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Comment by yojo | Hacker News Reader

I threw out some numbers to set a baseline of “this can’t go on forever.” I don’t pretend to know when it starts to transition, or the speed of the transition.

The fact that the rate of growth will someday slow means assumptions you make about your 401k may or may not hold if we happen to be at the wrong point on the curve.

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But humans also don’t have infinite demand on production. If we have a sufficiently high amount of production per capita (ie we are post-scarcity) then growth becomes irrelevant (especially if overall population isn’t growing, which with current trends seems reasonable). At that point the only thing is to ensure that output distribution is sufficiently equitable. We can then have millions of years of stable happy humanity with zero growth.

The rich will not give away their stuff. You’d probably have to give away 90% of your wealth to be level with the rest of the world. Also it is communism and it doesn’t work in practice.

Current world is not post-scarcity. However, there is a point where marginal value of “extra” stuff is essentially zero. When everyone can be at that level is what I mean by post-scarcity.

Would the world of today seem “post-scarcity” to a medieval peasant? I don’t think humanity will ever have “enough” — it’s just not in our nature.

I don’t agree. I don’t think we currently have enough stuff. As a techy in the US I make more than most, but there are still many material things that I can’t quite afford/have to limit myself. However, if production was 100x what it is now then perhaps I would be able to afford them. Post scarcity is at a production level far greater than current.

Also, higher production doesn’t mean higher natural resource consumption —- dematerialization is real. My phone satisfies my needs far more than a landline could but requires far less natural resources.

But don’t you think your desires would grow accordingly? To go back to my “medieval peasant” example, a simple shirt is something we take completely for granted and is arguably “post scarce”. But before industrialization, people would think of a shirt sort of like we think of cars today. It took months of labor to make one, and it cost orders of magnitude more what it costs today. So to those people “I would own a couple of really nice shirts” would have been a reasonable goal to aspire for. They simply could not imagine cars or iphones.

Your second point is an interesting one. I do think we’re gradually moving to a world of artificial scarcity (brand names, luxury goods, bitcoin etc.), plus some things will always be scarce by nature (access to important people, people’s time). So perhaps we’ll just discover that the connection between resource scarcity and human desires is accidental.

Yeah, my point rests on the idea of dematerialization going forward. I think people have finite capacity of desire for natural resource limited products and it is possible that we are not too unreasonably close to “peak physical stuff.” I can get better more “intelligent” clothing but I will never need 100000 unique clothing items simultaneously. On the other hand, immaterial needs may continue increasing, my desire for AI assistance, computer-human interfaces, and augmented reality may be massive, but those have low marginal cost.

I do also agree that certain things that are scarce by design or by their nature and will continue to be so.

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