7 ms·

We are entering a Post Scarcity Economy. A lot of fiction books write about how this plays out. Regardless of what happens a lot of economic theory becomes less

We are entering a Post Scarcity Economy. A lot of fiction books write about how this plays out. Regardless of what happens a lot of economic theory becomes less relevant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy#:~:text=Post%2Dscarcity%20is%20a%20theoretical,very%20cheaply%20or%20even%20freely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy#:~:text=....

spaetzleesser 5y ago
Post scarcity only for certain things. Things like living space are becoming scarcer and more expensive.
- klipt 5y ago
  Living space in rural areas is cheap. Living space near good jobs is what's scarce.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    In comes a pandemic induced remote work experiment and global satellite internet thanks to SpaceX. An unforeseen black swan of a decade.
  - midasuni 5y ago
    Not in the U.K. average house prices in rural areas are far higher than in towns, as they are more desirable.
    - globular-toast 5y ago
      That's true, but they are also bigger and better. A block of flats in the middle of nowhere would be worth way less than one in a city.
- david_dan 5y ago
  'Living Space' is also an illusion. In a near perfect VR world, (which we will achieve during singularity), everyone will have infinite 'living' space
BurningFrog 5y ago
As long as people want things they don't have, there will always be scarcity. I'll believe the Post Scarcity Economy only when I see it.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  From the second sentence of the article >Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services, but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services
- globular-toast 5y ago
  Do you buy as much milk as you can afford? Most food is way beyond scarcity at this point.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    No, but I buy more ribeye steaks and restaurant meals than I need. I'm of course way beyond fearing starvation, but there is still no real upper limit to my food expenses.
qsort 5y ago
Quote: This article is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor's personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. (January 2021)"
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  They directly linked to the definition, which is not written like a personal reflection.
midhhhthrow 5y ago
It’s just the opposite. The essential goods needed for survival: shelter is becoming more and more Scarce. 34% of millennials can’t even afford their own shelter anymore and are forced to live with parents. Those who can live by themselves are paying over 40% of their income on shelter. There’s been a pretty dramatic drop in living standards here in the US over the last several decades The fact that we can now afford ever more borderline useless apps, clothes and electronic gadgets doesn’t help much
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Housing prices are not driven by scarcity, they are driven by financialization of our economy. There are multiple cities in England where population has decreased but house prices increased. During lockdown 700k people left London, but house prices kept going up.
  - treeman79 5y ago
    Triple the housing supply. Prices will go down.
    - maxsilver 5y ago
      The Midwest US can assure you that they've definitely already tried this. We're literally mowing down every cornfield for housing here (I'm typing this from a neighborhood with thousands of units, 90% of all buildings here were built after 2012). It never works, prices are still at an all-time high, even for units on the market 6+ months or longer. "Just building more" alone isn't ever going to lower prices enough to make housing affordable for most, no matter how many more units you build. You have to decommoditize housing, or stop force-preventing natural depreciation, or at least put ownership caps on it, or some other thing in addition to the construction.
      - mac01021 5y ago
        Are all those new houses occupied? Where are all the people coming from?
vsareto 5y ago
If you believe that post scarcity is possible at all, you might consider that space colonization is also possible, but that brings about new significant requirements and needs that our economy will have to meet. Personally I think our civilization's ambition needs to expand so that happens. If we are still putting the "American Dream" as a goal when that can be built and satisfied cheaply by automation, then our goals need to change. A post scarcity economy would be able to meet today's American Dream easily and with little trouble, and yet we can't shake the mindset that you have to earn it because that makes it mean more or something.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  it does not have to be either/or. some people can live a low-impact, low-cost post-scarcity lifestyle, while others can aim/aspire for more abundance
  - vsareto 5y ago
    Oh I'm not saying we force people to do space jobs or livings, only that it should wayyyyy more accessible and common than it currently is and certain sectors of the economy will need to support that. It gives us more of what we can't realistically create on Earth, which is more land. The American dream is a challenge for people now. If we advance to where it's no longer a challenge because the pieces of that are plentiful and cheap and is given to everyone by virtue of existing, then we need a higher challenge because we've essentially "solved survival on Earth" and must now expand. IMO it's way better than just becoming an economy that focuses on producing luxuries or inventing new financial gadgets.
rvba 5y ago
What I will write probably wont be a popular opinion, but I completly disagree that we enter post scarcity. Post scarcity perhaps exists in some richest parts of selected countries (California? Hamburg?), but even in those places it is often just an illusion. Roads still have potholes and there are homeless on streets. Schools still struggle with supplies. There are also people who work, but whose work does not allow them to get a real place to live, or health services. Then there are other things that are difficult to measure: for example overworking, or drug addiction, which perhaps dont mean scarcity of goods, but seem to be connected with scarcity of services or scarcity of quality of life. People from the rich countries consume more natural resources than the few billion in developing, or third world countries. What happens now is already completely unsustainable and causes multiple problems: global warming, loss of natural habitats, dying species... There are billions of people in Africa or India, who dont consume even 10% of the resources that an average American consumes - but they sure as hell would prefer to get to that level. I imagine that it is easy to make comments about post scarcity when you live in some mega-rich bubble in California, but this is not true even for USA, not to mention the rest of the world. People in poor countries dont have cars YET and they sure want to drive those big trucks that drink a lot of fuel per mile. But where will this fuel come from? And where does the CO2 go? And in my opinion inflation is a result of incompetence, of planned policy by central banks to make the rich richer, while the rest to gets poorer. As much as I dont like bitcoin (multiple reasons, economical, unsustainable in real use..), it is right with one thing: the supply is known in advance and finite. We currently live in a time where money is printed out of thin air to save the too-big-to-fail banks and to pump the stockmarket prices, so rich dont lose anything. All of this at the expense of the middle class. The poor already dont have anything. And the middle class is shrinking: from one side those are the only ones who pay taxes, from other, those are the only ones who dont have real tools to defend against inflation. I mean, of course you will write that one can gamble on the stockmarket, but weren't saving accounts supposed to be the thing for those who are risk averse? I mean, if someone from middle class gambles and loses you will write that it is their own fault. If they dont gamble - and put money on a savings account (so lose money) - also their own fault. Currently the central banks create inflation higher than interest on saving accounts, what in my opinion is a very big problem. Since the central banks entered the cycle of bailing out bubbles, more and more money will be created: new and new bubbles will have to be bailed out.. and as I said, at expense of the middle class. Who just get screwed by inflation.
cableshaft 5y ago
The premise for the linked paper, "The Post-Scarcity World of 2050-2075", that "This convergence of peaking production is likely to lead to an age of scarcity. And yet that age of scarcity is unlikely to herald the end of the world. So what lies beyond scarcity?" makes no sense to me, although I have yet to read the whole paper. Like, yes, we are depleting the Earth of its resources, leading to scarcity, but then that will end because the Earth will be out of resources, therefore we are post-scarcity and everything is free or nearly so? No sense whatsoever. I think I can guess what the paper is about, that technology is going to develop that will save us from exhausting resources, but we're already inching pretty damn close to various tipping points that will lead to some really terrible things happening with various ecosystems and things are going to have to get a whole lot worse (and a lot of people are going to die) before we even can attempt to go back to some sort of eventual equilibrium. And tech is nowhere close enough to saving us from a good chunk of it. So yeah, I guess there could be a 'Post-Scarcity World', but only for the fraction of life that will survive to see it (maybe none of that life being human at the rate things are going).

spaetzleesser 5y ago

Post scarcity only for certain things. Things like living space are becoming scarcer and more expensive.

klipt 5y ago
Living space in rural areas is cheap. Living space near good jobs is what's scarce.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  In comes a pandemic induced remote work experiment and global satellite internet thanks to SpaceX. An unforeseen black swan of a decade.
- midasuni 5y ago
  Not in the U.K. average house prices in rural areas are far higher than in towns, as they are more desirable.
  - globular-toast 5y ago
    That's true, but they are also bigger and better. A block of flats in the middle of nowhere would be worth way less than one in a city.
david_dan 5y ago
'Living Space' is also an illusion. In a near perfect VR world, (which we will achieve during singularity), everyone will have infinite 'living' space

BurningFrog 5y ago

As long as people want things they don't have, there will always be scarcity. I'll believe the Post Scarcity Economy only when I see it.

boomboomsubban 5y ago
From the second sentence of the article >Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services, but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services
globular-toast 5y ago
Do you buy as much milk as you can afford? Most food is way beyond scarcity at this point.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  No, but I buy more ribeye steaks and restaurant meals than I need. I'm of course way beyond fearing starvation, but there is still no real upper limit to my food expenses.

qsort 5y ago

Quote: This article is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor's personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. (January 2021)"

boomboomsubban 5y ago
They directly linked to the definition, which is not written like a personal reflection.

midhhhthrow 5y ago

It’s just the opposite. The essential goods needed for survival: shelter is becoming more and more Scarce. 34% of millennials can’t even afford their own shelter anymore and are forced to live with parents. Those who can live by themselves are paying over 40% of their income on shelter. There’s been a pretty dramatic drop in living standards here in the US over the last several decades The fact that we can now afford ever more borderline useless apps, clothes and electronic gadgets doesn’t help much

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
Housing prices are not driven by scarcity, they are driven by financialization of our economy. There are multiple cities in England where population has decreased but house prices increased. During lockdown 700k people left London, but house prices kept going up.
- treeman79 5y ago
  Triple the housing supply. Prices will go down.
  - maxsilver 5y ago
    The Midwest US can assure you that they've definitely already tried this. We're literally mowing down every cornfield for housing here (I'm typing this from a neighborhood with thousands of units, 90% of all buildings here were built after 2012). It never works, prices are still at an all-time high, even for units on the market 6+ months or longer. "Just building more" alone isn't ever going to lower prices enough to make housing affordable for most, no matter how many more units you build. You have to decommoditize housing, or stop force-preventing natural depreciation, or at least put ownership caps on it, or some other thing in addition to the construction.
    - mac01021 5y ago
      Are all those new houses occupied? Where are all the people coming from?

vsareto 5y ago

If you believe that post scarcity is possible at all, you might consider that space colonization is also possible, but that brings about new significant requirements and needs that our economy will have to meet. Personally I think our civilization's ambition needs to expand so that happens. If we are still putting the "American Dream" as a goal when that can be built and satisfied cheaply by automation, then our goals need to change. A post scarcity economy would be able to meet today's American Dream easily and with little trouble, and yet we can't shake the mindset that you have to earn it because that makes it mean more or something.

paulpauper 5y ago
it does not have to be either/or. some people can live a low-impact, low-cost post-scarcity lifestyle, while others can aim/aspire for more abundance
- vsareto 5y ago
  Oh I'm not saying we force people to do space jobs or livings, only that it should wayyyyy more accessible and common than it currently is and certain sectors of the economy will need to support that. It gives us more of what we can't realistically create on Earth, which is more land. The American dream is a challenge for people now. If we advance to where it's no longer a challenge because the pieces of that are plentiful and cheap and is given to everyone by virtue of existing, then we need a higher challenge because we've essentially "solved survival on Earth" and must now expand. IMO it's way better than just becoming an economy that focuses on producing luxuries or inventing new financial gadgets.

rvba 5y ago

What I will write probably wont be a popular opinion, but I completly disagree that we enter post scarcity. Post scarcity perhaps exists in some richest parts of selected countries (California? Hamburg?), but even in those places it is often just an illusion. Roads still have potholes and there are homeless on streets. Schools still struggle with supplies. There are also people who work, but whose work does not allow them to get a real place to live, or health services. Then there are other things that are difficult to measure: for example overworking, or drug addiction, which perhaps dont mean scarcity of goods, but seem to be connected with scarcity of services or scarcity of quality of life. People from the rich countries consume more natural resources than the few billion in developing, or third world countries. What happens now is already completely unsustainable and causes multiple problems: global warming, loss of natural habitats, dying species... There are billions of people in Africa or India, who dont consume even 10% of the resources that an average American consumes - but they sure as hell would prefer to get to that level. I imagine that it is easy to make comments about post scarcity when you live in some mega-rich bubble in California, but this is not true even for USA, not to mention the rest of the world. People in poor countries dont have cars YET and they sure want to drive those big trucks that drink a lot of fuel per mile. But where will this fuel come from? And where does the CO2 go? And in my opinion inflation is a result of incompetence, of planned policy by central banks to make the rich richer, while the rest to gets poorer. As much as I dont like bitcoin (multiple reasons, economical, unsustainable in real use..), it is right with one thing: the supply is known in advance and finite. We currently live in a time where money is printed out of thin air to save the too-big-to-fail banks and to pump the stockmarket prices, so rich dont lose anything. All of this at the expense of the middle class. The poor already dont have anything. And the middle class is shrinking: from one side those are the only ones who pay taxes, from other, those are the only ones who dont have real tools to defend against inflation. I mean, of course you will write that one can gamble on the stockmarket, but weren't saving accounts supposed to be the thing for those who are risk averse? I mean, if someone from middle class gambles and loses you will write that it is their own fault. If they dont gamble - and put money on a savings account (so lose money) - also their own fault. Currently the central banks create inflation higher than interest on saving accounts, what in my opinion is a very big problem. Since the central banks entered the cycle of bailing out bubbles, more and more money will be created: new and new bubbles will have to be bailed out.. and as I said, at expense of the middle class. Who just get screwed by inflation.

cableshaft 5y ago

The premise for the linked paper, "The Post-Scarcity World of 2050-2075", that "This convergence of peaking production is likely to lead to an age of scarcity. And yet that age of scarcity is unlikely to herald the end of the world. So what lies beyond scarcity?" makes no sense to me, although I have yet to read the whole paper. Like, yes, we are depleting the Earth of its resources, leading to scarcity, but then that will end because the Earth will be out of resources, therefore we are post-scarcity and everything is free or nearly so? No sense whatsoever. I think I can guess what the paper is about, that technology is going to develop that will save us from exhausting resources, but we're already inching pretty damn close to various tipping points that will lead to some really terrible things happening with various ecosystems and things are going to have to get a whole lot worse (and a lot of people are going to die) before we even can attempt to go back to some sort of eventual equilibrium. And tech is nowhere close enough to saving us from a good chunk of it. So yeah, I guess there could be a 'Post-Scarcity World', but only for the fraction of life that will survive to see it (maybe none of that life being human at the rate things are going).