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I think it's not a coincidence that, over in the metaverse threads, there is discussion about creating intentional artificial scarcity in a world of natural abu
by jlokier 5y ago
I think it's not a coincidence that, over in the metaverse threads, there is discussion about creating intentional artificial scarcity in a world of natural abundance, as the basis for a new economy.
Even when there's plenty to go around for everyone, it seems we'd rather not let that happen.
- dnautics 5y agoIsn't it the other way? We're creating artificial abundance (requiring the currency to unboundedly grow) in a system with real and artificial limits (construction capacity, labor capacity, permitting and zoning drag) that forces people into either doing something individually wise but socially stupid (turning a need into an investment) or fall off the devaluation treadmill
- pydry 5y agoThis is essentially one of the same points Marx made. Capitalism is often really good at dealing with shortages but it will also perpetually create its own unless kept in check by countervailing forces.
- Miner49er 5y agoDidn't Marx think that Capitalism would end once we were near or at post-scarcity? Seems we'll never be there, because capital will just find ways to artificially create scarcity.
- lottin 5y agoNo, he though capitalism would end because of its "internal contradictions" which, in his opinion, led to an ever growing divergence between the haves and have-nots. In a post-scarcity world capitalism would make no sense, because there would be no need for an economy, since everything would be infinitely abundant.
- jfengel 5y agoMarx would certainly be surprised that we have so much more abundance than he dreamed of, while ordinary people still say "the economy must continue to grow". He expected people to demand basic food and shelter in such a society. He would look at our weak but non-zero safety nets and say, "You can do so much better," and note that if they didn't exist then Capitalism would have ended a long time ago. So I don't know what he'd predict from here. We're in a semi stable state, looking at a potentially more stable one but very afraid of it and even more afraid of upsetting the status quo. But if things got worse -- and they keep threatening to -- that would turn the semi stable state real unstable real quick.
- pydry 5y agoI doubt he'd be too surprised at the state of modern day America. He might be surprised at the extraordinary high level of false consciousness given the relative freedom of access to information (belief in the American dream, etc.) but he likely wouldnt look at it and think "there's a country on the verge of communism" just because of the high level of material wealth.
- RNCTX 5y agoI don't think he'd be surprised at America either. He wrote about America at some length, and accurately pointed out that America's ties to Europe would only last as long as there was free land west of the original colonies to take and give to its growing population, after which America would develop a factory working proletariat just as Europe had after the decline of feudalism, and then be far less welcoming of European immigrants as it sought to preserve the wealth the existing residents had built for themselves. In that respect his theory was proven true. Capital, not any sort of continental or feudal allegiance or concern for the future, would be the driving ideology. "Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy. Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all things – the world upside-down – the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities." -- Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "The Power of Money"
- amelius 5y agoBut the law is always too slow, so capital owners have the advantage. Perhaps this should be the other way around.
- WhisperingShiba 5y agoI get what you mean, but I think this might be too prone to error.
- amelius 5y agoThere will always be error. The erring will just be in the other direction.
- throwawaybbq1 5y agoI think this thread is correct on the artificial nature of the scarcity. I had an epiphany that this is what we are doing in the stock market (via tax codes and retirement plans), and something similar in the housing market via credit schemes (typically govt backed). In the stock market, there is an evergrowing pool of securities getting sequestered away into pension schemes and RRSPs. You can change what security you are in, but people/funds seldom get out of the market. When you cash our of your retirement (before actual retirement), there are huge tax disincentives to do so. For housing, people generally have a progression as they move to larger houses (as they have more kids, or kids get older). If all houses continue to get expensive, you just always stay in the housing market (well, until you go to a retirement home or expire). Both seem to remind me of the classic definition of a ponzi scheme, except housing is a basic necessity. We are basically saying there is an evergrowing mountain of wealth - you just can't spend it till you retire.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoInteresting point! And in fact, since you can pass along most assets to your heirs without taxation, even your death won’t prompt a sale.
- peytoncasper 5y agoFundamentally, if you boil any growth based asset down its going to be a “ponzi scheme” in architecture but not in intent. Growth is natural, given that there are more people born, more money is printed and the economy expands to add jobs to meet those needs. So yes, if tomorrow, no one else was born, a lot of systems would fall apart. Because growth would stall and liquidity would soon disappear as the last sellers find the last buyers. There are disincentives around divesting your retirement funds because at that age you probably won’t have the physical capacity to work anymore. So encouraging investment into a vehicle that has shown generational abilities to generate growth and returns and beat deflationary effects seems only logical. The government creates this behavior by agreeing not to tax some income if you invest in your retirement. However, this isn’t scarcity, stock markets are probably one of the most liquid assets on the planet besides literal cash. If an economy is inherently inflationary then asset prices will literally always have to increase. In my mind this is less about house prices rising and more about the centralization of well paying jobs within specific economic hubs. There are millions of homes and hundreds of thousands of acres of lands that are practically worthless, but aren’t actually viable candidates because until recently you had to commute and the land lacked investment into the necessary infrastructure to support those jobs. I’ve seen some arguments that no one wants live in small towns. And I don’t necessarily disagree, because the centralization of talent, competition and investment is often what makes large cities attractive. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t recognize the fundamental aspect that all large cities were once small towns. If companies or individuals aren’t willing to take a risk and move to underdeveloped areas, then it seems only logical that scarcity will be created in centralized pockets and prices will be driven up doesn’t it? Lastly, this idea that an object that for most people will be the most expensive purchase they ever make should be a static or deflationary asset is not something I understand. Home ownership isn’t cheap between maintenance and property taxes. Ideally those costs should be recouped somehow.
- beefield 5y agoIt's not that new idea. See Intellectual Property in its many forms. For some reason, when we try to figure how to manage abundant resources, only solutions we come up with are to make them artificially scarce. Which makes really little sense. But then, economics is a "science"[1] of scarcity, not abundance, and somehow economics is the main science used to solve how the society should be arranged. [1] I have a strong feeling that economists have missed the memo from Popper regarding what is modern science. There seems to be quite a lot of unfalsifiable assumptions lying at the bottom of economics, starting from the utility maximizing agent.
- tzs 5y ago> For some reason, when we try to figure how to manage abundant resources, only solutions we come up with are to make them artificially scarce. There are other solutions that have been seriously considered or proposed. For example in copyright one idea is to allow things to be freely copied and have some rich entity pay creators. This was how it was done a long time ago, with the rich entity usually being a king or a ruler of a city-state or a wealthy lord. Another idea is to pay creators via some tax on something that is roughly correlated with copying. An example would be a tax on blank tape. A problem with these approaches is deciding who gets paid and how much. In the tax approach not many people seem to like the idea of the government deciding which artists should get funded. The usually way to avoid that is to have it based on how many copies are made. But then you need some way to get that data. You could do it via some kind of polling. That was probably the only way back when copying was mostly physical, such as copying a record to a cassette tape. Nowadays when it is mostly digital you could do it by server side monitoring on download/streaming sites and/or device-side monitoring of playback--but then you are getting into areas that will worry many people for being an opening to more general surveillance. For ordinary physical goods we don't have these problems--a free market (even the poor approximation of a free market that we have) works pretty good for determining what to produce. But that only works if the goods have certain properties, which copies of art do not have. (If anyone wants more information, look into excludable vs non-excludable goods and rival vs non-rival goods). The approach of current copyright law is to legally give copies those properties so that the market can determine what art gets produced and how much the artist makes. This is a tradeoff, because it does mean that the consumer pays more for copies than the "correct" free market price (marginal cost of copying). The other approaches mentioned above tend to make the tradeoff the other way--the consumer pays marginal cost of copying, but less art gets produced than consumers would like. There's not really any way to avoid having either underproduction or underutilization when it comes to easily copyable art. Once you realize this things make a lot more sense.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoLand, near where the jobs are, isn't in abundance. And were it, resources like freeways will constrain unbounded growth with horrendous traffic patterns. I don't think anyone is intentionally putting their finger on the scale when it comes to real-estate prices. Maybe, and this is not from any data I can pull up, it is those with deep pockets buying additional properties as investments/rentals. And now we have huge corporations flipping, building rental homes on a massive scale.... The only solution I can see is to tax the living hell out of 3rd, 4th properties (etc.).
- jimmybot 5y agoLocal NIMBYs and landlords love constrained supply. They leverage zoning codes, claims about aesthetics, parking and traffic concerns, and worst of all affordability percentages to constrain local supply so that their home values and rental incomes will rise. This happens with so much political strategem that the only obvious thing about it is how vested and deliberate it is.
- User23 5y agoTijuana doesn't have those problems, and yet for some reason people that can afford it prefer to live in San Diego. Maybe ultra high density isn't that great? It certainly isn't if you want to swim anywhere near the Tijuana river.
- closeparen 5y agoOnly one of those places has rule of law.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoYet when we look at ultra dense cities around the world where parking or traffic aren’t concerns (because of good public transit), the housing prices become even more crazy.
- tata71 5y ago> Land, near where the jobs are, isn't in abundance. Sure it is, because the jobs are everywhere internet is. Semi-rural and rural property values should roughly follow fiber and Starlink rollouts.
- chiefalchemist 5y agoWe'd rather not? Or "they'd" rather not? They as in the status quo, their power, and their tools (e.g., waving the carrot as the rats run on the wheel?). There's plenty of we who want to see change. But not enough of us. There are still too many who buy into the web of the narrative spun by The They.
- _alex_ 5y agoPeople don’t want to pay for things that are infinite. People who make digital things want to be paid. You end up either with drm or tokenization.
- LightG 5y agoThe entire early stage internet raises its hands and says "w'oah there!!! we could have been paid for all that?"
- menage 5y agoMost of them were CS researchers funded by DARPA, so they were paid for it.
- LightG 5y agoNah, I'm talking about the rest of us dossers ... who spent years creating on the early internet for absolutely no reward. Creativity was its own reward. Just need the AI robots to feed us and we can stop worrying about the monetisation of digital assets.
- sabhiram 5y agoThis is, and has been the cost for early-adoption in practically all successful inventions / products. The reward was the fact that something you did had permanence in a way that allowed others who knew how to see or interact with "it". Now anyone with a phone can create and consume (and acknowledge). Taking that for granted was the 2010s. I suspect the 2020s will be about getting paid for it - and what better fuel than a COVID imposed lockdown to stoke the young blaze? I'm waiting for those robots too!
- annoyingnoob 5y agoGreedy and already rich people at Facebook would rather not let that happen. There are plenty of 'we' that do not like or want artificial scarcity. When my kids want Robux I try to explain that they are paying real money to see their screen light up in a certain way and nothing more.
- sjwalter 5y agoDoes your Robux argument extend to e.g. digital movie rentals? App purchases? All software and media purchases can boil reductively down to "paying money to see a screen light up in a certain way".
- annoyingnoob 5y agoHow we define value is a great question. To your point I'm, and my kids, the answer varies. I guess personally I do not value buying the latest outfit for my avatar in the same way I value Excel.
- mbrodersen 5y agoSo buying a book is paying real money to watch black ink on paper? I don’t think so.
- verisimi 5y agoWhy use 'we'? What is it that you did? If you have Blackrock and Vanguard buying up 20% of homes in the US at above market rates, that would do it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- closeparen 5y agoOwning houses is a ridiculously profitable opportunity. Ridiculously profitable opportunities don’t get left lying around. That’s rather the point of capitalism. What “you” did is oppose higher-density construction, which means the homes that exist today are the homes everyone in the future has to compete for, if they want to live near population centers. NIMBYism makes the profit that attracts the sharks.
- pgwhalen 5y agoMy understanding is these types of investors own less than 1% of homes in the US. Is that not true?
- larsiusprime 5y agoFun fact: whenever you see digital assets that are sufficiently "land-like", you tend to see digital land/housing crises! https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/digital-real-estate-and-the-digital-housing-crisis https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/digital-real-estate-a...
- dragonwriter 5y ago> over in the metaverse threads, there is discussion about creating intentional artificial scarcity in a world of natural abundance, as the basis for a new economy. Which isn't new (neither is mistaking a clear case of natural scarcity in an unfamiliar structure for natural abundance; the metaverse is limited by all the traditional dimensions of computing/information capacity—energy, processing capacity, storage, etc.—and it won't take long, if it actually exists in a usable form, before exploiting the superficial abundance results into usage running headlong into the real natural scarcity; artificial scarcity will be superfluous.)
- reddog 5y ago> creating intentional artificial scarcity in a world of natural abundance Which is essentially what Bitcoin does. There is a natural abundance of numbers but crytocurrency protocols make some more scarce/valuable than others.
- novok 5y agoSame as any other system of fiat money or company stock.
- nly 5y agoNeither of those are scarce, or artificially so for that matter. 1. A company can create more shares but the number of shares has nothing to do with the value of your holdings. The shares are not scarce, but the supply is controlled by the company in response to its need raise capital. It's not arbitrary. 2. Fiat money, by definition, has value by decree. It serves to provide liquidity to loans and other obligations within the economy. The amount of money relative to demand for payments, loans etc. in the economy determines how much a $ is worth. It's not scarce or printed willy-nilly, but rather to keep the economy going and maintain relatively stable prices. Again not arbitrary and therefore not artificially scarce. Bitcoin is scarce because the number in existence is arbitrary/predetermined and doesn't change in response to demand, hence its extreme volatility.
- downrightmike 5y agowealth prefers a zero sum game, in order to gain something, you have to take it from someone else. But we've been in a positive sum society since industrialization where each person can add to our collective innovation. Sadly keeping people in squalor keeps wealth happy, where we could be so much farther ahead if people weren't forced into poverty. I say it that way, but we only see a huge growth in everything when more people add to the pot. Like stone soup.
- DennisP 5y agoSomeday we'll invent cheap 3D printers that make food from dirt, and then half of humanity will starve to death.
- tylermauthe 5y agoAs others have said, our entire way of thinking is predicated on lack. Or, as it was said by The Watchowski Sisters in The Matrix: > Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.
- Forgeties79 5y agoThis is literally how “difficulty” in crypto mining works too, and it’s why PoW systems are so asinine/inefficient.
- RustyConsul 5y agothere are multiple ways to achieve consensus, but yes POW sucks.