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>> Yes, we took the wrong turn. As long as there is scarcity there will be competition and a "rat race" I would say we have two real scarcities left remaining

>> Yes, we took the wrong turn. As long as there is scarcity there will be competition and a "rat race" I would say we have two real scarcities left remaining: energy and the conjoined pair food/water. It can be argued that that the latter is entirely dependent on the former and the failure of modernity was our collective inability to adopt/secure nuclear power in the period between 1940-1970, the global adoption and security of which would have pushed us very close to a post-scarcity economy and the major cultural (re)evolution that would entail. Instead it was weaponized resulting in its demonization by reactionaries and the poisoning of it as "toxic" in the public discourse and we are now stuck in Adam Smith style economies of warfare that will eternally just create new scarcities in new cycles. I would imagine major warfare will soon begin towards the middle/end of this century over habitable space and water scarcities all problems of our own creation. Just my $0.02

imtringued 4y ago
>As long as there is scarcity there will be competition and a "rat race" That makes no sense. Human wants are infinite only at zero marginal cost. The moment there is a positive marginal cost wants become finite. Even a gift that costs you nothing has a marginal cost to receive and store it in your house. So even if the entirety of humanity gave Jeff Bezos a gift he would refuse those gifts at some point. What western societies suffer from is not scarcity but abundance relative to our quite limited wants. We give up an unreasonable amount of resources to buy something that is already there, land in a popular location. One thing that is special about land is that humans didn't create the earth. Suddenly there is an infinite demand for land because you own anything that happens on it, even the labor of other people working the land. The marginal cost of land is negative because of income taxation. But here is the thing. One man's land abundance is another man's land scarcity. So if you really wanted to solve this problem you would have to divide the earth equally among all humans.

imtringued 4y ago

>As long as there is scarcity there will be competition and a "rat race" That makes no sense. Human wants are infinite only at zero marginal cost. The moment there is a positive marginal cost wants become finite. Even a gift that costs you nothing has a marginal cost to receive and store it in your house. So even if the entirety of humanity gave Jeff Bezos a gift he would refuse those gifts at some point. What western societies suffer from is not scarcity but abundance relative to our quite limited wants. We give up an unreasonable amount of resources to buy something that is already there, land in a popular location. One thing that is special about land is that humans didn't create the earth. Suddenly there is an infinite demand for land because you own anything that happens on it, even the labor of other people working the land. The marginal cost of land is negative because of income taxation. But here is the thing. One man's land abundance is another man's land scarcity. So if you really wanted to solve this problem you would have to divide the earth equally among all humans.