Capital has universal value. The value of food is the preservation of life. That has value. That is objective reality for all life on Earth. If an animal can store food (read capital) then it improves it survivability.
Once basic needs are satisfied you cannot double-satisfy them. Paying for twice the amount of food does not make you live twice as long. So that's a fixed demand, while luxury goods are unbounded in their potential costs.
If you subtracted all that value spent on basic needs there there still would be a lot of capital flowing around.
I think the ancestor comment is arguing that there basically are two separate value circulations. One to distribute and allocate the essentials and the rest for social-value-signalling. Maybe that's also something UBI gets wrong. That we actually would need two currencies.
Post-scarcity scifi settings often feature something like that
a) all the basic stuff including housing is essentially given away for free
b) you get a fixed amount of luxury resource allocations on top of that
c) you can gain additional ones via some kind of work
d) they can be traded if others find whatever you're doing valuable.
so you don't have to work for the government or megacorp.Yes you can, food can be stored! At a later date less food can be consumed with no work was needed to harvest it.
> Paying for twice the amount of food does not make you live twice as long.
No but using your acquired food (read capital) to trade for medical supplies will increase your longevity. And it will increases the doctor's because he gets to eat!
> If you subtracted all that value spent on basic needs there there still would be a lot of capital flowing around.
Yes and isn't it wonderful? Its what allows things like food stamps and vacations to exist. Excess capital allows things like scientific research to occur.
> ...the rest for social-value-signalling.
That's a pretty pessimistic view of wealth.
---
I think I've been pretty realistic in my assessments of capital and its uses. But now, I'm going to enter territory where I'm wildly speculating.
I don't believe post-scarcity can exist or should exist. I don't believe it can exist for two reasons:
1). There simply is not an infinite amount of energy and matter (but there may be enough that it doesn't matter that its finite). 2). Even if there is enough resources, time will always be the limiting factor. Time contributes to scarcity the same way money does.
I don't believe it should exist because I believe that is the end of human progress. Scarcity, whether its a desire to own an iPhone or to acquire knowledge of quantum gravity, motivates humans to achieve.
This is pretty much what is happening around us. As we get hold of better resources, we reproduce more to make it impossible to have everything for everyone.
Again, we will have to re-discover the definition of scarcity because we have too many people unhappy with the system.
How does that jive with the fact that every developed country's reproduction rate has dropped as they developed?
Basically, the value associated with the fundamental nutritional benefit of food is objective and is something everyone can agree on. If this value is the only thing we cared about, the world would not be organized in the capitalist structure that it is today. Everyone would fish and equally distribute the produce. However, we as a species are hardwired to compete, to be "better". All capital is derived from "social-value-signaling".
And the fixed baseline vs. subject-to-infinite-want value-add aspects make them categorically different.
why is there a boundary to surplus essentials? if you store enough essentials for one person, then storing more of them means you're increasing the number of people (or amount of time) you're storing essentials for.
That's why it's categorically separate in my mind. For a fixed amount of people you only need a bounded amount of resources to satisfy their essential needs, which can be met with a relatively small fraction of the population's work capacity.
Everything beyond that is subject to drastically different dynamics where your want (not need) for luxury goods can gobble up a practically infinite amount of work capacity.