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> In ancient times, "post-scarcity society" meant a world with enough food for everybody. I buy 50-pound bags of rice for $50. If I ate nothing but rice it woul

> In ancient times, "post-scarcity society" meant a world with enough food for everybody. I buy 50-pound bags of rice for $50. If I ate nothing but rice it would cost me $1,500 per year. The US GDP Per Capita is $64,000. By the standards of medieval Japan, we have 40× the economic production of what people need.

coldacid 5y ago
And that's with the wrong math, considering a pound of rice at 600 calories instead of the actual 1600 calories. Which means $450 instead of $1500, which means over 140× the economic production of medieval Japan.
dane-pgp 5y ago
Yet if you proposed introducing a $200 per month Universal Basic Income, people would call you a political extremist. Unfortunately, per capita GDP isn't a good measure of whether society is post-scarcity, just whether most people in the society can work hard enough to overcome the scarcity of resources. > If we flattened wealth inequality without destroying the economy AND we cured all diseases AND we invented cold fusion AND we established world peace AND population growth stayed low then we still wouldn't be producing enough value to exhaust interpersonal competition ... Even the citizens of Kardashev Type III civilization can't all date Emma Stone and/or Keanu Reeves at the same time. There might still be competition over real estate and relationships, but I don't think those are good measures of what "post-scarcity" means. Real estate is, in a sense, a commodity that existed before humans and which cannot be manufactured, so it might end up needing a different system of ownership/taxation to other forms of wealth. Moreover, relationships are completely orthogonal to the idea of resource scarcity, as people are not property and we shouldn't judge our economic systems based on whether celebrities fall in love with everyone who is attracted to them.
Proven 5y ago
What value was that copying supposed to add? The post itself doesn't make any useful points apart from historical references. > The fact there is enough to go around doesn't mean it actually goes around. Why should it go around? "Stuff" doesn't belong to everyone, it belongs to individuals. The fact that one person has enough to feed 9 doesn't absolve them from having to earn a living. And the post title contradicts the author's message at the very end. There's no universal food scarcity, but there is scarcity of most other things (as expected by everyone except socialists and communists). Yes, some people still starve, but that's thanks to governments which won't let free market work for their people, not because of low productivity or undeveloped economy.

coldacid 5y ago

And that's with the wrong math, considering a pound of rice at 600 calories instead of the actual 1600 calories. Which means $450 instead of $1500, which means over 140× the economic production of medieval Japan.

dane-pgp 5y ago

Yet if you proposed introducing a $200 per month Universal Basic Income, people would call you a political extremist. Unfortunately, per capita GDP isn't a good measure of whether society is post-scarcity, just whether most people in the society can work hard enough to overcome the scarcity of resources. > If we flattened wealth inequality without destroying the economy AND we cured all diseases AND we invented cold fusion AND we established world peace AND population growth stayed low then we still wouldn't be producing enough value to exhaust interpersonal competition ... Even the citizens of Kardashev Type III civilization can't all date Emma Stone and/or Keanu Reeves at the same time. There might still be competition over real estate and relationships, but I don't think those are good measures of what "post-scarcity" means. Real estate is, in a sense, a commodity that existed before humans and which cannot be manufactured, so it might end up needing a different system of ownership/taxation to other forms of wealth. Moreover, relationships are completely orthogonal to the idea of resource scarcity, as people are not property and we shouldn't judge our economic systems based on whether celebrities fall in love with everyone who is attracted to them.

Proven 5y ago

What value was that copying supposed to add? The post itself doesn't make any useful points apart from historical references. > The fact there is enough to go around doesn't mean it actually goes around. Why should it go around? "Stuff" doesn't belong to everyone, it belongs to individuals. The fact that one person has enough to feed 9 doesn't absolve them from having to earn a living. And the post title contradicts the author's message at the very end. There's no universal food scarcity, but there is scarcity of most other things (as expected by everyone except socialists and communists). Yes, some people still starve, but that's thanks to governments which won't let free market work for their people, not because of low productivity or undeveloped economy.