I fundamentally don't understand how capitalism will work in a society where scarcity is essentially nil. It doesn't make sense. Maybe someone could explain it to me?
"A society where scarcity is essentially nil" is the part that doesn't make sense.
Particularly given the degree to which human experience of utility/disutility is demonstrated to be strongly influenced by relative rather than absolute conditions.
Relative abundance doesn't really substantially change the degree to which capitalism does or does not work.
Once we eliminate all the "simple" causes of scarcity, we'll soon be on to the next group. Some things probably won't present themselves as limited until they become scarce.
One example I like to think of: Land, it is currently abundant, to the point of ridiculousness based on our population. However, land near X (city, hospital, family, etc), is pretty limited. This is caused by unique local/contextual reasons. Not every city can have a beautiful ocean sunset, not every city can have a giant canyon in the middle that provides a unique nightlife of weird depths.
The important thing to remember is I might place zero value on something, but as long as you can find a buyer then stuff has value.
Imagine a world where energy is practically free, you might be tempted to think that spells the end of scarcity. But you still have to deal with thermodynamics. Your factory could be churning out countless diamonds with the free energy you are getting but you are going to need a large heat sink for all the entropy you will be pumping out. The scarcity then is your local ability to dump entropy.
Or imagine a reality where we create a Dyson Sphere and have super nano-tech and world peace is a reality. No more scarcity right? Those descendents are now competing with other space faring actors. They may be content to stay in our home solar system and wait for the sun to kill the species or wait for another actor to take our star. The new scarcity there is solar system redundancy.
Imagine an economy where everybody has a Universal Basic Income of about $10M. It's post-scarcity, so there are replicators that can make anything, and energy is really cheap. Robots mine and farm the asteroids using that cheap energy so all raw materials and raw food are really cheap. By really cheap, I mean about the same price as now. So you've got $10M a year in income, and can buy a car for about $500.
- Land is crazy expensive. There are billions of rich people bidding it up
- but you can rent an apartment for cheap since mile-high skyscrapers are easy to build
- human labour is crazy expensive -- who's going to work for you unless you pay substantially more than $10M/year?
- but people still need meaning in their life; most "work" is basically volunteer labour
Basically Star Trek.
>A human is only happy if she has two, and everybody else has one. And even then, she starts imagining three.
I suppose one other way to do this (That would hopefully be outlawed) is the creation of a virus that wipe out all the natural sources of a product (I'm thinking mainly of foodstuffs here), leaving a single company the owner of the plant/genome/whatever. The idea is explored in one of Zach's comics: [2]