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Comment by md2020 | Hacker News Reader

md2020

I don’t understand how a post-scarcity society would even be desirable. For things like art and music, their creators need to be able to command a price on their creations. The digitization of these things removes their scarcity and essentially makes them function as a public good, making it impossible to set a price on them that will support the artist. If there’s no way for digital artists to support themselves, then they’ll cease to exist. Extend this to any other proposed “post-scarcity X” and you get a society I wouldn’t really want to live in. This isn’t meant to be flippant, I’m genuinely curious if there’s something here I’m missing.

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The artist won't starve if all the basics of living are free. Universal basic income or some other scheme could maintain the means of economic transactions, but post-scarcity fundamentally means that everyone is taken care of to a minimum basic standard of living. Food, water, healthcare, shelter, sanitation, and safety are available by default to every citizen. An artist would only ever starve or suffer if they renounced the basics.

The nature of economics and markets changes radically in ways we can't predict. Post-scarcity systems could be fundamentally unstable concurrent with fungible currencies of the type we use now. New mechanisms of valuation based on time and so on might take hold, or it might require distribution of resources in ways not yet considered. The point being that incentives and accumulation of wealth will be radically different to the extent that there's not a clean or obvious connection to current incentives that drive human behavior.

> I don’t understand how a post-scarcity society would even be desirable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_vulture_and_the_little_gir...

> If there’s no way for digital artists to support themselves, then they’ll cease to exist.

They'll have day jobs and create art on the weekends and evenings. Alternately, they'll be sponsored through some full-time fellowship to create art.

> They'll have day jobs and create art on the weekends and evenings. Alternately, they'll be sponsored through some full-time fellowship to create art.

If public wants a specific artist to create a specific art, they will be forced to pay such artist money to incentive them. Examples: patreon, Kickstarter, etc.

>making it impossible to set a price on them that will support the artist.

What part of post-scarcity don't you understand? Money doesn't matter. Post-scarcity.

> Money doesn’t matter.

That would be a pretty huge departure from how we currently create and transact anything of value, so I’d say I don’t understand that.

Nothing to be ashamed of tbqh. Post-scarcity is the type of thing that will probably give everyone nowadays nightmares and existential ennui.

Imagine life where the guy bumming on the street and the guy working hard at his craft are both contributing the same amount in the long run because there is more than enough to keep everyone living comfortably, with no need to actually compete.

In fact, I imagine the trauma of the paradigm shift could very well break a generation or so adjusting to it.

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