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Comment by superswordfish | Hacker News Reader

We already have a post-scarcity economy. There is enough of everything to go around for everybody. Kropotkin talked about this in "The Conquest of Bread" in the 19th century. If history is a lesson, no degree of abundance will result in collective plenty.

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The total output of the world economy is about $13,000 worth of goods and services per person per year. That's not enough to provide even just education and healthcare up to a standard that would be considered remotely acceptable by people in the west.

(For comparison: the average public school student in the US costs $12,000 to educate. And yet plenty of people will say that even that is not enough.)

But the good news is if we don't fuck up, that number will continue to grow nonlinearly, just as it has for many decades. We will live to see it cross the point where it really is high enough to give everybody a comfortable life.

> the average public school student in the US costs $12,000 to educate

Why does it cost $30,000 to educate a class of 30 kids for a month? The salary of the teacher should be <$5,000. Double, or triple that to include rent and other costs. It still comes out at half of $30K.

> no degree of abundance will result in collective plenty

Will it? When you look at most First World countries in general nobody there has to starve anymore.

In the Middle Ages only liege lords could get by without ever having to work. Nowadays, even middle-class people don't necessarily need to work till retirement age.

You and I have seen very different parts of the "First World", then.

Indeed, hunger is still a problem in the US. Our welfare system is so fragmented and conditional that there are numerous cracks where people of the wrong class/gender/neurotype/etc. can fall undetected and unhelped, and even in cases where resources are available, there is such a strong stigma against using them that some people don't even realize they have the option.

I feel there are a lot of areas where poverty exists in the US, and as a society, we should work to improve them. I disagree though, that 'hunger' is a problem we should be trying to address. If we're claiming that a class of people in society regularly don't get enough food, then I should see malnourished people regularly in the hospital emergency department where I work as a physician, and I never do, except in the case of alcoholics, other substance abusers, people with severe gastrointestinal disease, and some old people with severe dementia living on their own (in which case, the problem is their general inability to care for themselves, not inability to afford sufficient calories). In fact, the most common nutritional problem seen among the poor is obesity. Fyi, all the hospitals I have worked in regularly over the last 8 years have been classified as 'medically underserved areas', which usually corresponds very closely with most other measures of poverty, so I don't think I am seeing an unrepresentative sample. Edit: I should have made explicit, we should of course be putting a lot more effort into feeding those people who are malnourished around the world, of whom there are way too many.

> nobody there has to starve anymore

Use of food banks has increased in the UK, and hunger is very much present: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_Kingdom

This is a policy choice. For many voters, it's far more important that nobody "gets something for nothing" than nobody starves to death. This has resulted in the benefits system being increasingly punitive leaving some people without money for food for weeks at a time.

i strongly recommend reading "the limits to growth" (don't remember authors, but it's easy to find) and "the culture" series by late mr Banks. we're nowhere near post-scarcity. in fact, i don't believe we can reach post-scarcity without a benevolent AGI that can deal with psychopaths.

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