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These are also precisely the kinds of things observed just before either (1) a market correction or (2) substantial inflation. This is not tenable.

This sounds like a personal hunch. Is there actually an observable pattern here? Can you give a source for this claim?

Everything is more expensive?

Labor

Housing

Gas

Food

Freaking computer components are more expensive! Those have always gone down.

As a direct response to the original post, it mentions 20% returns and doesn't seem to treat that as an outlier. That would indicate some serious inflation somewhere.

The broad money supply has shot up by almost 33% in roughly one year: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL. Even though some prices have already gone up, we haven't felt the full effect of this yet because we're still emerging out of the pandemic and money velocity hasn't reverted to trend: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V. Roughly speaking, price level = money velocity * broad money supply.

Money supply isn’t a thing which varies randomly, impacting the economy but not impacted by it. The money supply hasn’t shot up as some random event which will remain static if money velocity reverts to trend, it shot up specifically as a policy response to low velocity, and increasing velocity is one of the signals which will cause 8t to be reeled back in.

That's a pretty bold assertion when the M2 chart itself demonstrates that broad money supply has never contracted in any substantial way. Federal and corporate debt to GDP are also at historic highs, which is precisely the environment in which the Fed prefers to let inflation run hot.

The savings glut that occurred before the 2008 crash didn't go away.

> post-scarcity

I wanna know who the clown was that came up with this term, because there's a ton of stuff in the world that is scarce, you know, like homes.

"transitions to a post-scarcity economy" (emphasis mine)

There are no post-scarcity economies currently in existence, but with increasing automation such a thing may become possible in the future, and the transition may take a long time. There's no physical reason why homes must remain scarce forever, for example. That said, I don't think what paulpauper describes sounds like post-scarcity, as it's just about money; I think of things more like Iain M Banks's Culture.

This is such a silly and naive concept, though. It’s literal children’s logic. No one with the means to provide significant value to the masses is going to do so without commanding even commodity prices.

Are coffee beans free? No. Will they ever be? No. And yet, the world over produces tons of the stuff. What’s going to change in the next 50 years that would make them free? Nothing.

If anything, they’ll be more expensive then! Enjoy a cup while you’ve got the chance.

Some items have already reached post scarcity though? Take books for example. New books still have scarcity. A copy of any already written book however is effectively free when provided over the internet. The marginal cost to produce a copy of said book for another person is an infinitesimal percentage of a penny

You've hit on why people are easily seduced by the concept of post-scarcity.

Bits aren't free, but they are too cheap to meter. If I divide the time it takes to download an ebook by the amount I pay for Internet per month, it comes out to bupkis, even after I try and account for the percentage of my storage it uses up.

But a cup of sugar, and anything else made of atoms, is fundamentally different. There's no obvious route to sugar being too cheap to meter.

An old English idiom for getting something very cheap was "I got it for a song". So this kind of post-scarcity has been with us for a long time: anyone can sing a song, singing was never scarce.

Being too cheap for individuals or society to consider in their transactions and being completely free, are effectively the same to me.

You may feel otherwise, but if the distinction never makes a difference in the practical world then it does not enter my mind. Based on that metric, we already have post scarcity goods like already published books

You have entirely misunderstood me.

I’m fairly certain it’s the other way around. I agree that when you get to physical goods there’s no way it’s literally infinite. What I’m saying is that after a certain point it doesn’t matter.

If we had a sun sized amount of sugar available to humanity then it would be post scarcity even though it was actually getting used up by a measurable amount

You are arguing against a science fiction concept used as figure of speech

Are sure coffe beans wouldn't be free if we had Dyson-sphere leves of free energy providing magic-like stuff like replicators? Because that is a context in which post-scarcity is used literally

It's impossible unless we collectively decide to wind down our population to a point where every single individual can fulfill their wishes.

Just legally declare the bottom 50% homo sapiens by wealth as non human slaves and you already got there.

Wasn't it Marx?

> The labor force participation rate will keep falling as America transitions to a post-scarcity economy.

The wait time to get a new refrigerator is as high as 6 months right now for some people.

> The labor force participation rate will keep falling as America transitions to a post-scarcity economy.

America isn't in any danger of transitioning to poat-scarcity anything anytime soon, and I mean that with “soon” on a geological time scale.

Also, “post-scarcity” and “economy” are mutually exclusive; “economy” is the mechanism by which scarce resources are distributed. If you don’t have scarcity, you don’t have (or have any reason for) an economy.

> the probability approaches unity that someone will know someone who has a lot of money and thus does not need to work.

No, because the wealth is concentrated among a few people.

The idea that generational wealth multiplies the number of people who don't need to work is a ridiculous premise, but some people think this way.

Doesn’t look like a keep falling trend to me: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=Exyv

I've heard random uber drivers on the other side of the world talk about Dogecoin so you might want to include crypto in your list of why less people need to work now.

Crypto trading is a zero sum game.

Those Uber drivers either have confused unrealized gains with wealth, or have realized those gains by leaving someone else holding the bag. Probably someone else just like them.

Don't understand, your argument applies to any asset class.

Thats not the case. Certain asset classes are productive, for example stocks return cash to owners without the owners needing to divest themselves from them

Any other examples? Almost no average Joe retail investor owns stocks for the dividends.

Almost every investor is either directly or indirectly invested in companies that provide dividends.

As for other examples, housing is another popular one.

I'm aware but next to no one actually buys stocks for the dividends.

Housing market is same zero sum as OP described determined by investments in real estate instead of other assets

Any other examples?

The only reason anyone buys those assets is because of the divine share buybacks. Anything else is purely speculation and always reverts back to the mean.

Over the long term effectively 100% of all stock market returns comes from either dividends (and buybacks) or the companies increasing ability to pay dividends (through earnings growth).

I'm not sure why you think having a place to live ( or to rent to someone else) is not productive... mind explaining?

Companies do stock buy backs and dividends which put company money into the hands of investors. Companies that don't do this are abnormal.

>The labor force participation rate will keep falling as America transitions to a post-scarcity economy

What's the evidence that this is happening, or is going to happen? The top 3 categories in the CPI are housing, food, and transport. I can't imagine any of these transitioning to "post scarcity" any time soon. The only thing that can plausibly head toward post scarcity are education and recreation, which can be delivered digitally, but those only make up 3.0% and 5.8% of the CPI respectively.

None of this has anything to do with productivity growth. You're just getting free stuff from China and that can't last. Sure, take advantage of the free stuff to build a great nation that can do well without China and create a second China so you can transition from one source of free stuff to another because those are optimal strategies but don't rely on them exclusively.