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Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

>There's no obvious upper limit to how many desires could be satiated,

Of course there is: 100%

If all desires are satisfied, there is no growth.

You are assuming the conclusion. If someone can desire 100 heads of lettuce a year. They can also desire (with much less marginal utility) 100,000 heads of lettuce per year if only to bury them back into the ground in which they were grown. This is what is meant by desires are unbounded.

The more you desire the more time you need to check the fulfillment of your desires.

Because every humans time and attention span is limited, his desires are limited too.

That's begging the question. What constitutes 100% of desires, in a fully mature economy?

Who, 200 years ago, even knew how badly they wanted an OLED television? You don't even know what you might want in the economy of 2122 and succeed or fail at satisfying.

I do not believe this is how humans work.

That's how sane humans work.

That's the beauty of consumerism; capitalism constantly invents new desires to be satisfied.

It's deeper than that. How long do people tend to stay happy after they get what they long desired (material or otherwise)?

Especially if their neighbor/co-worker/social peer just got the bigger and better version?

Sounds more like a mental than economical problem.

We could end desire with various combination of drugs, brain surgery, or generic engineering.

This seems dystopian to me.

I don’t know which is less dystopian though, that, or a Malthusian crisis in a K3 civilization, or any of the other ways this can go wrong.

I am hopeful for the future in many ways; this may well be solvable.

No need to go dystopian.

There a difference between desire and greed.

If you are never satisfied you are greedy and should seek mental help, it's the same with being hungry no matter how much you eat.

Such people exist, and enough don’t seek help.

Would you choose to force them to get help, or would you choose to let them consume ever more?

>If you are never satisfied

That is the human condition though. No matter how much we have we soon get used to it, take it for granted and start looking for more.

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

Economics was literally invented by man. It is a social science although economists will deny this even under pain of torture.

And much of economics describes the behavior of psychopaths.

The demonization of Economics is as common amongst the fringe left as the demonization of vaccination is amongst the fringe right.

The fringe of Economics is evil.

Gordon Gekko and Jordan Belfort are the bad guys

Gordon Gekko and Jordan Belfort are not economists..

Striving for relative prosperity compared to others seems like an inherent mechanism for human mating rather than capitalism.

Is there an upper limit to bliss?

It's certainly not limitless, lets say that.

If you assume bliss is something neurons in the brain need to tell keep telling each other about so that it doesn't naturally fade, you can saturate the physical medium that transports the signal, and there comes a point where being too vigorous breaks the wires

Intuitively, there's a much lower limit to how much bliss I desire. Too much of a good thing sounds like a bad thing, I do not want that :)

Kerfentanyl, apparently...

until we learn how to reverse entropy, there will always be human desire

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