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> We need to figure out how to live in The World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention. There's a sense in which this statement embodies th

> We need to figure out how to live in The World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention. There's a sense in which this statement embodies the fulcrum of the liberal/conservative divide. The liberal outlook is that scarcity is a largely solved problem, a historical artifact if only we had the political will to distribute resources intelligently. The conservative outlook is that scarcity is real, immediate, inherent in the structure of the world, and at best separated from us by a few days of disaster or revolution. If you believe the former, you can start preparing for a world after capital, because capital has little point without scarcity. If you believe the later, the former program sounds like a formula for the manufacture of scarcity.

jkhdigital 5y ago
Or, as Sowell would describe it, the unconstrained vs. constrained visions: https://www.nku.edu/~gartigw/teaching_files/Weaver%20ch%2012%20Handout%20-%20Constrained%20versus%20Unconstrained%20Visions.pdf https://www.nku.edu/~gartigw/teaching_files/Weaver%20ch%2012...
mkr-hn 5y ago
There's another perspective that takes parts of both: we're a lot less likely to have a few days of disaster and revolution, and get through it faster and better if it happens, if the maximum number of people have what they need to survive. Think of how many people die because they can't afford to evacuate ahead of a hurricane (if there's enough warning to begin with), or suffer greater loss because they can't afford a home built to a sufficient standard. Guillotines look a lot less friendly under a less precarious lens.
- chillwaves 5y ago
  So who are these people that take the "both" perspective because that does not represent the conservative ideology at all -- which is based upon "personal responsibility" aka you get what you deserve. There is no call from conservatives for government intervention to make the poor less vulnerable.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Personal responsibility is just a convenient excuse for selfish behavior. It's about constructing an elaborate story about why you shouldn't or don't have to help other people. When you just throw out "personal responsibility" people stop thinking about the topic from a problem solving perspective and instead think about it from a moral perspective. It's especially true when people call each other lazy. Most of the time they are the ones who are too lazy to figure out the real problem. For example. Just assume everyone has a credit card. Then you can blame people for taking pay day loans. The real problem is that they don't have a credit card meanwhile everyone will tell you an elaborate story how stupid you are e.g. for not having friends that lend you money.
    - Chris2048 5y ago
      > people stop thinking about the topic from a problem solving perspective Individual rando citizens shouldn't be the ones "thinking about" infrastructural problems. That's what government and experts are for. > Just assume everyone has a credit card Not everyone who has a poor credit score/rating is stupid/irresponsible/to-blame, but I'm sure the majority are. But the majority will probably also claim to be blameless. The problem is there are two problems - the major one is the irresponsible. The minor one is the unfortunate. But protecting yourself from the irresponsible usually distancing yourself from the unfortunate as well. That said, most of the unfortunate you are likely to meet are at least a little irresponsible too, confounding the issue.
      - mkr-hn 5y ago
        Most people are irresponsible in some way, but the consequences scale exponentially with misfortune in countries without a functional social safety net. The vast underclass this creates is what leads to the revolutions feared upthread. Someone who spends $10 on a lottery ticket because he doesn't understand what $10 can become or believe he can do better is no more irresponsible than the rich person who tips the $500 change in his pocket because he doesn't understand money anymore, but the latter is not likely to face any consequences for long enough that it probably won't matter.
beerandt 5y ago
It doesn't matter if scarcity is "real" or not, because human's always create it where it doesn't already exist. Which is why any post-scarcity argument will eventually boil down to either "You don't really want that" or "here's a separate but equal replacement" or "nobody can have it".
- chillwaves 5y ago
  The cost of making goods is extremely cheap and will only go down as the cost of energy decreases. This is not an ideological statement. ETA: HN says I am replying too quickly. here is my reply to the replies: argue against what I wrote. I said the cost of making goods is going down. Not that rare things will no longer exist. And I certainly did not speak to arbitrarily valued things like baseball cards (lol?) and "numbered art". Who even cares? That's not remotely in the realm of discussion. No one said lowered energy costs will increase the existence of Kanye West signatures. The point is the price of goods is going down. It means higher per capita production output. That is the only thing I said. That means cheaper houses. It means cheaper consumer goods. Not "nothing rare will ever exist again" or even "nothing will ever be scarce" -- it means the things we need to survive are no longer resource or labor gated, they are closed off as an act of political will. If you want, make two different currencies. Some basic gov't scrip for necessities - housing, food, shelter, closing, and you can use BTC or whatever for your rich people shit and pay as much as you want for collectible shoes or whatever catches your fancy. People will largely not care because they won't be literally starving and dying from lack of access to physiological necessities.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    How's the supply of beach-front houses doing, relative to the demand? If the cost of energy decreases, are we going to have more of them? Some kinds of scarcity can be solved by cheap energy. Not all can. (I suppose that the kinds that are needs instead of wants are more likely to be solvable with cheap energy.)
    - barbecue_sauce 5y ago
yann2 5y ago
Oversimplifying the universe only leads to misunderstandings and false choices.
bradrn 5y ago
This basically sounds like Scott Alexander’s ‘thrive—survive’ distinction: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory...
neatze 5y ago
> if only we had the political will to distribute resources intelligently. Do you mean like USSR tried to do it ? The root premise of free market (with transparency and regulation) is the most efficient system of resources distribution.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > The root premise of free market (with transparency and regulation) is [...] I'm not aware of the existence of such a free market, properly regulated, outside of liberal economics textbooks. The claim that free markets are intrinsically efficient is based on unsupportable assumptions about the behaviour of "economic agents" (i.e. individuals). Incidentally, this notion of a "free market (with transparency and regulation)" appears to be a contradiction in terms. If the market is subject to rules, then in what sense is it free? What kinds of regulation are consistent with the market's freedom? There must be some kinds of regulation that would render a market non-free; for example, rules on who can own a business. Can you regulate press ownership in a free market? Is there such a thing as a person that is "unfit" to be a company director?
- toiletfuneral 5y ago
  How anyone can look at the world and say this with a straight face just blows my mind
imtringued 5y ago
>If you believe the former, you can start preparing for a world after capital, because capital has little point without scarcity. If you believe the later, the former program sounds like a formula for the manufacture of scarcity. Where is the middle ground? The capital is the source of abundance. You need to maintain and take care of it. Neither side is willing to do that. The liberals will neglect it resulting in scarcity. The conservatives will destroy it because they can't handle abundance. Zimbabwe had liberal land reforms that neglected doing actual farm work. The conservatives will abolish farm subsidies to prevent overproduction of grains because they believe the extra labor can be used on something more productive. Then a drought hits and you don't have enough food. Where is the middle ground? Build and create capital but also let it stay idle if its not needed rather than dismantling it.
Chris2048 5y ago
This ignores another resource - power. Power is built in to all resources, to the degree that you can deny resources to others. If resources are distributed they won't stay that way. Hence you can really "distribute" them freely, but rather "allocate" whereby some authority maintains the distribution, and hence has control over the resource in some capacity. From that perspective, lack of scarcity is never guaranteed to exist because equal distribution is not guaranteed to persist, without intervention at least. It's also a (conservative?) idea that control of resources is what binds society in terms of motivation. that co-dependence is actually a good thing. At the very least, even though I don't agree that society couldn't exist without scarcity, I do agree that: - current society is built on scarcity, and won't seamlessly transition to a viable post-scarcity just because you remove scarcity. - American society is dependant of tribal power-struggles more than most, and hence will fare even worse. - Many nations are not so abundant that they are too far from scarcity. Without long-term planned fail-safes, small disasters can bring it right back. Governance is mostly hands off - citizens are left to themselves, which is why most think in terms of self-preservations.
ladyattis 5y ago
Most of the modern world's scarcity comes from norms both legal and social. The idea that someone can own a warehouse full of goods or large sections of land and be able to leverage the power of state violence to prevent others from utilizing those resources even if they never do is the central problem that plagues our civilization. We're great at producing stuff but we're terrible at assigning it or allocating it because someone has to 'own' the things in question.

jkhdigital 5y ago

Or, as Sowell would describe it, the unconstrained vs. constrained visions: https://www.nku.edu/~gartigw/teaching_files/Weaver%20ch%2012%20Handout%20-%20Constrained%20versus%20Unconstrained%20Visions.pdf https://www.nku.edu/~gartigw/teaching_files/Weaver%20ch%2012...

mkr-hn 5y ago

There's another perspective that takes parts of both: we're a lot less likely to have a few days of disaster and revolution, and get through it faster and better if it happens, if the maximum number of people have what they need to survive. Think of how many people die because they can't afford to evacuate ahead of a hurricane (if there's enough warning to begin with), or suffer greater loss because they can't afford a home built to a sufficient standard. Guillotines look a lot less friendly under a less precarious lens.

chillwaves 5y ago
So who are these people that take the "both" perspective because that does not represent the conservative ideology at all -- which is based upon "personal responsibility" aka you get what you deserve. There is no call from conservatives for government intervention to make the poor less vulnerable.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Personal responsibility is just a convenient excuse for selfish behavior. It's about constructing an elaborate story about why you shouldn't or don't have to help other people. When you just throw out "personal responsibility" people stop thinking about the topic from a problem solving perspective and instead think about it from a moral perspective. It's especially true when people call each other lazy. Most of the time they are the ones who are too lazy to figure out the real problem. For example. Just assume everyone has a credit card. Then you can blame people for taking pay day loans. The real problem is that they don't have a credit card meanwhile everyone will tell you an elaborate story how stupid you are e.g. for not having friends that lend you money.
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    > people stop thinking about the topic from a problem solving perspective Individual rando citizens shouldn't be the ones "thinking about" infrastructural problems. That's what government and experts are for. > Just assume everyone has a credit card Not everyone who has a poor credit score/rating is stupid/irresponsible/to-blame, but I'm sure the majority are. But the majority will probably also claim to be blameless. The problem is there are two problems - the major one is the irresponsible. The minor one is the unfortunate. But protecting yourself from the irresponsible usually distancing yourself from the unfortunate as well. That said, most of the unfortunate you are likely to meet are at least a little irresponsible too, confounding the issue.
    - mkr-hn 5y ago
      Most people are irresponsible in some way, but the consequences scale exponentially with misfortune in countries without a functional social safety net. The vast underclass this creates is what leads to the revolutions feared upthread. Someone who spends $10 on a lottery ticket because he doesn't understand what $10 can become or believe he can do better is no more irresponsible than the rich person who tips the $500 change in his pocket because he doesn't understand money anymore, but the latter is not likely to face any consequences for long enough that it probably won't matter.

beerandt 5y ago

It doesn't matter if scarcity is "real" or not, because human's always create it where it doesn't already exist. Which is why any post-scarcity argument will eventually boil down to either "You don't really want that" or "here's a separate but equal replacement" or "nobody can have it".

chillwaves 5y ago
The cost of making goods is extremely cheap and will only go down as the cost of energy decreases. This is not an ideological statement. ETA: HN says I am replying too quickly. here is my reply to the replies: argue against what I wrote. I said the cost of making goods is going down. Not that rare things will no longer exist. And I certainly did not speak to arbitrarily valued things like baseball cards (lol?) and "numbered art". Who even cares? That's not remotely in the realm of discussion. No one said lowered energy costs will increase the existence of Kanye West signatures. The point is the price of goods is going down. It means higher per capita production output. That is the only thing I said. That means cheaper houses. It means cheaper consumer goods. Not "nothing rare will ever exist again" or even "nothing will ever be scarce" -- it means the things we need to survive are no longer resource or labor gated, they are closed off as an act of political will. If you want, make two different currencies. Some basic gov't scrip for necessities - housing, food, shelter, closing, and you can use BTC or whatever for your rich people shit and pay as much as you want for collectible shoes or whatever catches your fancy. People will largely not care because they won't be literally starving and dying from lack of access to physiological necessities.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  How's the supply of beach-front houses doing, relative to the demand? If the cost of energy decreases, are we going to have more of them? Some kinds of scarcity can be solved by cheap energy. Not all can. (I suppose that the kinds that are needs instead of wants are more likely to be solvable with cheap energy.)
  - barbecue_sauce 5y ago

yann2 5y ago

Oversimplifying the universe only leads to misunderstandings and false choices.

bradrn 5y ago

This basically sounds like Scott Alexander’s ‘thrive—survive’ distinction: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory...

neatze 5y ago

> if only we had the political will to distribute resources intelligently. Do you mean like USSR tried to do it ? The root premise of free market (with transparency and regulation) is the most efficient system of resources distribution.

denton-scratch 5y ago
> The root premise of free market (with transparency and regulation) is [...] I'm not aware of the existence of such a free market, properly regulated, outside of liberal economics textbooks. The claim that free markets are intrinsically efficient is based on unsupportable assumptions about the behaviour of "economic agents" (i.e. individuals). Incidentally, this notion of a "free market (with transparency and regulation)" appears to be a contradiction in terms. If the market is subject to rules, then in what sense is it free? What kinds of regulation are consistent with the market's freedom? There must be some kinds of regulation that would render a market non-free; for example, rules on who can own a business. Can you regulate press ownership in a free market? Is there such a thing as a person that is "unfit" to be a company director?
toiletfuneral 5y ago
How anyone can look at the world and say this with a straight face just blows my mind

imtringued 5y ago

>If you believe the former, you can start preparing for a world after capital, because capital has little point without scarcity. If you believe the later, the former program sounds like a formula for the manufacture of scarcity. Where is the middle ground? The capital is the source of abundance. You need to maintain and take care of it. Neither side is willing to do that. The liberals will neglect it resulting in scarcity. The conservatives will destroy it because they can't handle abundance. Zimbabwe had liberal land reforms that neglected doing actual farm work. The conservatives will abolish farm subsidies to prevent overproduction of grains because they believe the extra labor can be used on something more productive. Then a drought hits and you don't have enough food. Where is the middle ground? Build and create capital but also let it stay idle if its not needed rather than dismantling it.

Chris2048 5y ago

This ignores another resource - power. Power is built in to all resources, to the degree that you can deny resources to others. If resources are distributed they won't stay that way. Hence you can really "distribute" them freely, but rather "allocate" whereby some authority maintains the distribution, and hence has control over the resource in some capacity. From that perspective, lack of scarcity is never guaranteed to exist because equal distribution is not guaranteed to persist, without intervention at least. It's also a (conservative?) idea that control of resources is what binds society in terms of motivation. that co-dependence is actually a good thing. At the very least, even though I don't agree that society couldn't exist without scarcity, I do agree that: - current society is built on scarcity, and won't seamlessly transition to a viable post-scarcity just because you remove scarcity. - American society is dependant of tribal power-struggles more than most, and hence will fare even worse. - Many nations are not so abundant that they are too far from scarcity. Without long-term planned fail-safes, small disasters can bring it right back. Governance is mostly hands off - citizens are left to themselves, which is why most think in terms of self-preservations.

ladyattis 5y ago

Most of the modern world's scarcity comes from norms both legal and social. The idea that someone can own a warehouse full of goods or large sections of land and be able to leverage the power of state violence to prevent others from utilizing those resources even if they never do is the central problem that plagues our civilization. We're great at producing stuff but we're terrible at assigning it or allocating it because someone has to 'own' the things in question.