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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

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?
  - qez 4y ago
    > Not being able to send things into space is not scarcity. Strictly speaking, this is false.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  Thank you. OP statement is at odds with basic facts. We have nothing like the technology from Star Trek that allows for easy generation of goods or even Transmetropolitan. We have some level of current population satisfied, but even that is at a pretty high cost. I genuinely do not understand how people can claim 'post scarcity' ( unlimited ) access to resources on a, clearly, very limited resource that is Earth.
  - snowwrestler 4y ago
    Very simply, “post scarcity” does not mean unlimited availability of everything.
    - towaway15463 4y ago
      That feels like a redefinition or at least like a huge asterisk is being added. If you need a term to mean “only the basics are covered” you could do better. Post scarcity naturally implies no limits even if your semantics differ.
      - chii 4y ago
        > If you need a term to mean “only the basics are covered” you could do better. exactly, this is what i have issue with calling post-scarcity. may be the term could be "universal basic income capable" (UBI-able).
- Shacklz 4y ago
  > Even a small shortage of fertilizers will reduce food production such that some people are looking at starvation This is only because we pretend that the free market can solve these kinds of problems. If it weren't for supply chains that optimize in cost efficiency and nothing else, these sort of problems don't necessarily have to exist.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  It's kinda true, it's just a monkey's paw, careful what you wish for sort of way. We could absolutely give everyone on earth the median standard of living. If we divided everything up equally (84.71 trillion [global GDP] / 7.753 billion [world population]) we are talking about something like 11 grand per person, per year, total overall spending. That's housing, food, healthcare, fire, police, roads, schooling, etc. For most people on earth that would be a big raise[0], although virtually everyone in the west would be dramatically poorer. [0]https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/08/news/economy/global-low-income/ https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/08/news/economy/global-low-inc...
  - einpoklum 4y ago
    Just remember that divvying up money doesn't have the effect of ensuring a decent standard of living. If you go to some person living in a slum of some under-developed city in an under-developed country, and you gave them 11K USD, they would be able to buy some consumption goods, rennovate their apartment etc. - but they would not be able to buy decent education for their children (let alone themselves); nor decent health care services (they would be able to afford a few visits to an overpriced doctor); etc.
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      11k probably isn't enough to provide much by way of public health or education anyway once you buy all the essentials, I was just making the point that the number includes government spending so if you increase that you lower the amount of income each person will get.
    - towaway15463 4y ago
      Also, giving one person 11k is very different from giving everyone 11k.
- II2II 4y ago
  Post scarcity should not imply that people live in material luxury. It should mean that people have their fundamental needs met, both materially and psycologically (e.g. having enough food is insufficient if there is no food security, say due to droughts). People can still lead a good life by focussing upon social rather than material facets. We do not need communications networks to socialize, nor do we need overpowered silicon chips to entertain. This is not to dismiss the positive roles of those technologies. Better communications and computation certainly help in everything from agriculture to medicine. It is just that using them as a proxy in applications where they do not contribute to human welfare can be tremendously counterproductive. The same thing can be said for space exploration, perhaps even more assertively since it is a huge drain of resources with a disproportionately isolated gain.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  We went from being 95% farmers to 2% farmers. Meeting our physical needs used to be hard. Now it's easy. Just because it's easy doesn't mean we don't fuck it up, because of course we do. We push everyone as hard as we can, sending the benefits up the social pyramid and the problems down the social pyramid. When the system experiences a shock, it gets sent down the social pyramid and crunches the people at the bottom. We could do better, but we choose not to. This is what post-scarcity looks like in a world that hasn't figured out how to share. The core problem is: the more someone has the ability to change the system, the more incentives they have to not change the system.
  - towaway15463 4y ago
    You forget that those 2% of farmers are now supported by the entire bulk of an industrial economy. The work hasn’t disappeared, it’s just moved to other sectors like tractor and fertilizer production, genetic research, the petroleum industry, shipping networks, refrigeration and all the other things that make it possible to produce so much food with a small number of farmers. Until we automate all of that we’re no where near post scarcity.
    - jjoonathan 4y ago
      If you added up the "roots" of that 2%, it would multiply by a small factor. Wooo. Big deal. Same conclusion: we're not just post scarcity, we're distantly post-scarcity.
    - banannaise 4y ago
      Most of which could be straightforwardly marshaled to handle food logistics, thus solving this problem, except that there are other priorities that are apparently more important. (Those priorities are not, in fact, more important.)
api 4y ago
The only people who live in an almost post-scarcity society are people living in rich regions of rich countries. Most of humanity is nowhere near there.
- sahila 4y ago
  I think OPs point is that we could be living be a “post-scarcity” world today if we simply distributed existing resources equitably to everyone. The problem isn’t we haven’t solved how to make enough food to feed everyone, it’s that it’s not profitable to feed those that can’t pay for it.
  - danenania 4y ago
    "...if we simply distributed existing resources equitably to everyone" There's nothing simple about distribution. It's at least as hard as producing stuff in the first place. Solving distribution in a way that is both fair and economically sustainable has also proved to be extremely hard--much harder than just producing enough. Despite the moral problems inherent to market-based pricing (the poor go to the back of the line), all the alternatives we've tried so far have led to far worse results.
danuker 4y ago
Land will always be scarce. People multiply until that land gets to the limit of what it can provide. Energy is also scarce. A limited amount of solar energy falls on the Earth, and if you need more than that, it gets very expensive (from space somehow). Food is limited by labor (which scales with people) but also by energy and land (which do not). As such, there will always be scarcity, signalled through prices. One way of making resources more abundant per person is capping/reducing population.
- freemint 4y ago
  Space habitats are not really land limited. Yes our sun has a finite amount of power but by the time we use percent of it we can colonize other stars. Labour can be automated. Plants are not growing more complicated with time so at some point robotics can handle it.
- samatman 4y ago
  Land, sure, they aren't making more of it. Energy? Is not scarce. I'm not even in the top 25% of travel for people who have been in an airplane one time, and I've done the equivalent of several circumnavigations. Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget to split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and lately they can have a small solar panel and light as well. That's not scarce energy. It would be great if it was even less scarce, sure.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    > Energy? Is not scarce. I'm not even in the top 25% of travel for people who have been in an airplane one time, and I've done the equivalent of several circumnavigations. This is a terrible bar. By even being on an airplane just once you are already in the top 20% of the world. If you’ve done several circumnavigations you’re outside of the category of flying once or twice for major life events which puts you in the top 1%. > Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget to split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and lately they can have a small solar panel and light as well. That's not scarce energy This is a really uninformed view of the energy requirements to sustain human life. Transportation, getting people food/water, and HVAC dominates this. Enough energy to run a cell phone is a joke.
kortilla 4y ago
> We live in a post-scarcity society now. Not if you include the population of the world outside of a few rich western countries.
- qez 4y ago
  No that's their point. We could provide for everyone but we do not. I disagree with that like you might, but you're missing the point.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    No we can’t, that’s the point.
kspacewalk2 4y ago
>For example there is plenty of food to feed the entire world, but some people still go hungry. This is because having a reliable food supply everywhere is not the same thing as growing enough food, on the aggregate, to be able to feed everyone. That's not even half of it. Distribution and logistics are key, particularly making it robust to all sorts of shocks (droughts, conflict, etc). A lot of areas experiencing famine/hunger are places with very bad governance and infrastructure. Fixing that is Hard and Expensive, and once you do they'll never go hungry again because existing food available for sale elsewhere in the world will make its way there, either always or when needed. >I don’t have the answer. But I know there’s more to it than technology and innovation. The answer is in social innovation, and half the issue is letting go of ideological baggage. Socialists need to stop having pavlovian responses to the word 'capitalism' and 'markets', and economic liberals need to stop treating markets as a sacred cow and instead think of them as one tool in a toolbox. Most importantly, we need way more experimentation.
- einpoklum 4y ago
  > Socialists need to stop having pavlovian responses to the word 'capitalism' and 'markets', and economic liberals need to stop treating markets as a sacred cow and instead think of them as one tool in a toolbox. Suppose I were to suggest that we think of Feudalism as a tool in the box, or Slavery/Forced labor. Some economies used to be run like that. And nobody said you have to use that "tool". The thing is - it's not really a tool, which "we" can collectively apply towards reaching accepted social ends. And neither is Capitalism.
  - towaway15463 4y ago
    By that measure then neither is socialism due to the massive harm it has caused throughout history. So I guess we have no tools. I hate how people push centralized government and economies without a single shred of evidence that they have ever produced anything other than misery.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      >So I guess we have no tools. What kind of nonsense is that? We already have the tools, land value taxes and negative interest rates aka demurrage money. The solutions are trivial, and that is exactly why curing the symptoms can be nothing but complex. Demurrage money results in the neutrality of money and thereby activates a lot of economic theories that free market advocates take for granted when there is endless evidence that they don't work in a permanent money aka non neutral money system. Full employment is the default in a market economy, there is no such thing as a business cycle. It is only once you add non neutral money with the artificial zero lower bound that you get monetary cycles. If money is neutral, then debts won't have to grow eternally and there is no need to erode them with inflation.
carapace 4y ago
> We live in a post-scarcity society now. This. I repeat this over and over again, so sincere apologies to those who are tired of it, I'm a Bucky Fuller fan boy. He was an engineer who had a kind of epiphany one day, and he realized that he could maximize the benefit for humanity of his personal skills and talents if he did his best to work on behalf of all humanity. He went on to invent things like the geodesic dome, and was one of the most famous Americans world wide in his time. He traveled around the world something like eighty times (not eighty days, eighty times.) Anyway, he calculated (remember he was an engineer) that if we applied our technology and resources efficiently to solving our basic human needs (the lower tiers of Maslow's pyramid, eh?) then by sometime in the 1970's it should be possible that people could have careers of only two years duration and then retire, having accrued enough wealth to live "happily ever after" for the rest of their lives. > ...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. Yes. The technology arrived right on schedule, but the (relatively simple) logistical arrangements have not yet materialized. This seems to me to be a straightforward social/political movement. But it seemed that way back in the 60's with Bucky's "Design Science Revolution" as he called it, yet here we are. So, yeah, we have all the technology we need, we just have to organize and apply it efficiently and everybody on Earth could have food, shelter, clothes, energy, etc. Not only that, but we could do it in ecologically harmonious ways so that we're increasing the healthy and vitality of the world rather than grinding it down (as most of our systems do today.) It would be fun and easy. I have no idea why it's not more popular.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  To quote the man: “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
anotherrandom 4y ago
There is only artificial scarcity in some places. Ensuring a plentiful food (and other resource supplies) in many, many places of the world would require a great many invasions and occupations to root out corruption and snuff out local warlords, abusive military juntas, etc. It isn't as simple as "just send other places more food" when the local power-tripping dictator will just seize the foreign aid
imtringued 4y ago
Profit implies scarcity. Hence once you have abundance people come up with the broken window fallacy, because nobody has figured how to reduce the return on capital to something a saturated economy can support.

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?
- qez 4y ago
  > Not being able to send things into space is not scarcity. Strictly speaking, this is false.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
Thank you. OP statement is at odds with basic facts. We have nothing like the technology from Star Trek that allows for easy generation of goods or even Transmetropolitan. We have some level of current population satisfied, but even that is at a pretty high cost. I genuinely do not understand how people can claim 'post scarcity' ( unlimited ) access to resources on a, clearly, very limited resource that is Earth.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  Very simply, “post scarcity” does not mean unlimited availability of everything.
  - towaway15463 4y ago
    That feels like a redefinition or at least like a huge asterisk is being added. If you need a term to mean “only the basics are covered” you could do better. Post scarcity naturally implies no limits even if your semantics differ.
    - chii 4y ago
      > If you need a term to mean “only the basics are covered” you could do better. exactly, this is what i have issue with calling post-scarcity. may be the term could be "universal basic income capable" (UBI-able).
Shacklz 4y ago
> Even a small shortage of fertilizers will reduce food production such that some people are looking at starvation This is only because we pretend that the free market can solve these kinds of problems. If it weren't for supply chains that optimize in cost efficiency and nothing else, these sort of problems don't necessarily have to exist.
willcipriano 4y ago
It's kinda true, it's just a monkey's paw, careful what you wish for sort of way. We could absolutely give everyone on earth the median standard of living. If we divided everything up equally (84.71 trillion [global GDP] / 7.753 billion [world population]) we are talking about something like 11 grand per person, per year, total overall spending. That's housing, food, healthcare, fire, police, roads, schooling, etc. For most people on earth that would be a big raise[0], although virtually everyone in the west would be dramatically poorer. [0]https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/08/news/economy/global-low-income/ https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/08/news/economy/global-low-inc...
- einpoklum 4y ago
  Just remember that divvying up money doesn't have the effect of ensuring a decent standard of living. If you go to some person living in a slum of some under-developed city in an under-developed country, and you gave them 11K USD, they would be able to buy some consumption goods, rennovate their apartment etc. - but they would not be able to buy decent education for their children (let alone themselves); nor decent health care services (they would be able to afford a few visits to an overpriced doctor); etc.
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    11k probably isn't enough to provide much by way of public health or education anyway once you buy all the essentials, I was just making the point that the number includes government spending so if you increase that you lower the amount of income each person will get.
  - towaway15463 4y ago
    Also, giving one person 11k is very different from giving everyone 11k.
II2II 4y ago
Post scarcity should not imply that people live in material luxury. It should mean that people have their fundamental needs met, both materially and psycologically (e.g. having enough food is insufficient if there is no food security, say due to droughts). People can still lead a good life by focussing upon social rather than material facets. We do not need communications networks to socialize, nor do we need overpowered silicon chips to entertain. This is not to dismiss the positive roles of those technologies. Better communications and computation certainly help in everything from agriculture to medicine. It is just that using them as a proxy in applications where they do not contribute to human welfare can be tremendously counterproductive. The same thing can be said for space exploration, perhaps even more assertively since it is a huge drain of resources with a disproportionately isolated gain.
jjoonathan 4y ago
We went from being 95% farmers to 2% farmers. Meeting our physical needs used to be hard. Now it's easy. Just because it's easy doesn't mean we don't fuck it up, because of course we do. We push everyone as hard as we can, sending the benefits up the social pyramid and the problems down the social pyramid. When the system experiences a shock, it gets sent down the social pyramid and crunches the people at the bottom. We could do better, but we choose not to. This is what post-scarcity looks like in a world that hasn't figured out how to share. The core problem is: the more someone has the ability to change the system, the more incentives they have to not change the system.
- towaway15463 4y ago
  You forget that those 2% of farmers are now supported by the entire bulk of an industrial economy. The work hasn’t disappeared, it’s just moved to other sectors like tractor and fertilizer production, genetic research, the petroleum industry, shipping networks, refrigeration and all the other things that make it possible to produce so much food with a small number of farmers. Until we automate all of that we’re no where near post scarcity.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    If you added up the "roots" of that 2%, it would multiply by a small factor. Wooo. Big deal. Same conclusion: we're not just post scarcity, we're distantly post-scarcity.
  - banannaise 4y ago
    Most of which could be straightforwardly marshaled to handle food logistics, thus solving this problem, except that there are other priorities that are apparently more important. (Those priorities are not, in fact, more important.)

api 4y ago

The only people who live in an almost post-scarcity society are people living in rich regions of rich countries. Most of humanity is nowhere near there.

sahila 4y ago
I think OPs point is that we could be living be a “post-scarcity” world today if we simply distributed existing resources equitably to everyone. The problem isn’t we haven’t solved how to make enough food to feed everyone, it’s that it’s not profitable to feed those that can’t pay for it.
- danenania 4y ago
  "...if we simply distributed existing resources equitably to everyone" There's nothing simple about distribution. It's at least as hard as producing stuff in the first place. Solving distribution in a way that is both fair and economically sustainable has also proved to be extremely hard--much harder than just producing enough. Despite the moral problems inherent to market-based pricing (the poor go to the back of the line), all the alternatives we've tried so far have led to far worse results.

danuker 4y ago

Land will always be scarce. People multiply until that land gets to the limit of what it can provide. Energy is also scarce. A limited amount of solar energy falls on the Earth, and if you need more than that, it gets very expensive (from space somehow). Food is limited by labor (which scales with people) but also by energy and land (which do not). As such, there will always be scarcity, signalled through prices. One way of making resources more abundant per person is capping/reducing population.

freemint 4y ago
Space habitats are not really land limited. Yes our sun has a finite amount of power but by the time we use percent of it we can colonize other stars. Labour can be automated. Plants are not growing more complicated with time so at some point robotics can handle it.
samatman 4y ago
Land, sure, they aren't making more of it. Energy? Is not scarce. I'm not even in the top 25% of travel for people who have been in an airplane one time, and I've done the equivalent of several circumnavigations. Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget to split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and lately they can have a small solar panel and light as well. That's not scarce energy. It would be great if it was even less scarce, sure.
- kortilla 4y ago
  > Energy? Is not scarce. I'm not even in the top 25% of travel for people who have been in an airplane one time, and I've done the equivalent of several circumnavigations. This is a terrible bar. By even being on an airplane just once you are already in the top 20% of the world. If you’ve done several circumnavigations you’re outside of the category of flying once or twice for major life events which puts you in the top 1%. > Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget to split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and lately they can have a small solar panel and light as well. That's not scarce energy This is a really uninformed view of the energy requirements to sustain human life. Transportation, getting people food/water, and HVAC dominates this. Enough energy to run a cell phone is a joke.

kortilla 4y ago

> We live in a post-scarcity society now. Not if you include the population of the world outside of a few rich western countries.

qez 4y ago
No that's their point. We could provide for everyone but we do not. I disagree with that like you might, but you're missing the point.
- kortilla 4y ago
  No we can’t, that’s the point.

kspacewalk2 4y ago

>For example there is plenty of food to feed the entire world, but some people still go hungry. This is because having a reliable food supply everywhere is not the same thing as growing enough food, on the aggregate, to be able to feed everyone. That's not even half of it. Distribution and logistics are key, particularly making it robust to all sorts of shocks (droughts, conflict, etc). A lot of areas experiencing famine/hunger are places with very bad governance and infrastructure. Fixing that is Hard and Expensive, and once you do they'll never go hungry again because existing food available for sale elsewhere in the world will make its way there, either always or when needed. >I don’t have the answer. But I know there’s more to it than technology and innovation. The answer is in social innovation, and half the issue is letting go of ideological baggage. Socialists need to stop having pavlovian responses to the word 'capitalism' and 'markets', and economic liberals need to stop treating markets as a sacred cow and instead think of them as one tool in a toolbox. Most importantly, we need way more experimentation.

einpoklum 4y ago
> Socialists need to stop having pavlovian responses to the word 'capitalism' and 'markets', and economic liberals need to stop treating markets as a sacred cow and instead think of them as one tool in a toolbox. Suppose I were to suggest that we think of Feudalism as a tool in the box, or Slavery/Forced labor. Some economies used to be run like that. And nobody said you have to use that "tool". The thing is - it's not really a tool, which "we" can collectively apply towards reaching accepted social ends. And neither is Capitalism.
- towaway15463 4y ago
  By that measure then neither is socialism due to the massive harm it has caused throughout history. So I guess we have no tools. I hate how people push centralized government and economies without a single shred of evidence that they have ever produced anything other than misery.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    >So I guess we have no tools. What kind of nonsense is that? We already have the tools, land value taxes and negative interest rates aka demurrage money. The solutions are trivial, and that is exactly why curing the symptoms can be nothing but complex. Demurrage money results in the neutrality of money and thereby activates a lot of economic theories that free market advocates take for granted when there is endless evidence that they don't work in a permanent money aka non neutral money system. Full employment is the default in a market economy, there is no such thing as a business cycle. It is only once you add non neutral money with the artificial zero lower bound that you get monetary cycles. If money is neutral, then debts won't have to grow eternally and there is no need to erode them with inflation.

carapace 4y ago

> We live in a post-scarcity society now. This. I repeat this over and over again, so sincere apologies to those who are tired of it, I'm a Bucky Fuller fan boy. He was an engineer who had a kind of epiphany one day, and he realized that he could maximize the benefit for humanity of his personal skills and talents if he did his best to work on behalf of all humanity. He went on to invent things like the geodesic dome, and was one of the most famous Americans world wide in his time. He traveled around the world something like eighty times (not eighty days, eighty times.) Anyway, he calculated (remember he was an engineer) that if we applied our technology and resources efficiently to solving our basic human needs (the lower tiers of Maslow's pyramid, eh?) then by sometime in the 1970's it should be possible that people could have careers of only two years duration and then retire, having accrued enough wealth to live "happily ever after" for the rest of their lives. > ...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. Yes. The technology arrived right on schedule, but the (relatively simple) logistical arrangements have not yet materialized. This seems to me to be a straightforward social/political movement. But it seemed that way back in the 60's with Bucky's "Design Science Revolution" as he called it, yet here we are. So, yeah, we have all the technology we need, we just have to organize and apply it efficiently and everybody on Earth could have food, shelter, clothes, energy, etc. Not only that, but we could do it in ecologically harmonious ways so that we're increasing the healthy and vitality of the world rather than grinding it down (as most of our systems do today.) It would be fun and easy. I have no idea why it's not more popular.

ryandrake 4y ago
To quote the man: “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

anotherrandom 4y ago

There is only artificial scarcity in some places. Ensuring a plentiful food (and other resource supplies) in many, many places of the world would require a great many invasions and occupations to root out corruption and snuff out local warlords, abusive military juntas, etc. It isn't as simple as "just send other places more food" when the local power-tripping dictator will just seize the foreign aid

imtringued 4y ago

Profit implies scarcity. Hence once you have abundance people come up with the broken window fallacy, because nobody has figured how to reduce the return on capital to something a saturated economy can support.