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I fundamentally don't understand how capitalism will work in a society where scarcity is essentially nil. It doesn't make sense. Maybe someone could explain it

I fundamentally don't understand how capitalism will work in a society where scarcity is essentially nil. It doesn't make sense. Maybe someone could explain it to me?

Florin_Andrei 11y ago
It's hard to envision how money in general would work post-scarcity.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> I fundamentally don't understand how capitalism will work in a society where scarcity is essentially nil. It doesn't make sense. "A society where scarcity is essentially nil" is the part that doesn't make sense. Particularly given the degree to which human experience of utility/disutility is demonstrated to be strongly influenced by relative rather than absolute conditions. Relative abundance doesn't really substantially change the degree to which capitalism does or does not work.
Retric 11y ago
The model for how Japanese Manga or High Fashion is sold may have some input on this. Basically, the what people pay for is design time and marketing not production costs. So, artificial scarcity is often used to drives up prices. AKA normal is X, but limited edition red version is 10X. The important thing to remember is I might place zero value on something, but as long as you can find a buyer then stuff has value.
fao_ 11y ago
It depends on the market, however I think that scarcity will end up being manufactured. Just look at the diamond market -- one or two companies effectively monopolised the entire market and rose the price and value of their product through creating artificial scarcity. I don't like the idea of this (I hold the idea of Iain M. Banks' The Culture[1] as the ideal civilization), but I think that it is required for capitalism to remain a viable system post-scarcity. I suppose one other way to do this (That would hopefully be outlawed) is the creation of a virus that wipe out all the natural sources of a product (I'm thinking mainly of foodstuffs here), leaving a single company the owner of the plant/genome/whatever. The idea is explored in one of Zach's comics: [2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture [2]: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2834 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2834
davidw 11y ago
As the economists say, 'human wants are unlimited'. If one thing isn't scarce, something else will be.
- Amorymeltzer 11y ago
  I like the way Zach Weiner over at SMBC put this: >A human is only happy if she has two, and everybody else has one. And even then, she starts imagining three. (http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3531 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3531)
task_queue 11y ago
No one is about to flood the market with free goods. Power in a capitalist system is derived from scarcity, so it follows that artificial scarcity will be maintained if a 'post-scarcity' technological development was made.
3pt14159 11y ago
There will always be some form of scarcity. Look at housing prices in major cities. Once food and clothing became (essentially) solved problems people ended up bidding up the remaining housing stock to the stratosphere.
zo1 11y ago
There will always be something we want, but can't have. It's human nature, I would argue. As soon as we push one boundary, another horizon presents itself. Once we eliminate all the "simple" causes of scarcity, we'll soon be on to the next group. Some things probably won't present themselves as limited until they become scarce. One example I like to think of: Land, it is currently abundant, to the point of ridiculousness based on our population. However, land near X (city, hospital, family, etc), is pretty limited. This is caused by unique local/contextual reasons. Not every city can have a beautiful ocean sunset, not every city can have a giant canyon in the middle that provides a unique nightlife of weird depths.
bryanlarsen 11y ago
post-scarcity is kind of a misnomer; there will always be scarcity in something -- land and human labour will always be valuable. Energy and other raw resources required by the replicators might be really, really cheap, but not free/unlimited. Imagine an economy where everybody has a Universal Basic Income of about $10M. It's post-scarcity, so there are replicators that can make anything, and energy is really cheap. Robots mine and farm the asteroids using that cheap energy so all raw materials and raw food are really cheap. By really cheap, I mean about the same price as now. So you've got $10M a year in income, and can buy a car for about $500. - Land is crazy expensive. There are billions of rich people bidding it up - but you can rent an apartment for cheap since mile-high skyscrapers are easy to build - human labour is crazy expensive -- who's going to work for you unless you pay substantially more than $10M/year? - but people still need meaning in their life; most "work" is basically volunteer labour Basically Star Trek.
Jach 11y ago
Unless we find a way to create energy, black hole orbiting real estate will one day be very valuable...
zbyte64 11y ago
Post-scarcity is what happens when the current resources that restrict our actions are no longer an issue. There will be different bottlenecks for development but those resources are so far removed from our current concerns it is hard to imagine. Imagine a world where energy is practically free, you might be tempted to think that spells the end of scarcity. But you still have to deal with thermodynamics. Your factory could be churning out countless diamonds with the free energy you are getting but you are going to need a large heat sink for all the entropy you will be pumping out. The scarcity then is your local ability to dump entropy. Or imagine a reality where we create a Dyson Sphere and have super nano-tech and world peace is a reality. No more scarcity right? Those descendents are now competing with other space faring actors. They may be content to stay in our home solar system and wait for the sun to kill the species or wait for another actor to take our star. The new scarcity there is solar system redundancy.

I fundamentally don't understand how capitalism will work in a society where scarcity is essentially nil. It doesn't make sense. Maybe someone could explain it to me?

Florin_Andrei 11y ago

It's hard to envision how money in general would work post-scarcity.

dragonwriter 11y ago

> I fundamentally don't understand how capitalism will work in a society where scarcity is essentially nil. It doesn't make sense. "A society where scarcity is essentially nil" is the part that doesn't make sense. Particularly given the degree to which human experience of utility/disutility is demonstrated to be strongly influenced by relative rather than absolute conditions. Relative abundance doesn't really substantially change the degree to which capitalism does or does not work.

Retric 11y ago

The model for how Japanese Manga or High Fashion is sold may have some input on this. Basically, the what people pay for is design time and marketing not production costs. So, artificial scarcity is often used to drives up prices. AKA normal is X, but limited edition red version is 10X. The important thing to remember is I might place zero value on something, but as long as you can find a buyer then stuff has value.

fao_ 11y ago

It depends on the market, however I think that scarcity will end up being manufactured. Just look at the diamond market -- one or two companies effectively monopolised the entire market and rose the price and value of their product through creating artificial scarcity. I don't like the idea of this (I hold the idea of Iain M. Banks' The Culture[1] as the ideal civilization), but I think that it is required for capitalism to remain a viable system post-scarcity. I suppose one other way to do this (That would hopefully be outlawed) is the creation of a virus that wipe out all the natural sources of a product (I'm thinking mainly of foodstuffs here), leaving a single company the owner of the plant/genome/whatever. The idea is explored in one of Zach's comics: [2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture [2]: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2834 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2834

davidw 11y ago

As the economists say, 'human wants are unlimited'. If one thing isn't scarce, something else will be.

Amorymeltzer 11y ago
I like the way Zach Weiner over at SMBC put this: >A human is only happy if she has two, and everybody else has one. And even then, she starts imagining three. (http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3531 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3531)

task_queue 11y ago

No one is about to flood the market with free goods. Power in a capitalist system is derived from scarcity, so it follows that artificial scarcity will be maintained if a 'post-scarcity' technological development was made.

3pt14159 11y ago

There will always be some form of scarcity. Look at housing prices in major cities. Once food and clothing became (essentially) solved problems people ended up bidding up the remaining housing stock to the stratosphere.

zo1 11y ago

There will always be something we want, but can't have. It's human nature, I would argue. As soon as we push one boundary, another horizon presents itself. Once we eliminate all the "simple" causes of scarcity, we'll soon be on to the next group. Some things probably won't present themselves as limited until they become scarce. One example I like to think of: Land, it is currently abundant, to the point of ridiculousness based on our population. However, land near X (city, hospital, family, etc), is pretty limited. This is caused by unique local/contextual reasons. Not every city can have a beautiful ocean sunset, not every city can have a giant canyon in the middle that provides a unique nightlife of weird depths.

bryanlarsen 11y ago

post-scarcity is kind of a misnomer; there will always be scarcity in something -- land and human labour will always be valuable. Energy and other raw resources required by the replicators might be really, really cheap, but not free/unlimited. Imagine an economy where everybody has a Universal Basic Income of about $10M. It's post-scarcity, so there are replicators that can make anything, and energy is really cheap. Robots mine and farm the asteroids using that cheap energy so all raw materials and raw food are really cheap. By really cheap, I mean about the same price as now. So you've got $10M a year in income, and can buy a car for about $500. - Land is crazy expensive. There are billions of rich people bidding it up - but you can rent an apartment for cheap since mile-high skyscrapers are easy to build - human labour is crazy expensive -- who's going to work for you unless you pay substantially more than $10M/year? - but people still need meaning in their life; most "work" is basically volunteer labour Basically Star Trek.

Jach 11y ago

Unless we find a way to create energy, black hole orbiting real estate will one day be very valuable...

zbyte64 11y ago

Post-scarcity is what happens when the current resources that restrict our actions are no longer an issue. There will be different bottlenecks for development but those resources are so far removed from our current concerns it is hard to imagine. Imagine a world where energy is practically free, you might be tempted to think that spells the end of scarcity. But you still have to deal with thermodynamics. Your factory could be churning out countless diamonds with the free energy you are getting but you are going to need a large heat sink for all the entropy you will be pumping out. The scarcity then is your local ability to dump entropy. Or imagine a reality where we create a Dyson Sphere and have super nano-tech and world peace is a reality. No more scarcity right? Those descendents are now competing with other space faring actors. They may be content to stay in our home solar system and wait for the sun to kill the species or wait for another actor to take our star. The new scarcity there is solar system redundancy.