Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we haven't totally solved all of our dependencies on limited resources I think this seriously understates the case. Hoarding certainly matters in terms of shared wealth , but the resource use of the mega-rich is much closer to that of the middle class than their financial position. The common "fourth Earths to live like Americans!" statistics seem to abuse means, but even median first world consumption is basically…
Good comment: I don't really disagree with you. I probably shouldn't have thrown that thing in there about hoarding cause it's more of a gripe than anything. I guess what I was trying to say is that our current relation to power (that is, capital) results in serious inefficiencies like huge amounts of food going to waste because no one near them will pay, or people dying of preventable causes within walking distance…
There's undoubtedly room to go back and forth on specifics, but it's hard to deny the extreme cases; access to things like clean water, mosquito netting, and essential medicines are exceedingly low cost for their amount of benefit.
The education point is even more poignant - faced with the sudden ability to offer educational resources at near-zero marginal cost, we've instead devoted huge effort to recreating scarcity (e.g. with login access codes in textbooks). Even outside gatekeeping spaces like college degrees, we end up with absurd situations like artificial limits on how many times a digital library book can be 'loaned' before it has to be 'destroyed'.
It's been a depressing road seeing that even in the least-scarce domains imaginable, we can't accept ways to create wealth other than artificial scarcity. (And conversely, it's been awesome to see things like Patreon sponsor free-for-everyone content creation.) I'm not sure what the answer will be - it's pretty clear that new technology will be necessary to make non-scarcity possible, but insufficient to make it happen.