Comment by the8472 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the8472 | Hacker News Reader

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> The value of food is the preservation of life.

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.

> Once basic needs are satisfied you cannot double-satisfy them.

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.

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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.

One reason for post-scarcity to not exist is that the more resources we have, the more we will reproduce which will end up in consuming more and more resources. It degrades the ecosystem and brings down the quality of living for everyone involved.

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.

> 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.

How does that jive with the fact that every developed country's reproduction rate has dropped as they developed?

In regards to "value" for food, let's consider beyond a certain universal unit of sustenance. For example, imagine two pieces of fish that are identical in size, nutrition etc... However, one was simply grilled by a fisherman, while another was "expertly" prepared by a specialized chef. The latter costs 10 times as much. This extra cost is the social value that is being added to the food.

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".

My argument is that the "fundamental nutritional benefit" value is present in both types of fish while the fisherman/chef-prepared aspect is value-add on top of that baseline.

And the fixed baseline vs. subject-to-infinite-want value-add aspects make them categorically different.

> Once basic needs are satisfied you cannot double-satisfy them

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.

storing them doesn't give you the same value. instead of enabling people to be alive you're now only increasing a safety margin for those who are already living. and there are rapidly diminishing returns for increasing the storage factor.

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.

I think you might want to reconsider this. Arguably the first ever accumulation of capital in human history was grain storage in the ancient river civilizations (Egypt, Sumeria, Indus, etc.). Stockpiling capital in the form of grain reserves allowed these civilizations to shift labor efforts from subsistence farming to a more diverse range of economic activities.

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