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I wrote the article. Thank you for your response. I don't think post-scarcity will eat the entire economy anytime soon. In particular, I think that it will stil

I wrote the article. Thank you for your response. I don't think post-scarcity will eat the entire economy anytime soon. In particular, I think that it will still be unaffordable to access proper medical care, child care, and housing. And I don't see how UBI solves that. Hence there are more pressing problems, like deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer) and reflecting on how we could make housing more affordable so that middle class and working class people can live where the jobs are located.

makomk 10y ago
On the contrary, I think that is exactly why post-scarcity is going to devour the economy. Think about what happens when access to medical care and housing become the scarce resources, when it becomes pointless to buy more consumer goods because you have nowhere to put them anyway. More and more of the economy becomes diverted into the pockets of those who own real estate and the medical industry. Improvements in efficiency elsewhere just make the problem worse further damage those industries. An increasing portion of our economy gets siphoned into the pockets of a rentier class with little reason to spend it.
ZenoArrow 10y ago
> "deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer)" Why involve the insurance companies at all? They're just a drain on the US healthcare system. If you cut out the insurance companies, changed the rules about price gouging in the pharmaceutical industry and engaged in preventative medicine (such as offering support to those who wanted to lose weight), the US could easily afford publicly funded healthcare. Other countries with fewer resources have managed it just fine. Even if you have to raise taxes to do it, you could do so and still leave people with more money in their pocket compared to when they were paying out insurance premiums.
SmellTheGlove 10y ago
> I wrote the article. Thank you for your response. I don't think post-scarcity will eat the entire economy anytime soon. In particular, I think that it will still be unaffordable to access proper medical care, child care, and housing. And I don't see how UBI solves that. From a US-centric perspective, those things are true. But the rest of the industrialized world has largely solved access to medical care (even if they are still working on timeliness in some respects). Child care has been solved in parts of the world through a combo of subsidy and parental leave - you can look at parts of Canada and Northern Europe for some models. Housing is tricky - areas are expensive because they're either on the coasts or near major economic hubs. In a post-scarcity economy, there will still be upward pressure on the former, but the latter eases quite a bit. We'll see it sooner than this, though, as tech starts to go more and more remote, and production processes become more and more automated. Not tomorrow, but optimistically, within my childrens' lifetimes. > Hence there are more pressing problems, like deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer) and reflecting on how we could make housing more affordable so that middle class and working class people can live where the jobs are located. I agree with both of these. Both of these problems have some political solutions, though. They're not technical impossibilities.

makomk 10y ago

On the contrary, I think that is exactly why post-scarcity is going to devour the economy. Think about what happens when access to medical care and housing become the scarce resources, when it becomes pointless to buy more consumer goods because you have nowhere to put them anyway. More and more of the economy becomes diverted into the pockets of those who own real estate and the medical industry. Improvements in efficiency elsewhere just make the problem worse further damage those industries. An increasing portion of our economy gets siphoned into the pockets of a rentier class with little reason to spend it.

ZenoArrow 10y ago

> "deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer)" Why involve the insurance companies at all? They're just a drain on the US healthcare system. If you cut out the insurance companies, changed the rules about price gouging in the pharmaceutical industry and engaged in preventative medicine (such as offering support to those who wanted to lose weight), the US could easily afford publicly funded healthcare. Other countries with fewer resources have managed it just fine. Even if you have to raise taxes to do it, you could do so and still leave people with more money in their pocket compared to when they were paying out insurance premiums.

SmellTheGlove 10y ago

> I wrote the article. Thank you for your response. I don't think post-scarcity will eat the entire economy anytime soon. In particular, I think that it will still be unaffordable to access proper medical care, child care, and housing. And I don't see how UBI solves that. From a US-centric perspective, those things are true. But the rest of the industrialized world has largely solved access to medical care (even if they are still working on timeliness in some respects). Child care has been solved in parts of the world through a combo of subsidy and parental leave - you can look at parts of Canada and Northern Europe for some models. Housing is tricky - areas are expensive because they're either on the coasts or near major economic hubs. In a post-scarcity economy, there will still be upward pressure on the former, but the latter eases quite a bit. We'll see it sooner than this, though, as tech starts to go more and more remote, and production processes become more and more automated. Not tomorrow, but optimistically, within my childrens' lifetimes. > Hence there are more pressing problems, like deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer) and reflecting on how we could make housing more affordable so that middle class and working class people can live where the jobs are located. I agree with both of these. Both of these problems have some political solutions, though. They're not technical impossibilities.