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Post-Scarcity Economics (2013)

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Re: Post-Scarcity Economics (2013)

#41

Post by TeMPOraL »

marcosdumay wrote: post #38
misja111 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although electricity, food, etc. are not provided automatically yet, I don't think that in the developed world they are scarce anymore. People don't chase a promotion, work overhours or buy a lottery ticket in the hope of being able to obtain more food. It might not be a gourmet meal in a Michelin star restaurant, but you surely can buy as much food as you need to never be hungry. If you want a car, then at least in…

> So why do many people still work so hard? Let me make you a question. For how long will you still afford all that stuff if you simply quit working?

This. Especially with western world moving more and more into service-based economy, we're literally beginning to have to pay rent to survive.

Re: Post-Scarcity Economics (2013)

#42

Post by marcosdumay »

conanbatt wrote: post #10
mcny wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a more personal level, I ask people whether they think of same wages for everyone. Many people think that a supervisor or a manager should make more money than the person reporting to them. I ask why and I have yet to find a satisfactory answer.

In general the supervisor or manager provides more value than an employee under his command. Exceptions to that are at least as common as employees having higher wages than managers and supervisors.

Value is a too ill defined concept. I would say that the manager has more leverage on the destiny of the company, thus you want a great manager more than you want great employees, and thus you have to pay them more.

Except that this is not exactly true either. Some times it is, other times it isn't. Yet the salary relations never change.

Re: Post-Scarcity Economics (2013)

#43

Post by ralmidani »

jstanley wrote: post #7
brightball wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post scarcity is one of those terms that just does not make sense. How much is enough for everybody? What if some people want more? Who decides exactly when something isn’t scarce anymore? I’ve yet to see anything that convinced me that post scarcity is anything more that a recent buzzword because fundamentally...supply and demand can’t ever actually go away.

The way a post-scarcity society could come to exist is if we stop doing any activity in the physical world and everything moves online. We've actually gone quite a long way down that road already. I wouldn't be surprised if in 100 years or so, most physical-world activity has stopped. Once basic electricity, internet connectivity, food, etc. is provided automatically, and all work and leisure is conducted online, the…

People also like to get married, have families, socialize, play sports, go to nice restaurants, attend shows, etc.

Your vision also assumes every human wants to, or can, be a knowledge worker. A lot of people can only function as manual laborers.

Re: Post-Scarcity Economics (2013)

#44

Post by pault »

js8 wrote: post #15
conanbatt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general the supervisor or manager provides more value than an employee under his command. Exceptions to that are at least as common as employees having higher wages than managers and supervisors.

I don't understand why do you think this is the case. (I am one of those people who thinks people should have the same salaries, btw.) What exactly do you mean by "value"? Can you give some examples? To add: I don't think there is a meaningful comparison of importance of two professions that depend on each other. It's like asking, which part of the car provides more value for the user? Is it the engine or the wheels?

For better or worse, production workers are seen as fungible and managers (ideally) have deep domain expertise and knowledge of the company's operations that allow them to multiply the efficiency of the people working under them. I am aware that in reality this is not always the case.

Edit: In your car analogy, the management aren't the engine; they're the driver.

Re: Post-Scarcity Economics (2013)

#45

Post by afarrell »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #30
brightball wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post scarcity is one of those terms that just does not make sense. How much is enough for everybody? What if some people want more? Who decides exactly when something isn’t scarce anymore? I’ve yet to see anything that convinced me that post scarcity is anything more that a recent buzzword because fundamentally...supply and demand can’t ever actually go away.

Fundamentally they can't, but that's not what the concept is aiming at. What we can do is to drop costs of things people need (or want) in their daily lives to the point that supply/demand basically stops working for them on an aggregate scale. If we do this to the point that any person can live a full life and participate in the society at large without having to exchange labour for resources or worrying about their…

> Healthcare

We'd have to either normalize suicide or prevent aging in order to get to a world where the demand for healthcare is basically met for everyone. Before we even get there, we've still got a lot of people whose healthcare costs are infinite with current technology.

The NHS is fantastic, it doesn't operate in a post-scarcity environment.

Re: Post-Scarcity Economics (2013)

#46

Post by rmah »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #30
brightball wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post scarcity is one of those terms that just does not make sense. How much is enough for everybody? What if some people want more? Who decides exactly when something isn’t scarce anymore? I’ve yet to see anything that convinced me that post scarcity is anything more that a recent buzzword because fundamentally...supply and demand can’t ever actually go away.

Fundamentally they can't, but that's not what the concept is aiming at. What we can do is to drop costs of things people need (or want) in their daily lives to the point that supply/demand basically stops working for them on an aggregate scale. If we do this to the point that any person can live a full life and participate in the society at large without having to exchange labour for resources or worrying about their…

That happened about 50 years ago in the developed world. A well off family in the mid-1800's would purchase a new set of clothing once or twice a year. Each person would have maybe two or three pairs of shoes. They had enough funds heat their homes during winter. Poor people had far less. By the 1950's, a developed economy could easily provide that level of comfort to everyone. We just (mostly) chose not to.

Today, it's quite cheap (relative to average incomes) to provide for basic needs if you define basic needs to food, a few sets of clothing and a heated place live. Problem is, we define that as being in deep poverty now. Now most people living in developed economies include things like 12 years of basic schooling, health care for most ailments, a dozen sets of clothing, reliable home heating, indoor plumbing, various in-home kitchen appliances, indoor plumbing, communications tools, some entertainment, the means to travel many miles every day, etc, etc as "basic needs". 100 years ago, at an absolute level anyway, this was an upper class level of wealth.

In other words, the bar constantly rises as society's overall wealth increases.

Re: Post-Scarcity Economics (2013)

#47

Post by brightball »

imgabe wrote: post #24
brightball wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post scarcity is one of those terms that just does not make sense. How much is enough for everybody? What if some people want more? Who decides exactly when something isn’t scarce anymore? I’ve yet to see anything that convinced me that post scarcity is anything more that a recent buzzword because fundamentally...supply and demand can’t ever actually go away.

I think of it like oxygen. We don't pay for the air we breathe. You don't need an "air" utility to pipe breathable air into your house and have to pay them a monthly bill (yet anyway). You just breathe. You want to breathe harder? Go ahead. Everyone on Earth could run wind sprints all day and we wouldn't run out of air. It replenishes itself naturally. Once we can do the same with potable water, food, shelter, we'll…

That's really the question though:

Who produces the food, water, shelter?

What are the required incentives for them to continue dedicating their scarce time to continuing to produce it?

What are the incentives or rewards for them to invest in the infrastructure, equipment, etc for them to create that?

Who maintains it and how are they compensated for doing so? What benefit do they gain for committing their time to the endeavor while everyone else enjoys the fruits?

Air is an example that actually fits this well. With air, distribution and production are handled by systems that don't require people to construct and maintain. All of those costs go away.

I don't see a point where post-scarcity is realistic until scarcity of time can be addressed.

Re: Post-Scarcity Economics (2013)

#48

Post by pault »

maxxxxx wrote: post #39
cat199 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tax+spend; not supporting 'trickle down' economics w/r/t other gov't policies, actually enforcing monopoly laws, regulating other areas in favor of small business (e.g. FCC used to have media ownership laws to keep media companies smaller) etc.. if everyone has more money but there is no cap on the top, things will just get more expensive, and then more basic income will be provided, and the cycle will continue.. not…

I wonder how things would work out if we had a system where companies beyond a certain size are strongly discouraged. I think the economy would be much healthier if we had many small businesses instead of behemoths like apple and Google

I was going to say "what about research projects that only a billion dollar company can absorb", but now that I think about it an industry consortium seems like a better outcome for society than a monopoly dictating the industry's focus and creating artificial scarcity. It's undoubtedly less efficient, but spreading the work around many organizations reduces the "bus factor" and the duplicated effort of competing incompatible standards.

Re: Post-Scarcity Economics (2013)

#49

Post by TeMPOraL »

vzcx wrote: post #40
TeMPOraL wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally they can't, but that's not what the concept is aiming at. What we can do is to drop costs of things people need (or want) in their daily lives to the point that supply/demand basically stops working for them on an aggregate scale. If we do this to the point that any person can live a full life and participate in the society at large without having to exchange labour for resources or worrying about their…

Ah, but what is a "full life?" Might someone believe that they need something more rare in order to attain it? Isn't "post-scarcity" just taking the limit as supply reaches infinity, and thus just another term for "asymptotically cheap?" Do we really need a "fresh new" economic theory to talk about this?

> Ah, but what is a "full life?" Might someone believe that they need something more rare in order to attain it?

That's indeed a fuzzy term right here. Can't come up with a better one, though. I'm thinking here of a life of an average person, though, not about outliers.

> Isn't "post-scarcity" just taking the limit as supply reaches infinity, and thus just another term for "asymptotically cheap?" Do we really need a "fresh new" economic theory to talk about this?

Maybe? Whether you call it "post-scarcity" or "most stuff is asymptotically cheap now", our current economic theories (and practice) don't handle near-free things well.

Re: Post-Scarcity Economics (2013)

#50

Post by pault »

brightball wrote: post #47
imgabe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of it like oxygen. We don't pay for the air we breathe. You don't need an "air" utility to pipe breathable air into your house and have to pay them a monthly bill (yet anyway). You just breathe. You want to breathe harder? Go ahead. Everyone on Earth could run wind sprints all day and we wouldn't run out of air. It replenishes itself naturally. Once we can do the same with potable water, food, shelter, we'll…

That's really the question though: Who produces the food, water, shelter? What are the required incentives for them to continue dedicating their scarce time to continuing to produce it? What are the incentives or rewards for them to invest in the infrastructure, equipment, etc for them to create that? Who maintains it and how are they compensated for doing so? What benefit do they gain for committing their time to th…

I've always been convinced that a true post-scarcity economy requires some pretty sophisticated AI and automation for the reasons you specified. A potential solution for technological unemployment is UBI, and UBI is enabled by the technologies that cause the unemployment, which is appealingly tidy in my opinion.
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