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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

> We need to figure out how to live in The World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention.

There's a sense in which this statement embodies the fulcrum of the liberal/conservative divide. The liberal outlook is that scarcity is a largely solved problem, a historical artifact if only we had the political will to distribute resources intelligently. The conservative outlook is that scarcity is real, immediate, inherent in the structure of the world, and at best separated from us by a few days of disaster or revolution.

If you believe the former, you can start preparing for a world after capital, because capital has little point without scarcity. If you believe the later, the former program sounds like a formula for the manufacture of scarcity.

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There's another perspective that takes parts of both: we're a lot less likely to have a few days of disaster and revolution, and get through it faster and better if it happens, if the maximum number of people have what they need to survive. Think of how many people die because they can't afford to evacuate ahead of a hurricane (if there's enough warning to begin with), or suffer greater loss because they can't afford a home built to a sufficient standard. Guillotines look a lot less friendly under a less precarious lens.

So who are these people that take the "both" perspective because that does not represent the conservative ideology at all -- which is based upon "personal responsibility" aka you get what you deserve. There is no call from conservatives for government intervention to make the poor less vulnerable.

Personal responsibility is just a convenient excuse for selfish behavior. It's about constructing an elaborate story about why you shouldn't or don't have to help other people.

When you just throw out "personal responsibility" people stop thinking about the topic from a problem solving perspective and instead think about it from a moral perspective.

It's especially true when people call each other lazy. Most of the time they are the ones who are too lazy to figure out the real problem. For example. Just assume everyone has a credit card. Then you can blame people for taking pay day loans. The real problem is that they don't have a credit card meanwhile everyone will tell you an elaborate story how stupid you are e.g. for not having friends that lend you money.

> people stop thinking about the topic from a problem solving perspective

Individual rando citizens shouldn't be the ones "thinking about" infrastructural problems. That's what government and experts are for.

> Just assume everyone has a credit card

Not everyone who has a poor credit score/rating is stupid/irresponsible/to-blame, but I'm sure the majority are. But the majority will probably also claim to be blameless.

The problem is there are two problems - the major one is the irresponsible. The minor one is the unfortunate. But protecting yourself from the irresponsible usually distancing yourself from the unfortunate as well. That said, most of the unfortunate you are likely to meet are at least a little irresponsible too, confounding the issue.

Most people are irresponsible in some way, but the consequences scale exponentially with misfortune in countries without a functional social safety net. The vast underclass this creates is what leads to the revolutions feared upthread.

Someone who spends $10 on a lottery ticket because he doesn't understand what $10 can become or believe he can do better is no more irresponsible than the rich person who tips the $500 change in his pocket because he doesn't understand money anymore, but the latter is not likely to face any consequences for long enough that it probably won't matter.

It's arguable that those who live with high risk (no safety net) need to therefore be less irresponsible.

I'd argue revolution in these environment happen less due to the irresponsible poor, but rather the irresponsible bureaucrats whose corruption allows them this behaviour.

> Someone who spends $10 on a lottery ticket..

I don't think measures of "irresponsible" are independent of consequences. If the consequences are low, is it no longer (personally) irresponsible since that take into account the results. On the contrary, the most irresponsible acts are those that are small or easy, but of great consequences - such as agreeing to a high-interest loan.

AFAIC someone wasting money they can afford to waste is not irresponsible, they are just wasteful.

I wasn't talking in terms of some vague "conservative," whatever that means in this age of failed coups led by, participated in, and defended by self-described conservatives in positions of power and influence.

There are things that lead to disasters and revolutions. There are differing circumstances that lead to better or worse outcomes in these situations. Whatever ideological lens goes in front of that is not my concern or business as long as its aims are pro-social and inclusive. I care about good outcomes, who experiences them, and who doesn't.

Or, as Sowell would describe it, the unconstrained vs. constrained visions: https://www.nku.edu/~gartigw/teaching_files/Weaver%20ch%2012...

It doesn't matter if scarcity is "real" or not, because human's always create it where it doesn't already exist.

Which is why any post-scarcity argument will eventually boil down to either "You don't really want that" or "here's a separate but equal replacement" or "nobody can have it".

You're absolutely correct but how much scarcity impacts you depends on how high the scarce thing is up the hierarchy of needs. There is not an infinite amount of monopolies that ruin your day. There are maybe three important ones. The monopoly of money, land and patents. There are probably a thousand others but they just don't matter that much.

They matter because if the ones you mention are divided equally among everyone, then the previously unimportant ones become the real bargaining chips.

The cost of making goods is extremely cheap and will only go down as the cost of energy decreases. This is not an ideological statement.

ETA: HN says I am replying too quickly.

here is my reply to the replies: argue against what I wrote. I said the cost of making goods is going down. Not that rare things will no longer exist. And I certainly did not speak to arbitrarily valued things like baseball cards (lol?) and "numbered art".

Who even cares? That's not remotely in the realm of discussion. No one said lowered energy costs will increase the existence of Kanye West signatures.

The point is the price of goods is going down. It means higher per capita production output. That is the only thing I said. That means cheaper houses. It means cheaper consumer goods. Not "nothing rare will ever exist again" or even "nothing will ever be scarce" -- it means the things we need to survive are no longer resource or labor gated, they are closed off as an act of political will.

If you want, make two different currencies. Some basic gov't scrip for necessities - housing, food, shelter, closing, and you can use BTC or whatever for your rich people shit and pay as much as you want for collectible shoes or whatever catches your fancy.

People will largely not care because they won't be literally starving and dying from lack of access to physiological necessities.

>If you want, make two different currencies. Some basic gov't scrip for necessities - housing, food, shelter, closing, and you can use BTC or whatever for your rich people shit and pay as much as you want for collectible shoes or whatever catches your fancy.

If everyone has equal or unlimited rent money, then the apartment goes to who ever pays asking price (or rent controlled price) plus gifts the cosplaying landlord the "collectable shoes".

That "rich people shit" becomes the differentiating factor in otherwise equal cash prices/offers. It's inseparable.

How does the "two forms of currencies" currently work out for things like EBT/SNAP benefits or section 8 housing? Scarcity doesn't disappear, it just gets shifted to other mechanisms besides cash.

>People will largely not care because they won't be literally starving and dying from lack of access to physiological necessities.

We've been beyond that in the US for a while now, to the point of obesity epidemic.

Free education, free school meals, free home and weekend meals, free SNSP/EBT on top of free school meals, free health insurance, free housing vouchers, free phones/data,

Any necessities not being met in the US today is due to neglegent parenting, not lack of resources.

> Any necessities not being met in the US today is due to neglegent parenting, not lack of resources.

The data doesn't lie: there is still childhood hunger and homelessness in the US.

You can play the blame game and say the parents should do a better job of navigating a clunky and hostile bureaucracy, but while we're doing that, children are going without food and shelter. Is that an outcome we're willing to accept so we can point our fingers and say the parents were wrong?

Unique items. Real estate. Numbered artwork. Baseball cards. Antique cars. Transferable automatic weapons. Anything anyone ever bought because of who the previous owner was.

How's the supply of beach-front houses doing, relative to the demand? If the cost of energy decreases, are we going to have more of them?

Some kinds of scarcity can be solved by cheap energy. Not all can. (I suppose that the kinds that are needs instead of wants are more likely to be solvable with cheap energy.)

"Post-scarcity" economics as a concept is specifically about needs and not wants.

But when "needs" are satisfied "equally", "wants" become extremely relevant in the allocation of those resources.

> are we going to have more of them?

Dubai thinks so ;-)

Got a job offer one from one of those companies.

The SEC public disclosures are hilariously blunt on how just one of a handful autonomous rulers could have a spontaneous change of heart that would effectively tank the company.

This ignores another resource - power. Power is built in to all resources, to the degree that you can deny resources to others.

If resources are distributed they won't stay that way. Hence you can really "distribute" them freely, but rather "allocate" whereby some authority maintains the distribution, and hence has control over the resource in some capacity.

From that perspective, lack of scarcity is never guaranteed to exist because equal distribution is not guaranteed to persist, without intervention at least.

It's also a (conservative?) idea that control of resources is what binds society in terms of motivation. that co-dependence is actually a good thing. At the very least, even though I don't agree that society couldn't exist without scarcity, I do agree that:

- current society is built on scarcity, and won't seamlessly transition to a viable post-scarcity just because you remove scarcity. - American society is dependant of tribal power-struggles more than most, and hence will fare even worse. - Many nations are not so abundant that they are too far from scarcity. Without long-term planned fail-safes, small disasters can bring it right back. Governance is mostly hands off - citizens are left to themselves, which is why most think in terms of self-preservations.

> if only we had the political will to distribute resources intelligently.

Do you mean like USSR tried to do it ?

The root premise of free market (with transparency and regulation) is the most efficient system of resources distribution.

> The root premise of free market (with transparency and regulation) is [...]

I'm not aware of the existence of such a free market, properly regulated, outside of liberal economics textbooks. The claim that free markets are intrinsically efficient is based on unsupportable assumptions about the behaviour of "economic agents" (i.e. individuals).

Incidentally, this notion of a "free market (with transparency and regulation)" appears to be a contradiction in terms. If the market is subject to rules, then in what sense is it free? What kinds of regulation are consistent with the market's freedom? There must be some kinds of regulation that would render a market non-free; for example, rules on who can own a business. Can you regulate press ownership in a free market? Is there such a thing as a person that is "unfit" to be a company director?

Most of the modern world's scarcity comes from norms both legal and social. The idea that someone can own a warehouse full of goods or large sections of land and be able to leverage the power of state violence to prevent others from utilizing those resources even if they never do is the central problem that plagues our civilization. We're great at producing stuff but we're terrible at assigning it or allocating it because someone has to 'own' the things in question.

Oversimplifying the universe only leads to misunderstandings and false choices.

>If you believe the former, you can start preparing for a world after capital, because capital has little point without scarcity. If you believe the later, the former program sounds like a formula for the manufacture of scarcity.

Where is the middle ground? The capital is the source of abundance. You need to maintain and take care of it. Neither side is willing to do that. The liberals will neglect it resulting in scarcity. The conservatives will destroy it because they can't handle abundance.

Zimbabwe had liberal land reforms that neglected doing actual farm work.

The conservatives will abolish farm subsidies to prevent overproduction of grains because they believe the extra labor can be used on something more productive. Then a drought hits and you don't have enough food.

Where is the middle ground? Build and create capital but also let it stay idle if its not needed rather than dismantling it.

This basically sounds like Scott Alexander’s ‘thrive—survive’ distinction: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory...

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