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The only rational thing to is to work towards a post scarcity society. There will always be inequality of talent , of effort, what have you. If you have the b

by imgabe 4y ago

The only rational thing to is to work towards a post scarcity society. There will always be inequality of talent , of effort, what have you. If you have the benefit of this inequality, you should use it to ensure the availability of life’s necessities so that anyone else with a similar inequality can provide the maximum benefit regardless of the circumstances they’re born into.

feet 4y ago
We already have that, the scarcity is fake. Induced to increase profits, that's why the oil/gas companies refuse to increase production. They've literally been saying this recently on earnings calls. They could drill more but they won't, the administration has been granting more permits than the last. They could refine more of what they have but they refuse. Again, all clear as day stated in their earnings calls This is just one prominent example, another would be the huge amount of food waste produced by grocers and other retailers.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Oil companies know EVs are coming. Investing in oil wells - which won't start producing for several years is a stupid investment that probably will not pay off. The only sane investment in oil is to milk previous investments all the way to zero. Of course there are non gasoline car uses for oil, and those are worth investing in, but there is much less of them.
- pc86 4y ago
  I haven't listened to the earnings calls but I seriously doubt the content boils down to "we could drill more and make more money, but... meh"
  - feet 4y ago
    Huh? No they make more money by restricting supply, that's what I'm saying. Not drilling and not refining let's them jack up prices while blaming inflation
    - pc86 4y ago
      This doesn't make sense at the micro level though. You have (let's say) half a dozen oil companies all producing roughly x BBL for $y/BBL. What's to stop Company A, who has the means to do so already, from simply producing 1.1x BBL and keeping its price at $y? At a macro level yes, if everyone increases supply 10% you'll see some price fluctuation, but that doesn't necessarily hold for an individual, self-interested company. Hell, that company could produce 10% more but sell it for $y-0.05 and presumably make more money selling for cheaper.
      - feet 4y ago
        Have you listened to the earnings calls?
- osigurdson 4y ago
  Two years ago, oil was at $0. If the war in Ukraine ends, oil will likely go back to $40 or less. Larger projects take years to develop and long term prospects are dismal since we won't be using oil anymore. Can you really blame companies for being cautious?
  - feet 4y ago
    They have essentially tripled their profits at the expense of everyone else This is what unbridled capitalism and profit seeking gets us
    - ericd 4y ago
      It’s not easy/quick to spin up production. The demand is somewhat inelastic, and they sell it to the highest bidder. Not sure what you want?
      - feet 4y ago
        Its purposeful, go listen to the calls They have production capacity already and they refuse to use it
    - osigurdson 4y ago
      Were you petitioning for government bailouts for the oil industry when oil was at $0?
- kortilla 4y ago
  This explanation is dumb. If the oil investments looked like they would pay off, companies would be incentivized to expand way more and capture more profit. You’re suggesting they are refusing to increase production out of greed, but the greedy move would be to expand drilling and refinement to capture more of the high margin volume. Preventing this defector behavior requires an explicit cartel (see OPEC), which is not legal in the US. So your explanation for why oil companies don’t increase production is lacking.
  - feet 4y ago
    Restricting the supply allows them to keep the margins high, increasing supply would mean that price would drop How does your stance make sense at all? In what market does increasing supply not lead to decreasing prices? Of course they're going to keep restricting supply to keep prices high while they can. What I don't understand is why you're here defending them without listening to the earning calls where they literally state what I am telling you
    - kortilla 4y ago
      > How does your stance make sense at all? In what market does increasing supply not lead to decreasing prices? It’s super basic economics unless you control 100% of the market. An oil provider that doubles their output from 1% of the market to 2% will only put a slight downward pressure on the price while doubling their high margin income. The winning move is always to increase production. > without listening to the earning calls where they literally state what I am telling you I’m telling you that you don’t understand what they are saying. If they are unwilling to build it’s because the future of the oil is uncertain, not because the margins are high right now. The margins being high is a great reason to expand drilling even into hard to extract areas.
      - feet 4y ago
        You're misunderstanding what I'm saying. They don't need to build anything They already have capacity, they have the distilleries and holding already built but sitting entirely unused, they just aren't spinning it up to purposely restrict supply and keep profit margins high. That's what we get with an oligarchy, the companies work together to control production and price.
cs137 4y ago
Not only will there be inequality of talent (relative to whatever talents are valued at a given time, because that itself is in flux) but simulations like this show that random inequality is not an aberration, but inevitable. The more precisely realistic one is his geometric-variance model, in which some end up in massive debt while others end up very rich--a permanent division of society into landlords/bosses and peons. In theory, the state is supposed to prevent this through taxation and policy, but what we observe in capitalist countries is that the wealthy inevitably corrupt the state that is supposed to constrain them. The US is already at third-world levels of corruption and inequality, and the EU is only 20 years or so behind on this neoliberal roller coaster to nowhere. Capitalism promises equilibrium, but it diverges. The people in charge will always have the power and resources to see to it that (a) they stay in charge, and (b) the gains from economic growth go solely to them.
- vsareto 4y ago
  >but simulations like this show that random inequality is not an aberration, but inevitable. At least some of this wealth is completely inherited (maybe even most of it). There's not a good mechanism to determine how much someone should inherit, but I bet wealth being limited to the lifetime of one person would certainly change the model and make it not-so-inevitable.
- caracustard 4y ago
  Talent is inherently "inequal" as you can't put any sort of a restriction or a cap on the skills or abilities of an individual so i'm not sure what you're trying to say there. The results of the "precisely realistic" model (according to you) are not taking into account the self-employed members of society but are also attempting to create an artificial divide in the aformentioned society by labeling them ("peons"? seriously?). So much for your seemingly pro-equality message. What exactly is the state supposed to prevent? Employment of individuals by other individuals? The ability of an individual to OWN property rather than being at the states mercy? Free trade between members of society? "...the wealthy inevitably corrupt the state..." golly gee, so that's why all of those non-capitalist, anti-wealth utopias of the past are...gone? "The US is already at third-world levels of corruption and inequality..." except the American perception of corruption and inequality is "i earn 70k per year, i drive Hyundai, my boss earns 200k, he drives Mercedes, very bad!!!" which is different from say earning 3k per year, not having any access to quality financing services (which would allow you to start your OWN business) and on top of that not having a vehicle at all (which in many countries, especially the post-antiwealth-utopias is still a pipe dream for most). No it doesn't. Capitalism promises and provides the ability to convert your abilities, wealth and products of abilities/wealth/wealth+abilities as an individual or a group of individuals into monetary units which are then used as "fuel" for facilitating trade/services in the society. Also i find it ironic that your last sentence perfectly describes every communist state of the past: they stay in charge (one party system, transfer of power between the Party members), the gains from economic growth go solely to them (the state is the only employer and services/products provider and as a result the Party becomes the main benefactor from everyones labour while the people recieve mere scraps without any way establish any business of their own) and how it also ignores that regardless of the system in use taxation is still a thing with the only difference being the percentage of taxes taken. Perhaps it's time to stop trying to make false equialences of hierarchy and capitalism, considering that the latter allows you to minimize your dependency on any sort of a hierarchy?
marginalia_nu 4y ago
> If you have the benefit of this inequality, you should use it to ensure the availability of life’s necessities so that any else with a similar inequality can provide the maximum benefit regardless of the circumstances they’re born into. Well let me be the devil's advocate here and ask why.
- imgabe 4y ago
  - shuger 4y ago
    Entropy cannot be opposed. That's fundamental law of physics.
    - fny 4y ago
      Sure it can, I decrease entropy locally and reallocate it somewhere else. Space is huge and it will take a long time to approach the limit.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      In the long term. But in the short term there are plenty of loopholes, according to those laws of physics.
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      You literally opposed entropy by writing this comment.
    - dsr_ 4y ago
      Entropy wins universally. Locally, lots of processes are anti-entropic. Look at a leaf.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    > To continue the proliferation of humanity and life in general throughout the universe. To oppose entropy. Right, but I'm a human being, I am not humanity itself. Humanity is just an idea, it has no agency or conscience. It cannot suffer, it does not want. As a human being, my primary responsibility is toward myself, to make myself happy, and to arrange the world according to the principles that resonate with my soul. Toiling to make other people happy at my own expense doesn't make me happy. Even if that was the way it worked, surely the best action would be to line up to work at an Amazon warehouse and bask in opportunity to contribute to the incandescence of Jeff Bezos' prosperity. > If that is not appealing to you, you should probably off yourself right now. I don't really see how that follows. I'll die regardless whether it's by my own hands right now or at the hands of external circumstance some years later.
whiddershins 4y ago
The United States closely resembles what someone 100 years ago would have termed a post scarcity society. The potential for consumption is infinite.
- random314 4y ago
  If you ignore health care, student loans and housing, sure.
  - rabite 4y ago
    > health care Most heart disease and cancer, the two biggest cost centers, are somehow self-inflicted. People choose to eat badly and take drugs. In fact, moving away from a post-scarcity society would be the best at mitigating healthcare costs. If people were too poor to afford anything but tiny servings of grain and produce, they would have less health problems and live longer. > student loans This is also self-inflicted. People do not need to get the vast majority of degrees that they have. Most people are attending college to get the college experience. They want to party and waste time because stacking up loans is easier to them than actually working a job they are fit for. The degrees they are choosing to get are not serving to increase their employability, and burdening society's balance sheets for the debt they never pay off. We should start aggressively denying "education" to those that cannot be educated. > housing Housing is extremely cheap. It is not extremely cheap in the Bay Area, but if we forced the chronically homeless, criminals, and indigents on section 8 to move to affordable locales we would not only no longer have a housing crisis, but we could restore the cities that have been lost to their degeneracy.
    - vsareto 4y ago
      >If people were too poor to afford anything but tiny servings of grain and produce, they would have less health problems and live longer. One small disaster that disrupts the food supply chain and they'll quickly be starving and turn to violence. >We should start aggressively denying "education" to those that cannot be educated. I don't even know how you would begin to definitively determine that for the lifetime of a person, much less denying something which is handed out freely in other countries. >but we could restore the cities that have been lost to their degeneracy. Income inequality is vastly more responsible for city degeneration than the homeless.
osigurdson 4y ago
Technology and innovation are also much more interesting that squabbling about government policy and income redistribution schemes. Let's find ways to drive costs to zero so everyone on the planet (to the greatest extent possible) can live like today's billionaires without causing any damage to the environment.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  The interesting thing is that we were effectively there 50 years ago: were (the rich West) were living like the kings of yesteryear (or even better in many cases). But we didn't exactly stop wanting stuff and further improvements, hedonic adaptation pretty much guarantees that no matter what our position we will always want more so how this could happen without damage to the environment is a mystery to me. The environment doesn't vote, it doesn't lobby and every institution that claims to do that is first and foremost in the business of keeping itself alive.
  - kbutler 4y ago
    50 years ago, half the population of the world lived in extreme poverty. This percentage and the total number of people in extreme poverty have made extreme declines since that time. https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty This is one of the great achievements of humankind, and while we have much more to do, it's good to recognize the progress we've made. And while I'm also skeptical about the amount of resources organizations use to maintain themselves, any organization or organism or community that does not have a primary goal of keeping itself alive will in short order cease to exist. If you think your organization has a long-term beneficial purpose, you better design it to be self-sustaining, and with a large margin of safety.
  - carapace 4y ago
    Vaclav Smil says something like "Would it be so bad, going back to a 1960's level of energy consumption?" in the context of energy usages (and therefore roughly CO2 emissions) of Western and particularly American lifestyles. (I'm paraphrasing: Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk ) > hedonic adaptation pretty much guarantees that no matter what our position we will always want more There's an Indian holy man, now deceased, who said we need to learn to practice "ceiling on desires". It may be that only the expression of our higher values can clear this logjam? > so how this could happen without damage to the environment One thought that occurs to me is if we could create a kind of split-level economy. There would be a real-world ecologically-informed economy that met basic needs as efficiently as possible. On top of that substrate we would have a computer-mediated virtual economy where there were no (or very few) effective limits on hedonistic adaptation (or status-symbol seeking, or whatever). It seems like we're seeing something like that emerge "naturally" anyway, eh? NFT & "crypto", in-game purchases, whatever FB's metaverse becomes, etc. Eventually, people might submit voluntarily to enter "the Matrix": your physical body kept perfectly safe, and the only limits are your imagination? Not my cup of tea, but not insane on the face of it, eh?
photochemsyn 4y ago
'Post-scarcity' on a finite planet with a growing population? The only way out of that is to go off-planet and that's not plausible anytime soon at any scale. The ultimate scarcity is the scarcity of arable land and raw materials to host a human population. Some of the major conflicts over the 20th century in this area have revolved around land reform and land ownership, whether it was breaking up feudal estates and redistributing land to peasants (Russian Revolution) or expansionist ideologies (Germany's 'Push to the East' for 'lebensraum', aka 'settler colonialism' which was also a feature in America's 'Manifest Destiny'). The United States is again setting the stage for such conflicts with the majority of young people being priced out of the housing market. Homeownership rates shot up after FDR's New Deal reforms, and there was a brief peak in 2004 before a sustained collapse that showed some signs of recent recovery: https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-united-states/ https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-united-state... It's fairly skewed by age and this increasing (probably high student loan debt being a major factor), i.e. homeowners are getting older and fewer young people are buying homes: https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/homeownership-rate-by-age https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/homeownership-rate-...
- fartcannon 4y ago
  Off-planet is a great goal. Also educated, healthy populations tend to have fewer kids. This isn't an overnight fix, but a long term goal. So the first move is to learn to share like the toddlers we are. It's not easy and we dont have a solution yet. Greed is fundamental.
  - danuker 4y ago
    > is to learn to share like the toddlers we are As in, taxation + inflation is not enough? We spend 27.9% through government (a "shared resource"). How much more should we disincentivize work? https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.XPN.TOTL.GD.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.XPN.TOTL.GD.ZS
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      Ah, well, as a non expert in the subject, the way you phrased the question made me think, 'as much as we can'. Probably makes sense to work on making it so that no one has to toil just to starve at the extreme end. And probably good to make it so people who haven't accidentally found wealth can try out ideas. I think it'll have to be phases. The first goal would be fewer musks/besos/gates etc and spread that wealth around. Eventually maybe we succeed in automating most of the menial work and let humans collective imagination drive the future. Greed though. That's our races great filter.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
snowwrestler 4y ago
We live in a post-scarcity society now. We’ve just invented artificial scarcity to keep our current economic and social structures going. For example there is plenty of food to feed the entire world, but some people still go hungry. There is plenty of land and buildings to house everyone, but some people are still homeless. There is far more than enough clothes, but some people still have to wear rags. I don’t have the answer. But I know there’s more to it than technology and innovation. Because those have already given us what we need, in many cases. But we have so far failed to leverage them fully.
- chii 4y ago
  > We live in a post-scarcity society now. people say that, but it's not true. We barely have enough to launch stuff into space. There's plenty of limits of resources, and are hard to obtain (e.g., rare earth metals, fossil fuels, etc). Even a small shortage of fertilizers will reduce food production such that some people are looking at starvation - of course, not in the western countries, but that's not what a post-scarcity society looks like.
  - geysersam 4y ago
    Not being able to send things into space is not scarcity. Food, education, transportation, housing, healthcare, life's necessities.
    - chii 4y ago
      if you were able to send things into space (which should be easy to achieve for such a society), then it's evidence we're in a post-scarcity society. By the lack of being able to send much to space, we must not currently be in a post-scarcity society, because space exploration is such a good and exciting thing to do, you'd expect that it's one of the first things to get accomplished by a post-scarcity society.
      - soraki_soladead 4y ago
        That isn't what post-scarcity means. It doesn't mean there is zero scarcity. It means basic needs are easily met: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy You're making claims about how space things align with post-scarcity that doesn't match up with the accepted meaning. Even still, we _can_ send stuff into space, now cheaper than ever. What is the threshold for "send much to space"? Any person can order up a rocket payload on Amazon.space and have it placed in orbit? That doesn't sound good even if it were free. Especially if it were free... > space exploration is such a good and exciting thing to do, you'd expect that it's one of the first things to get accomplished by a post-scarcity society Why?
mtkhaos 4y ago
Inside that society and with the direction of our technologies. Is not only post scarcity, but post talent and ability. As soon the individuals ability to compete will be eclipsed by AI. The argument should be to form a society that embraces that fact. But there are certain inefficiencies within out late stage that may stop this an equitable form from happening. As well as be catastrophic if not handled as infrastructure. As the question is what game are we using these AI tools to solve? Profit? Beware of offering stock in market dominated by AI actors that can willingly create disinformation in seconds to pump or short your companies stock arbitrarily. Etc...
xwdv 4y ago
First we have to build a society where energy is cheap and abundant. Then everything else will follow.
thegrimmest 4y ago
That depends on whether you are a collectivist or an individualist. Selflessness is not a default, psychologically speaking. It's not very well selected for, in evolutionary terms. Why should we optimize for collective availability of life's necessities? I'd rather optimize for my own outcomes, and judging by their behaviour most other people feel similarly. Forcing someone into a collective against their will is indistinguishable from a degree of slavery. This by far the greater sin for those who believe in the primacy of individual will and choice.
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
Strictly speaking, there will always be scarcity, since some things are inherently scarce. Some examples: front row tickets to a show, beachfront property, Friday dinner reservations at a popular restaurant, original pieces of art from a famous artist, sessions with a renowned therapist.
frankfrankfrank 4y ago
Post scarcity society? I'm just going to say it because there is no point in beating around the bush. You are not living in reality. In reality the laws of physics dictate that such juvenile marvel universe type fantasy of a "post scarcity society" simply cannot exist in general. Even if you wanted to create it on a limited/bounded small scale, basically everything people with this type of mindset are doing and supporting, directly sabotages any ability to ever achieve it. For example; you cannot have "post scarcity", while increasing the demand on resources through immigration on a local level or in general through exponential population growth like in basically all non-European regions of the world. In broad strokes, Europe and especially the USA were not only "post scarcity societies" up until about 1970, but negative scarcity societies, producing excess of their needs and spreading that across the globe altruistically. It is precisely that negative scarcity state that elevated every other people of the world for so long; be it by feeding, sharing technology and knowledge, providing medical care, education, etc. to the whole of the non-European world. Essentially nothing we currently benefit from and enjoy in the whole world is not the product of Europeans that had produced a post and negative scarcity world by various means. Look around you, not a single thing you use and benefits you was not produced by some Europeans. That process has been poisoned, the micro-dosing of poison starting in about the turn of the 19th century in the USA, as groups started sabotaging, betraying, exploiting, usurping, and undermining the system of negative scarcity. I think there is some confusion that people are suffering from. We are not moving towards less scarcity, we are moving directly towards increased scarcity; largely precisely because of the confusion and distorted perspective you are looking at things from. You confused the short time scale view of the leveling curve as positive, when in reality it was becoming ever more negative and we are now approaching or at the turning point/apex. To illustrate; the whole world's population in 1850 was the same as is projected for Nigeria lone by 2100 that has a supposed population of 218M, which is currently increasing at about 9M per year, or about 20 more people if it took you 1 minute to read this far. And that's just one country of Africa, who's overall population is expected to increase by 1.5 Billion by 2050, or about 100 people by the time you read this far. Tonight, if you watch a movie for roughly 90 minutes, by the end of it, there will be 9,000 more people in Africa than when you started the movie. Is the world, let alone Africa producing just alone enough food to feed 9,000 more people all their life by the end of the movie you watched? I don't know, but it seems unlikely. Let's ask the billionaires who want you to eat bugs so they can continue eating beef. Ironically, that is largely due to the "post scarcity society" that the USA and Europe had produced, largely due to the generosity and incentives destroying principle of "post scarcity society", aka utopian fantasy. A grain silo is also a "post scarcity society" for mice, until the population explodes, they ruin the grain, and the population collapses amidst either a massive die off or a surge of mice that scour the countryside and spread the devastation. Scarcity is generally a good thing, it forces prioritization and self-regulation. We are today seeing the effects of "post scarcity" in rather real terms as inflation eats through our economies due to "post scarcity" caused by currency printing that is deflection of realty at best and fraud at worst. The laws of physics remain in effect all throughout though.

by imgabe 4y ago

feet 4y ago

We already have that, the scarcity is fake. Induced to increase profits, that's why the oil/gas companies refuse to increase production. They've literally been saying this recently on earnings calls. They could drill more but they won't, the administration has been granting more permits than the last. They could refine more of what they have but they refuse. Again, all clear as day stated in their earnings calls This is just one prominent example, another would be the huge amount of food waste produced by grocers and other retailers.

bluGill 4y ago
Oil companies know EVs are coming. Investing in oil wells - which won't start producing for several years is a stupid investment that probably will not pay off. The only sane investment in oil is to milk previous investments all the way to zero. Of course there are non gasoline car uses for oil, and those are worth investing in, but there is much less of them.
pc86 4y ago
I haven't listened to the earnings calls but I seriously doubt the content boils down to "we could drill more and make more money, but... meh"
- feet 4y ago
  Huh? No they make more money by restricting supply, that's what I'm saying. Not drilling and not refining let's them jack up prices while blaming inflation
  - pc86 4y ago
    This doesn't make sense at the micro level though. You have (let's say) half a dozen oil companies all producing roughly x BBL for $y/BBL. What's to stop Company A, who has the means to do so already, from simply producing 1.1x BBL and keeping its price at $y? At a macro level yes, if everyone increases supply 10% you'll see some price fluctuation, but that doesn't necessarily hold for an individual, self-interested company. Hell, that company could produce 10% more but sell it for $y-0.05 and presumably make more money selling for cheaper.
    - feet 4y ago
      Have you listened to the earnings calls?
osigurdson 4y ago
Two years ago, oil was at $0. If the war in Ukraine ends, oil will likely go back to $40 or less. Larger projects take years to develop and long term prospects are dismal since we won't be using oil anymore. Can you really blame companies for being cautious?
- feet 4y ago
  They have essentially tripled their profits at the expense of everyone else This is what unbridled capitalism and profit seeking gets us
  - ericd 4y ago
    It’s not easy/quick to spin up production. The demand is somewhat inelastic, and they sell it to the highest bidder. Not sure what you want?
    - feet 4y ago
      Its purposeful, go listen to the calls They have production capacity already and they refuse to use it
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    Were you petitioning for government bailouts for the oil industry when oil was at $0?
kortilla 4y ago
This explanation is dumb. If the oil investments looked like they would pay off, companies would be incentivized to expand way more and capture more profit. You’re suggesting they are refusing to increase production out of greed, but the greedy move would be to expand drilling and refinement to capture more of the high margin volume. Preventing this defector behavior requires an explicit cartel (see OPEC), which is not legal in the US. So your explanation for why oil companies don’t increase production is lacking.
- feet 4y ago
  Restricting the supply allows them to keep the margins high, increasing supply would mean that price would drop How does your stance make sense at all? In what market does increasing supply not lead to decreasing prices? Of course they're going to keep restricting supply to keep prices high while they can. What I don't understand is why you're here defending them without listening to the earning calls where they literally state what I am telling you
  - kortilla 4y ago
    > How does your stance make sense at all? In what market does increasing supply not lead to decreasing prices? It’s super basic economics unless you control 100% of the market. An oil provider that doubles their output from 1% of the market to 2% will only put a slight downward pressure on the price while doubling their high margin income. The winning move is always to increase production. > without listening to the earning calls where they literally state what I am telling you I’m telling you that you don’t understand what they are saying. If they are unwilling to build it’s because the future of the oil is uncertain, not because the margins are high right now. The margins being high is a great reason to expand drilling even into hard to extract areas.
    - feet 4y ago
      You're misunderstanding what I'm saying. They don't need to build anything They already have capacity, they have the distilleries and holding already built but sitting entirely unused, they just aren't spinning it up to purposely restrict supply and keep profit margins high. That's what we get with an oligarchy, the companies work together to control production and price.

cs137 4y ago

Not only will there be inequality of talent (relative to whatever talents are valued at a given time, because that itself is in flux) but simulations like this show that random inequality is not an aberration, but inevitable. The more precisely realistic one is his geometric-variance model, in which some end up in massive debt while others end up very rich--a permanent division of society into landlords/bosses and peons. In theory, the state is supposed to prevent this through taxation and policy, but what we observe in capitalist countries is that the wealthy inevitably corrupt the state that is supposed to constrain them. The US is already at third-world levels of corruption and inequality, and the EU is only 20 years or so behind on this neoliberal roller coaster to nowhere. Capitalism promises equilibrium, but it diverges. The people in charge will always have the power and resources to see to it that (a) they stay in charge, and (b) the gains from economic growth go solely to them.

vsareto 4y ago
>but simulations like this show that random inequality is not an aberration, but inevitable. At least some of this wealth is completely inherited (maybe even most of it). There's not a good mechanism to determine how much someone should inherit, but I bet wealth being limited to the lifetime of one person would certainly change the model and make it not-so-inevitable.
caracustard 4y ago
Talent is inherently "inequal" as you can't put any sort of a restriction or a cap on the skills or abilities of an individual so i'm not sure what you're trying to say there. The results of the "precisely realistic" model (according to you) are not taking into account the self-employed members of society but are also attempting to create an artificial divide in the aformentioned society by labeling them ("peons"? seriously?). So much for your seemingly pro-equality message. What exactly is the state supposed to prevent? Employment of individuals by other individuals? The ability of an individual to OWN property rather than being at the states mercy? Free trade between members of society? "...the wealthy inevitably corrupt the state..." golly gee, so that's why all of those non-capitalist, anti-wealth utopias of the past are...gone? "The US is already at third-world levels of corruption and inequality..." except the American perception of corruption and inequality is "i earn 70k per year, i drive Hyundai, my boss earns 200k, he drives Mercedes, very bad!!!" which is different from say earning 3k per year, not having any access to quality financing services (which would allow you to start your OWN business) and on top of that not having a vehicle at all (which in many countries, especially the post-antiwealth-utopias is still a pipe dream for most). No it doesn't. Capitalism promises and provides the ability to convert your abilities, wealth and products of abilities/wealth/wealth+abilities as an individual or a group of individuals into monetary units which are then used as "fuel" for facilitating trade/services in the society. Also i find it ironic that your last sentence perfectly describes every communist state of the past: they stay in charge (one party system, transfer of power between the Party members), the gains from economic growth go solely to them (the state is the only employer and services/products provider and as a result the Party becomes the main benefactor from everyones labour while the people recieve mere scraps without any way establish any business of their own) and how it also ignores that regardless of the system in use taxation is still a thing with the only difference being the percentage of taxes taken. Perhaps it's time to stop trying to make false equialences of hierarchy and capitalism, considering that the latter allows you to minimize your dependency on any sort of a hierarchy?

marginalia_nu 4y ago

> If you have the benefit of this inequality, you should use it to ensure the availability of life’s necessities so that any else with a similar inequality can provide the maximum benefit regardless of the circumstances they’re born into. Well let me be the devil's advocate here and ask why.

imgabe 4y ago
- shuger 4y ago
  Entropy cannot be opposed. That's fundamental law of physics.
  - fny 4y ago
    Sure it can, I decrease entropy locally and reallocate it somewhere else. Space is huge and it will take a long time to approach the limit.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    In the long term. But in the short term there are plenty of loopholes, according to those laws of physics.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    You literally opposed entropy by writing this comment.
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    Entropy wins universally. Locally, lots of processes are anti-entropic. Look at a leaf.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  > To continue the proliferation of humanity and life in general throughout the universe. To oppose entropy. Right, but I'm a human being, I am not humanity itself. Humanity is just an idea, it has no agency or conscience. It cannot suffer, it does not want. As a human being, my primary responsibility is toward myself, to make myself happy, and to arrange the world according to the principles that resonate with my soul. Toiling to make other people happy at my own expense doesn't make me happy. Even if that was the way it worked, surely the best action would be to line up to work at an Amazon warehouse and bask in opportunity to contribute to the incandescence of Jeff Bezos' prosperity. > If that is not appealing to you, you should probably off yourself right now. I don't really see how that follows. I'll die regardless whether it's by my own hands right now or at the hands of external circumstance some years later.

whiddershins 4y ago

The United States closely resembles what someone 100 years ago would have termed a post scarcity society. The potential for consumption is infinite.

random314 4y ago
If you ignore health care, student loans and housing, sure.
- rabite 4y ago
  > health care Most heart disease and cancer, the two biggest cost centers, are somehow self-inflicted. People choose to eat badly and take drugs. In fact, moving away from a post-scarcity society would be the best at mitigating healthcare costs. If people were too poor to afford anything but tiny servings of grain and produce, they would have less health problems and live longer. > student loans This is also self-inflicted. People do not need to get the vast majority of degrees that they have. Most people are attending college to get the college experience. They want to party and waste time because stacking up loans is easier to them than actually working a job they are fit for. The degrees they are choosing to get are not serving to increase their employability, and burdening society's balance sheets for the debt they never pay off. We should start aggressively denying "education" to those that cannot be educated. > housing Housing is extremely cheap. It is not extremely cheap in the Bay Area, but if we forced the chronically homeless, criminals, and indigents on section 8 to move to affordable locales we would not only no longer have a housing crisis, but we could restore the cities that have been lost to their degeneracy.
  - vsareto 4y ago
    >If people were too poor to afford anything but tiny servings of grain and produce, they would have less health problems and live longer. One small disaster that disrupts the food supply chain and they'll quickly be starving and turn to violence. >We should start aggressively denying "education" to those that cannot be educated. I don't even know how you would begin to definitively determine that for the lifetime of a person, much less denying something which is handed out freely in other countries. >but we could restore the cities that have been lost to their degeneracy. Income inequality is vastly more responsible for city degeneration than the homeless.

osigurdson 4y ago

Technology and innovation are also much more interesting that squabbling about government policy and income redistribution schemes. Let's find ways to drive costs to zero so everyone on the planet (to the greatest extent possible) can live like today's billionaires without causing any damage to the environment.

jacquesm 4y ago
The interesting thing is that we were effectively there 50 years ago: were (the rich West) were living like the kings of yesteryear (or even better in many cases). But we didn't exactly stop wanting stuff and further improvements, hedonic adaptation pretty much guarantees that no matter what our position we will always want more so how this could happen without damage to the environment is a mystery to me. The environment doesn't vote, it doesn't lobby and every institution that claims to do that is first and foremost in the business of keeping itself alive.
- kbutler 4y ago
  50 years ago, half the population of the world lived in extreme poverty. This percentage and the total number of people in extreme poverty have made extreme declines since that time. https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty This is one of the great achievements of humankind, and while we have much more to do, it's good to recognize the progress we've made. And while I'm also skeptical about the amount of resources organizations use to maintain themselves, any organization or organism or community that does not have a primary goal of keeping itself alive will in short order cease to exist. If you think your organization has a long-term beneficial purpose, you better design it to be self-sustaining, and with a large margin of safety.
- carapace 4y ago
  Vaclav Smil says something like "Would it be so bad, going back to a 1960's level of energy consumption?" in the context of energy usages (and therefore roughly CO2 emissions) of Western and particularly American lifestyles. (I'm paraphrasing: Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk ) > hedonic adaptation pretty much guarantees that no matter what our position we will always want more There's an Indian holy man, now deceased, who said we need to learn to practice "ceiling on desires". It may be that only the expression of our higher values can clear this logjam? > so how this could happen without damage to the environment One thought that occurs to me is if we could create a kind of split-level economy. There would be a real-world ecologically-informed economy that met basic needs as efficiently as possible. On top of that substrate we would have a computer-mediated virtual economy where there were no (or very few) effective limits on hedonistic adaptation (or status-symbol seeking, or whatever). It seems like we're seeing something like that emerge "naturally" anyway, eh? NFT & "crypto", in-game purchases, whatever FB's metaverse becomes, etc. Eventually, people might submit voluntarily to enter "the Matrix": your physical body kept perfectly safe, and the only limits are your imagination? Not my cup of tea, but not insane on the face of it, eh?

photochemsyn 4y ago

'Post-scarcity' on a finite planet with a growing population? The only way out of that is to go off-planet and that's not plausible anytime soon at any scale. The ultimate scarcity is the scarcity of arable land and raw materials to host a human population. Some of the major conflicts over the 20th century in this area have revolved around land reform and land ownership, whether it was breaking up feudal estates and redistributing land to peasants (Russian Revolution) or expansionist ideologies (Germany's 'Push to the East' for 'lebensraum', aka 'settler colonialism' which was also a feature in America's 'Manifest Destiny'). The United States is again setting the stage for such conflicts with the majority of young people being priced out of the housing market. Homeownership rates shot up after FDR's New Deal reforms, and there was a brief peak in 2004 before a sustained collapse that showed some signs of recent recovery: https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-united-states/ https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-united-state... It's fairly skewed by age and this increasing (probably high student loan debt being a major factor), i.e. homeowners are getting older and fewer young people are buying homes: https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/homeownership-rate-by-age https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/homeownership-rate-...

fartcannon 4y ago
Off-planet is a great goal. Also educated, healthy populations tend to have fewer kids. This isn't an overnight fix, but a long term goal. So the first move is to learn to share like the toddlers we are. It's not easy and we dont have a solution yet. Greed is fundamental.
- danuker 4y ago
  > is to learn to share like the toddlers we are As in, taxation + inflation is not enough? We spend 27.9% through government (a "shared resource"). How much more should we disincentivize work? https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.XPN.TOTL.GD.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.XPN.TOTL.GD.ZS
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    Ah, well, as a non expert in the subject, the way you phrased the question made me think, 'as much as we can'. Probably makes sense to work on making it so that no one has to toil just to starve at the extreme end. And probably good to make it so people who haven't accidentally found wealth can try out ideas. I think it'll have to be phases. The first goal would be fewer musks/besos/gates etc and spread that wealth around. Eventually maybe we succeed in automating most of the menial work and let humans collective imagination drive the future. Greed though. That's our races great filter.

deleted 4y ago

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snowwrestler 4y ago

We live in a post-scarcity society now. We’ve just invented artificial scarcity to keep our current economic and social structures going. For example there is plenty of food to feed the entire world, but some people still go hungry. There is plenty of land and buildings to house everyone, but some people are still homeless. There is far more than enough clothes, but some people still have to wear rags. I don’t have the answer. But I know there’s more to it than technology and innovation. Because those have already given us what we need, in many cases. But we have so far failed to leverage them fully.

chii 4y ago
> We live in a post-scarcity society now. people say that, but it's not true. We barely have enough to launch stuff into space. There's plenty of limits of resources, and are hard to obtain (e.g., rare earth metals, fossil fuels, etc). Even a small shortage of fertilizers will reduce food production such that some people are looking at starvation - of course, not in the western countries, but that's not what a post-scarcity society looks like.
- geysersam 4y ago
  Not being able to send things into space is not scarcity. Food, education, transportation, housing, healthcare, life's necessities.
  - chii 4y ago
    if you were able to send things into space (which should be easy to achieve for such a society), then it's evidence we're in a post-scarcity society. By the lack of being able to send much to space, we must not currently be in a post-scarcity society, because space exploration is such a good and exciting thing to do, you'd expect that it's one of the first things to get accomplished by a post-scarcity society.
    - soraki_soladead 4y ago
      That isn't what post-scarcity means. It doesn't mean there is zero scarcity. It means basic needs are easily met: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy You're making claims about how space things align with post-scarcity that doesn't match up with the accepted meaning. Even still, we _can_ send stuff into space, now cheaper than ever. What is the threshold for "send much to space"? Any person can order up a rocket payload on Amazon.space and have it placed in orbit? That doesn't sound good even if it were free. Especially if it were free... > space exploration is such a good and exciting thing to do, you'd expect that it's one of the first things to get accomplished by a post-scarcity society Why?

mtkhaos 4y ago

Inside that society and with the direction of our technologies. Is not only post scarcity, but post talent and ability. As soon the individuals ability to compete will be eclipsed by AI. The argument should be to form a society that embraces that fact. But there are certain inefficiencies within out late stage that may stop this an equitable form from happening. As well as be catastrophic if not handled as infrastructure. As the question is what game are we using these AI tools to solve? Profit? Beware of offering stock in market dominated by AI actors that can willingly create disinformation in seconds to pump or short your companies stock arbitrarily. Etc...

xwdv 4y ago

First we have to build a society where energy is cheap and abundant. Then everything else will follow.

thegrimmest 4y ago

That depends on whether you are a collectivist or an individualist. Selflessness is not a default, psychologically speaking. It's not very well selected for, in evolutionary terms. Why should we optimize for collective availability of life's necessities? I'd rather optimize for my own outcomes, and judging by their behaviour most other people feel similarly. Forcing someone into a collective against their will is indistinguishable from a degree of slavery. This by far the greater sin for those who believe in the primacy of individual will and choice.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

Strictly speaking, there will always be scarcity, since some things are inherently scarce. Some examples: front row tickets to a show, beachfront property, Friday dinner reservations at a popular restaurant, original pieces of art from a famous artist, sessions with a renowned therapist.

frankfrankfrank 4y ago

Post scarcity society? I'm just going to say it because there is no point in beating around the bush. You are not living in reality. In reality the laws of physics dictate that such juvenile marvel universe type fantasy of a "post scarcity society" simply cannot exist in general. Even if you wanted to create it on a limited/bounded small scale, basically everything people with this type of mindset are doing and supporting, directly sabotages any ability to ever achieve it. For example; you cannot have "post scarcity", while increasing the demand on resources through immigration on a local level or in general through exponential population growth like in basically all non-European regions of the world. In broad strokes, Europe and especially the USA were not only "post scarcity societies" up until about 1970, but negative scarcity societies, producing excess of their needs and spreading that across the globe altruistically. It is precisely that negative scarcity state that elevated every other people of the world for so long; be it by feeding, sharing technology and knowledge, providing medical care, education, etc. to the whole of the non-European world. Essentially nothing we currently benefit from and enjoy in the whole world is not the product of Europeans that had produced a post and negative scarcity world by various means. Look around you, not a single thing you use and benefits you was not produced by some Europeans. That process has been poisoned, the micro-dosing of poison starting in about the turn of the 19th century in the USA, as groups started sabotaging, betraying, exploiting, usurping, and undermining the system of negative scarcity. I think there is some confusion that people are suffering from. We are not moving towards less scarcity, we are moving directly towards increased scarcity; largely precisely because of the confusion and distorted perspective you are looking at things from. You confused the short time scale view of the leveling curve as positive, when in reality it was becoming ever more negative and we are now approaching or at the turning point/apex. To illustrate; the whole world's population in 1850 was the same as is projected for Nigeria lone by 2100 that has a supposed population of 218M, which is currently increasing at about 9M per year, or about 20 more people if it took you 1 minute to read this far. And that's just one country of Africa, who's overall population is expected to increase by 1.5 Billion by 2050, or about 100 people by the time you read this far. Tonight, if you watch a movie for roughly 90 minutes, by the end of it, there will be 9,000 more people in Africa than when you started the movie. Is the world, let alone Africa producing just alone enough food to feed 9,000 more people all their life by the end of the movie you watched? I don't know, but it seems unlikely. Let's ask the billionaires who want you to eat bugs so they can continue eating beef. Ironically, that is largely due to the "post scarcity society" that the USA and Europe had produced, largely due to the generosity and incentives destroying principle of "post scarcity society", aka utopian fantasy. A grain silo is also a "post scarcity society" for mice, until the population explodes, they ruin the grain, and the population collapses amidst either a massive die off or a surge of mice that scour the countryside and spread the devastation. Scarcity is generally a good thing, it forces prioritization and self-regulation. We are today seeing the effects of "post scarcity" in rather real terms as inflation eats through our economies due to "post scarcity" caused by currency printing that is deflection of realty at best and fraud at worst. The laws of physics remain in effect all throughout though.