5 ms·
> post-scarcity I wanna know who the clown was that came up with this term, because there's a ton of stuff in the world that is scarce, you know, like homes.
by andrewmcwatters 5y ago
> post-scarcity
I wanna know who the clown was that came up with this term, because there's a ton of stuff in the world that is scarce, you know, like homes.
- mkl 5y ago"transitions to a post-scarcity economy" (emphasis mine) There are no post-scarcity economies currently in existence, but with increasing automation such a thing may become possible in the future, and the transition may take a long time. There's no physical reason why homes must remain scarce forever, for example. That said, I don't think what paulpauper describes sounds like post-scarcity, as it's just about money; I think of things more like Iain M Banks's Culture.
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoThis is such a silly and naive concept, though. It’s literal children’s logic. No one with the means to provide significant value to the masses is going to do so without commanding even commodity prices. Are coffee beans free? No. Will they ever be? No. And yet, the world over produces tons of the stuff. What’s going to change in the next 50 years that would make them free? Nothing. If anything, they’ll be more expensive then! Enjoy a cup while you’ve got the chance.
- lovich 5y agoSome items have already reached post scarcity though? Take books for example. New books still have scarcity. A copy of any already written book however is effectively free when provided over the internet. The marginal cost to produce a copy of said book for another person is an infinitesimal percentage of a penny
- samatman 5y agoYou've hit on why people are easily seduced by the concept of post-scarcity. Bits aren't free, but they are too cheap to meter. If I divide the time it takes to download an ebook by the amount I pay for Internet per month, it comes out to bupkis, even after I try and account for the percentage of my storage it uses up. But a cup of sugar, and anything else made of atoms, is fundamentally different. There's no obvious route to sugar being too cheap to meter. An old English idiom for getting something very cheap was "I got it for a song". So this kind of post-scarcity has been with us for a long time: anyone can sing a song, singing was never scarce.
- lovich 5y agoBeing too cheap for individuals or society to consider in their transactions and being completely free, are effectively the same to me. You may feel otherwise, but if the distinction never makes a difference in the practical world then it does not enter my mind. Based on that metric, we already have post scarcity goods like already published books
- samatman 5y agoYou have entirely misunderstood me.
- lovich 5y agoI’m fairly certain it’s the other way around. I agree that when you get to physical goods there’s no way it’s literally infinite. What I’m saying is that after a certain point it doesn’t matter. If we had a sun sized amount of sugar available to humanity then it would be post scarcity even though it was actually getting used up by a measurable amount
- gota 5y agoYou are arguing against a science fiction concept used as figure of speech Are sure coffe beans wouldn't be free if we had Dyson-sphere leves of free energy providing magic-like stuff like replicators? Because that is a context in which post-scarcity is used literally
- imtringued 5y agoIt's impossible unless we collectively decide to wind down our population to a point where every single individual can fulfill their wishes.
- imtringued 5y agoJust legally declare the bottom 50% homo sapiens by wealth as non human slaves and you already got there.
- Miner49er 5y agoWasn't it Marx?