11 ms·

No economy, please. The current system created artificial scarcity which kept many people poor and a few people rich. We didn't actually need to consume until

No economy, please. The current system created artificial scarcity which kept many people poor and a few people rich. We didn't actually need to consume until the planet was ruined, but we did. Now we are all screwed because real scarcity is returning and we still don't know how to share.

zohch 5y ago
> The current system created artificial scarcity The current system has been responsible for creating actual abundance that has vastly improved the living conditions of the vast majority of people. Scarcity is the default state, not artificial.
- montagg 5y ago
  Abundance for some. Built on scarcity for others.
  - EthanHeilman 5y ago
    Humanity managed to create an abundance but thus far has failed to distribute the abundance. This is not surprising and I'm very hopeful we will solve the distribution problem over the next two hundreds years. In the last hundred years we have made enormous progress to solving the distribution problem and expanding the abundance. Solving the abundance problem was the high priority as distribution was purely theoretical concern until we achieved abundance. It took us about 200,000 years develop the ideas, technology and to put the infrastructure in place to achieve post-scarcity for food and water.
- vinceguidry 5y ago
  The 'vast majority of people' have not had their lives improved. They were, and still are, given a Squid Game-esque choice to either participate in a status-seeking game to destroy your health for someone else's comfort or exist in total squalor, dependent on other people who are destroying their health so that you can exist on the crumbs they throw your way. Capitalism seems more or less benign in affluent nations which can afford to value individual life at millions of dollars. You can rest assured that the homeless people you ignore aren't going to starve, that they'll just buy drugs with the money you'd have given them anyway. It's easy to squint your eyes and believe in the system. It's much harder to look at countries were life is much much cheaper and accept that the system is a net improver of lives rather than one of enforced stagnation. Where getting people fed, clothed and housed is a matter of politics, not logistics. Everywhere you go in the developing world, you see politics, by that I mean rich people preserving their riches, keeping the people willing to do the legwork and work out the logistics, from following through on their altruistic missions. We need to stop pretending the system designed to make people feel better about exploiting whatever they can in self-interest is the arbiter of human worth. Scarcity could go away tomorrow if the rent-seekers could just get out of the way.
  - mym1990 5y ago
    Your first sentence is absolutely wrong and your second sentence is absolutely absurd. If you want to have a real conversation, maybe keep out the latest thing you watched on Netflix as a source of your bias. Global living conditions across multiple facets have DRAMATICALLY improved in the last 200 years. No, I am not talking about the last 10 or 20 years, I mean over many generations: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...
    - vinceguidry 5y ago
      You can look at numbers on reports, or you can go and actually look at some of these run-down areas. It's actually kinda hard to do, my eyes were opened one day when I was trying to get from point A to point B in Colombia and I took a shared cab some 400 miles. Seeing it in person is way different than looking at pictures online, lemme tell you. It hits you that it's not just that part of rural Colombia that looks like that, rural everywhere does. And you'll never unsee it, but you'll never actually see it either unless you go out there and look. The world isn't much different now than the one that caused the Buddha to leave his princely lifestyle and dedicate his life to teaching and spirituality. Those material gains over the last 200 years, sorry they just don't seem all that germane.
      - mym1990 5y ago
        I had a feeling you wouldn't want to look at the data and accept the possibility that you are wrong. I see the poverty everywhere, I lived in SF paying $3000 for rent while homeless people were everywhere, I don't disagree that capitalism is hitting a stride that will be hard to recover from. But the fact that you claim to know what the world was like when Buddha was around is even more alarming.
      - halo-and-talon 5y ago
        Do you know how many babies used to die before they were a year old? It sounds like you saw real poverty and it woke you up to your immense wealth and comfortable existence, so kudos on that. You took the wrong leap though and decided that your life is the default state, when in fact it is in an incredible aberration of history. For millions of years every person was poor, then a few were rich, then more were rich, and now you're one of them.
- indrax 5y ago
  Do you think abundance requires the current system?
uselesscynicism 5y ago
Reality creates scarcity. The "current system" produces a modern society with so much abundance that people like you have forgotten that scarcity of everything is the natural state and the "system" is responsible for artificial ABUNDANCE, not scarcity. Yes, there are edge cases like intellectual property but "no economy please" is the kind of thing someone who is completely ignorant to the nature of reality would say.
- dwater 5y ago
  Can you explain what you mean by "the natural state"? Your argument assumes an understanding of what that is, but the picture I have in my mind when I read that phrase is not scarcity of everything.
  - halo-and-talon 5y ago
    Imagine waking up in a forest with your tribe. One of your cousins has an infected foot after stepping on a branch a few days before and it is known that he will soon die in agony. Everyone is hungry and there is nothing to eat, so you prepare hunting and foraging parties and hope that you will find food before starving to death. That's the default state.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

zohch 5y ago

> The current system created artificial scarcity The current system has been responsible for creating actual abundance that has vastly improved the living conditions of the vast majority of people. Scarcity is the default state, not artificial.

montagg 5y ago
Abundance for some. Built on scarcity for others.
- EthanHeilman 5y ago
  Humanity managed to create an abundance but thus far has failed to distribute the abundance. This is not surprising and I'm very hopeful we will solve the distribution problem over the next two hundreds years. In the last hundred years we have made enormous progress to solving the distribution problem and expanding the abundance. Solving the abundance problem was the high priority as distribution was purely theoretical concern until we achieved abundance. It took us about 200,000 years develop the ideas, technology and to put the infrastructure in place to achieve post-scarcity for food and water.
vinceguidry 5y ago
The 'vast majority of people' have not had their lives improved. They were, and still are, given a Squid Game-esque choice to either participate in a status-seeking game to destroy your health for someone else's comfort or exist in total squalor, dependent on other people who are destroying their health so that you can exist on the crumbs they throw your way. Capitalism seems more or less benign in affluent nations which can afford to value individual life at millions of dollars. You can rest assured that the homeless people you ignore aren't going to starve, that they'll just buy drugs with the money you'd have given them anyway. It's easy to squint your eyes and believe in the system. It's much harder to look at countries were life is much much cheaper and accept that the system is a net improver of lives rather than one of enforced stagnation. Where getting people fed, clothed and housed is a matter of politics, not logistics. Everywhere you go in the developing world, you see politics, by that I mean rich people preserving their riches, keeping the people willing to do the legwork and work out the logistics, from following through on their altruistic missions. We need to stop pretending the system designed to make people feel better about exploiting whatever they can in self-interest is the arbiter of human worth. Scarcity could go away tomorrow if the rent-seekers could just get out of the way.
- mym1990 5y ago
  Your first sentence is absolutely wrong and your second sentence is absolutely absurd. If you want to have a real conversation, maybe keep out the latest thing you watched on Netflix as a source of your bias. Global living conditions across multiple facets have DRAMATICALLY improved in the last 200 years. No, I am not talking about the last 10 or 20 years, I mean over many generations: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...
  - vinceguidry 5y ago
    You can look at numbers on reports, or you can go and actually look at some of these run-down areas. It's actually kinda hard to do, my eyes were opened one day when I was trying to get from point A to point B in Colombia and I took a shared cab some 400 miles. Seeing it in person is way different than looking at pictures online, lemme tell you. It hits you that it's not just that part of rural Colombia that looks like that, rural everywhere does. And you'll never unsee it, but you'll never actually see it either unless you go out there and look. The world isn't much different now than the one that caused the Buddha to leave his princely lifestyle and dedicate his life to teaching and spirituality. Those material gains over the last 200 years, sorry they just don't seem all that germane.
    - mym1990 5y ago
      I had a feeling you wouldn't want to look at the data and accept the possibility that you are wrong. I see the poverty everywhere, I lived in SF paying $3000 for rent while homeless people were everywhere, I don't disagree that capitalism is hitting a stride that will be hard to recover from. But the fact that you claim to know what the world was like when Buddha was around is even more alarming.
    - halo-and-talon 5y ago
      Do you know how many babies used to die before they were a year old? It sounds like you saw real poverty and it woke you up to your immense wealth and comfortable existence, so kudos on that. You took the wrong leap though and decided that your life is the default state, when in fact it is in an incredible aberration of history. For millions of years every person was poor, then a few were rich, then more were rich, and now you're one of them.
indrax 5y ago
Do you think abundance requires the current system?

uselesscynicism 5y ago

Reality creates scarcity. The "current system" produces a modern society with so much abundance that people like you have forgotten that scarcity of everything is the natural state and the "system" is responsible for artificial ABUNDANCE, not scarcity. Yes, there are edge cases like intellectual property but "no economy please" is the kind of thing someone who is completely ignorant to the nature of reality would say.

dwater 5y ago
Can you explain what you mean by "the natural state"? Your argument assumes an understanding of what that is, but the picture I have in my mind when I read that phrase is not scarcity of everything.
- halo-and-talon 5y ago
  Imagine waking up in a forest with your tribe. One of your cousins has an infected foot after stepping on a branch a few days before and it is known that he will soon die in agony. Everyone is hungry and there is nothing to eat, so you prepare hunting and foraging parties and hope that you will find food before starving to death. That's the default state.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]