustainable level. The scale of these businesses requires massive throughput, but the resultant consumer anger actually pushes demand down. You move down the marginal profit curve and have to raise prices.

So at first you see Hardee's and Wendy's closing hundreds of stores, chocolate products that resemble the crap "chocolatey" coating that you would have only seen on cheap Little Debbie products back in the day, $10 12 packs of Pepsi, etc. These are loud market signals that the mass market brands of yesteryear are dying and fewer people will be able to consume them.

The next step that I think will happen is legislative edicts that hammer away at the principles of supply side economics. California shutting down 17% of its oil refining capacity is one such example, but you will see this turbocharged in the next 10 years as angry leftists attack producers and exploiters of "corporate greed."

Eventually that step will pull down a load bearing wall and we will have an actual crisis along with some critical systemic failure around the time the Millennials have control of critical systems. So I agree completely with your theory.