4 ms·
"post-scarcity" is an illusion presented to people living at the very top of the economic pyramid. I'm sure most HNers are in the top 90th percentile of US hous
by Homunculiheaded 12y ago
"post-scarcity" is an illusion presented to people living at the very top of the economic pyramid. I'm sure most HNers are in the top 90th percentile of US household income on their own, living in a world mostly surrounded by other affluent individuals working in a similar field, all in jobs with increasingly flexible work hours, better benefits and nearly unlimited job prospects.
The world only looks like it's moving towards post-scarcity because the resources consumed and waste produced have been nearly completely outsourced away, and the pangs of the labor issues created by automation are happening somewhere else.
Post-scarcity is not an issue of 'productivity' but of resource use. As Jevons paradox [0] points out the more efficiently we use resources the more of them we tend to use. Looking merely at productivity and efficiency without looking at resource use and waste production gives a wildly incomplete picture of "post-scarcity". What I see is that the world is increasingly separating into a small sub-population that is presented the illusion of post-scarcity and a another, growing, subset that is feeling the effects of scarcity required to maintain that illusion.
When I see data to support the argument that resource use and waste production are plummeting, then I'll believe in narratives about post-scarcity.
0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- a8da6b0c91d 12y agoThere's a lot of delusion about the developing energy picture. The arithmetic shows we will not be running millions of robot slaves and self driving electric cars on solar and wind power. We will be walking places and drying clothing on clothes lines. We are running out of fossil fuel energy and still no viable replacements have been identified.
- phaemon 12y agoI like how you identify "walking places and drying clothing on clothes lines" as signs of the collapse of civilisation. To most people, those are normal things.
- seanflyon 12y agoIf labor is effectively free (because robots don't get paid) then I don't think that the products of that labor would be particularly scarce. Even material costs are primarily the labor cost to extract or recycle a material.
- slurry 12y agoThat's like saying if housing is effectively free (because buildings don't get paid).
- seanflyon 12y agoHousing is expensive because: 1) Lots of people want to live in the same relatively small area. 2) Houses take a lot of labor to make. 3) The material houses are made from take a lot of labor to extract. If labor were cheap 2 and 3 would be cheap as well and if people did not need to live near job centers I think 1 would not be as big of a deal either. This discussion of the problems we will have once robots take our jobs by making labor free ignores the benefits of free labor. I am skeptical of the ability of robots to take our jobs by providing free labor, but we only have to worry about the downsides of free robot labor, if we actually have free robot labor.