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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

We live in a post-scarcity society now. We’ve just invented artificial scarcity to keep our current economic and social structures going.

For example there is plenty of food to feed the entire world, but some people still go hungry. There is plenty of land and buildings to house everyone, but some people are still homeless. There is far more than enough clothes, but some people still have to wear rags.

I don’t have the answer. But I know there’s more to it than technology and innovation. Because those have already given us what we need, in many cases. But we have so far failed to leverage them fully.

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>For example there is plenty of food to feed the entire world, but some people still go hungry.

This is because having a reliable food supply everywhere is not the same thing as growing enough food, on the aggregate, to be able to feed everyone. That's not even half of it. Distribution and logistics are key, particularly making it robust to all sorts of shocks (droughts, conflict, etc). A lot of areas experiencing famine/hunger are places with very bad governance and infrastructure. Fixing that is Hard and Expensive, and once you do they'll never go hungry again because existing food available for sale elsewhere in the world will make its way there, either always or when needed.

>I don’t have the answer. But I know there’s more to it than technology and innovation.

The answer is in social innovation, and half the issue is letting go of ideological baggage. Socialists need to stop having pavlovian responses to the word 'capitalism' and 'markets', and economic liberals need to stop treating markets as a sacred cow and instead think of them as one tool in a toolbox. Most importantly, we need way more experimentation.

> Socialists need to stop having pavlovian responses to the word 'capitalism' and 'markets', and economic liberals need to stop treating markets as a sacred cow and instead think of them as one tool in a toolbox.

Suppose I were to suggest that we think of Feudalism as a tool in the box, or Slavery/Forced labor. Some economies used to be run like that. And nobody said you have to use that "tool". The thing is - it's not really a tool, which "we" can collectively apply towards reaching accepted social ends. And neither is Capitalism.

By that measure then neither is socialism due to the massive harm it has caused throughout history. So I guess we have no tools.

I hate how people push centralized government and economies without a single shred of evidence that they have ever produced anything other than misery.

>So I guess we have no tools.

What kind of nonsense is that? We already have the tools, land value taxes and negative interest rates aka demurrage money.

The solutions are trivial, and that is exactly why curing the symptoms can be nothing but complex.

Demurrage money results in the neutrality of money and thereby activates a lot of economic theories that free market advocates take for granted when there is endless evidence that they don't work in a permanent money aka non neutral money system.

Full employment is the default in a market economy, there is no such thing as a business cycle. It is only once you add non neutral money with the artificial zero lower bound that you get monetary cycles.

If money is neutral, then debts won't have to grow eternally and there is no need to erode them with inflation.

> I hate how people push centralized government and economies...

You must be one of those anarcho-communists.

>This is because having a reliable food supply everywhere is not the same thing as growing enough food, on the aggregate, to be able to feed everyone.

It's more that the people who cant get enough food dont have anything that the people who have an excess of it really want.

Global wealth distribution is more the issue than logistics and that wealth includes legal monopolies on all the worlds most arable lands intrinsically backed by the threat of violence.

> It's more that the people who cant get enough food dont have anything that the people who have an excess of it really want.

Sure they do. It's just that forefingers own everything of value in their countries and every time they elect someone to do something about it, the US violently overthrows them, covertly or overtly.[1]

1. https://github.com/binka/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md

Thats kind of another way of saying the same thing.

Food aid is a thing. There are already organizations set up to distribute surplus food production. The problem is not that they developed world is greedy, it’s that the developing world is run mostly by criminals that are willing to steal the money and food that charities and governments try to give to people in need.

What are these legal monopolies on arable land? Do you mean the countries that contain the land or something else?

> it’s that the developing world is run mostly by criminals that are willing to steal the money and food that charities and governments try to give to people in need.

This is silly. You say that as if the western countries aren't the same and didn't put those people in power...

Western governments most certainly aren't the same, and didn't put those people in power, certainly not in the last 30-40 years.

Ultimately, the ideology of not having an ideology, or centrism, favors the status quo, which is not a great way of creating the change you want to see in the world. You will always take actions depending on the results you want. Ideology serves as a way of understanding the change you want to see, and which actions are the most useful and powerful to take. Ideology can also serve as a way of finding likeminded people, promoting your ideals and organizing.

Also, it's funny how you blame socialists for society not being able to fix the problems of capitalism.

> We live in a post-scarcity society now.

people say that, but it's not true.

We barely have enough to launch stuff into space. There's plenty of limits of resources, and are hard to obtain (e.g., rare earth metals, fossil fuels, etc).

Even a small shortage of fertilizers will reduce food production such that some people are looking at starvation - of course, not in the western countries, but that's not what a post-scarcity society looks like.

Not being able to send things into space is not scarcity. Food, education, transportation, housing, healthcare, life's necessities.

if you were able to send things into space (which should be easy to achieve for such a society), then it's evidence we're in a post-scarcity society.

By the lack of being able to send much to space, we must not currently be in a post-scarcity society, because space exploration is such a good and exciting thing to do, you'd expect that it's one of the first things to get accomplished by a post-scarcity society.

That isn't what post-scarcity means. It doesn't mean there is zero scarcity. It means basic needs are easily met: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

You're making claims about how space things align with post-scarcity that doesn't match up with the accepted meaning.

Even still, we _can_ send stuff into space, now cheaper than ever. What is the threshold for "send much to space"? Any person can order up a rocket payload on Amazon.space and have it placed in orbit? That doesn't sound good even if it were free. Especially if it were free...

> space exploration is such a good and exciting thing to do, you'd expect that it's one of the first things to get accomplished by a post-scarcity society

Why?

> Not being able to send things into space is not scarcity.

Strictly speaking, this is false.

Thank you. OP statement is at odds with basic facts. We have nothing like the technology from Star Trek that allows for easy generation of goods or even Transmetropolitan. We have some level of current population satisfied, but even that is at a pretty high cost.

I genuinely do not understand how people can claim 'post scarcity' ( unlimited ) access to resources on a, clearly, very limited resource that is Earth.

Very simply, “post scarcity” does not mean unlimited availability of everything.

That feels like a redefinition or at least like a huge asterisk is being added. If you need a term to mean “only the basics are covered” you could do better. Post scarcity naturally implies no limits even if your semantics differ.

> If you need a term to mean “only the basics are covered” you could do better.

exactly, this is what i have issue with calling post-scarcity.

may be the term could be "universal basic income capable" (UBI-able).

> Even a small shortage of fertilizers will reduce food production such that some people are looking at starvation

This is only because we pretend that the free market can solve these kinds of problems. If it weren't for supply chains that optimize in cost efficiency and nothing else, these sort of problems don't necessarily have to exist.

It's kinda true, it's just a monkey's paw, careful what you wish for sort of way.

We could absolutely give everyone on earth the median standard of living. If we divided everything up equally (84.71 trillion [global GDP] / 7.753 billion [world population]) we are talking about something like 11 grand per person, per year, total overall spending. That's housing, food, healthcare, fire, police, roads, schooling, etc.

For most people on earth that would be a big raise[0], although virtually everyone in the west would be dramatically poorer.

[0]https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/08/news/economy/global-low-inc...

Just remember that divvying up money doesn't have the effect of ensuring a decent standard of living. If you go to some person living in a slum of some under-developed city in an under-developed country, and you gave them 11K USD, they would be able to buy some consumption goods, rennovate their apartment etc. - but they would not be able to buy decent education for their children (let alone themselves); nor decent health care services (they would be able to afford a few visits to an overpriced doctor); etc.

11k probably isn't enough to provide much by way of public health or education anyway once you buy all the essentials, I was just making the point that the number includes government spending so if you increase that you lower the amount of income each person will get.

Also, giving one person 11k is very different from giving everyone 11k.

Post scarcity should not imply that people live in material luxury. It should mean that people have their fundamental needs met, both materially and psycologically (e.g. having enough food is insufficient if there is no food security, say due to droughts).

People can still lead a good life by focussing upon social rather than material facets. We do not need communications networks to socialize, nor do we need overpowered silicon chips to entertain. This is not to dismiss the positive roles of those technologies. Better communications and computation certainly help in everything from agriculture to medicine. It is just that using them as a proxy in applications where they do not contribute to human welfare can be tremendously counterproductive. The same thing can be said for space exploration, perhaps even more assertively since it is a huge drain of resources with a disproportionately isolated gain.

We went from being 95% farmers to 2% farmers. Meeting our physical needs used to be hard. Now it's easy.

Just because it's easy doesn't mean we don't fuck it up, because of course we do. We push everyone as hard as we can, sending the benefits up the social pyramid and the problems down the social pyramid. When the system experiences a shock, it gets sent down the social pyramid and crunches the people at the bottom.

We could do better, but we choose not to. This is what post-scarcity looks like in a world that hasn't figured out how to share. The core problem is: the more someone has the ability to change the system, the more incentives they have to not change the system.

You forget that those 2% of farmers are now supported by the entire bulk of an industrial economy. The work hasn’t disappeared, it’s just moved to other sectors like tractor and fertilizer production, genetic research, the petroleum industry, shipping networks, refrigeration and all the other things that make it possible to produce so much food with a small number of farmers. Until we automate all of that we’re no where near post scarcity.

If you added up the "roots" of that 2%, it would multiply by a small factor. Wooo. Big deal. Same conclusion: we're not just post scarcity, we're distantly post-scarcity.

Most of which could be straightforwardly marshaled to handle food logistics, thus solving this problem, except that there are other priorities that are apparently more important.

(Those priorities are not, in fact, more important.)

There is only artificial scarcity in some places. Ensuring a plentiful food (and other resource supplies) in many, many places of the world would require a great many invasions and occupations to root out corruption and snuff out local warlords, abusive military juntas, etc.

It isn't as simple as "just send other places more food" when the local power-tripping dictator will just seize the foreign aid

> We live in a post-scarcity society now.

This.

I repeat this over and over again, so sincere apologies to those who are tired of it, I'm a Bucky Fuller fan boy. He was an engineer who had a kind of epiphany one day, and he realized that he could maximize the benefit for humanity of his personal skills and talents if he did his best to work on behalf of all humanity. He went on to invent things like the geodesic dome, and was one of the most famous Americans world wide in his time. He traveled around the world something like eighty times (not eighty days, eighty times.)

Anyway, he calculated (remember he was an engineer) that if we applied our technology and resources efficiently to solving our basic human needs (the lower tiers of Maslow's pyramid, eh?) then by sometime in the 1970's it should be possible that people could have careers of only two years duration and then retire, having accrued enough wealth to live "happily ever after" for the rest of their lives.

> ...there’s more to it than technology and innovation. Because those have already given us what we need, in many cases. But we have so far failed to leverage them fully.

Yes. The technology arrived right on schedule, but the (relatively simple) logistical arrangements have not yet materialized.

This seems to me to be a straightforward social/political movement. But it seemed that way back in the 60's with Bucky's "Design Science Revolution" as he called it, yet here we are.

So, yeah, we have all the technology we need, we just have to organize and apply it efficiently and everybody on Earth could have food, shelter, clothes, energy, etc. Not only that, but we could do it in ecologically harmonious ways so that we're increasing the healthy and vitality of the world rather than grinding it down (as most of our systems do today.)

It would be fun and easy.

I have no idea why it's not more popular.

To quote the man:

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

Land will always be scarce. People multiply until that land gets to the limit of what it can provide.

Energy is also scarce. A limited amount of solar energy falls on the Earth, and if you need more than that, it gets very expensive (from space somehow).

Food is limited by labor (which scales with people) but also by energy and land (which do not).

As such, there will always be scarcity, signalled through prices. One way of making resources more abundant per person is capping/reducing population.

Space habitats are not really land limited. Yes our sun has a finite amount of power but by the time we use percent of it we can colonize other stars. Labour can be automated. Plants are not growing more complicated with time so at some point robotics can handle it.

Land, sure, they aren't making more of it.

Energy? Is not scarce. I'm not even in the top 25% of travel for people who have been in an airplane one time, and I've done the equivalent of several circumnavigations.

Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget to split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and lately they can have a small solar panel and light as well. That's not scarce energy.

It would be great if it was even less scarce, sure.

> Energy? Is not scarce. I'm not even in the top 25% of travel for people who have been in an airplane one time, and I've done the equivalent of several circumnavigations.

This is a terrible bar. By even being on an airplane just once you are already in the top 20% of the world. If you’ve done several circumnavigations you’re outside of the category of flying once or twice for major life events which puts you in the top 1%.

> Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget to split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and lately they can have a small solar panel and light as well. That's not scarce energy

This is a really uninformed view of the energy requirements to sustain human life. Transportation, getting people food/water, and HVAC dominates this. Enough energy to run a cell phone is a joke.

It's not the energy to run a cell phone. It's the embodied energy of a cell phone and solar panel. It's the 20 kilo bags of grain which come off the boat in Egypt from Alberta. It's the cell towers, it's the bulk shipper which brings the grain, it's the container which transports the cell phones and panels.

A world in which anyone at all is flying around the world in dozens of passenger jets several times just in the course of living has an enormous amount of available energy relative to any time in history. If this is scarce, we don't have a word for what it was like before.

Related on HN this week:

> A lightning bolt would be worth only about a nickel

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834627

> Land, sure, they aren't making more of it.

Actually they are. My city is dumping earth into a lake to make new land for residential development. And China is literally building islands in the sea to extend its domain.

Another way to make resources more abundant that sounds less like the start of a 1960s dystopian novel is simply using resources more efficiently.

So much of society in western nations and especially the US is seemingly optimized to be as wasteful as possible. We live in mansions surrounded by unused land so we have to drive our personal gas-burning suit of armor everywhere, and then we store it in fields of asphalt at our destination. We put resources subsidizing foods that no one will eat, and then ship them to people in ways that maximize the labor to goods transported ratio.

In the US at least, there really just isn't much motivation to be more efficient because the past couple of generations have been raised on perpetual abundance.

It's a bit dystopian (if not wrong) to say that people will multiply until land is scarce, but to a large extent the problem is that cows and cars have multiplied until land is scarce. Removing/reducing those woudl go a long ways.

Cows are not making land scarce and cars could be said to increase the supply of land because they allow you to access more of it.

Cars are one of many ways to increase land supply and probably the least resource and fiscally efficient way to do it. If we want to make mobility and housing cheaper then we need to make these both more efficient. Car dependency is expensive, but changing it is one of the many things we need to do before we can become a post-scarcity society.

Cars suffer from the same problem as space rockets - the tyranny of the load/thrust equation.

For space rockets, the further you want to go, the more fuel you must carry, but all that fuel weighs something until burned, so you need yet more fuel just to launch the other fuel into space. So as your rocket's range increases, the needed fuel to reach that range grows at least polynomially.

For cars, having one enables you to drive to places... but those places need gas stations and parking. The more cars there are, the greater the proportion of land dedicated to roads, refueling and parking. But then there's less space for the places you'd actually want to go, pushing them further. And then you need more gas stations and parking to get that far. And then there's less space again. Repeat ad infinitum.

I don't think solar energy is the only type of energy. And if you are at "we are running out of square meters of land to put solar panels on", space might actually be viable at that level of advancement.

Food is not limited by labor, or specifically scarce any more than any other good. In fact it's not obvious to me it will always require labor at all.

Strictly speaking, all goods are scarce if you don't have an infinite number of them. But I think we are lazily saying "scarce" when we mean something like "unavoidably zero sum". The only thing you list which has that is land.

It's the only type of renewable energy. All other renewable energies depend on the heat from the sun to work. The earth's core doesn't generate enough to fully satisfy our current needs, there's a finite quantity of uranium, plutonium, coal, oil, etc.

Of course, all of this is on a scale well beyond what we need to (currently) be concerned with- we don't have the technology to fully utilize what we have to fully eliminate scarcity in the first place.

> People multiply until that land gets to the limit of what it can provide.

One of the big things we learned during the 20th Century is that this is not true. As basic needs are met, and people (especially women) are educated and socially empowered, population growth slows regardless of how much land is available.

Also, as the danger shrinks. It's similar to, but not the same as, basic needs being met. But as medicine reduces the need to have 17 kids to have one survive to adulthood, people have fewer kids.

The existence of negative interest rates empirically disproves that there will always be scarcity.

After all, a zero percent interest rate implies the non scarcity of capital.

Profit implies scarcity. Hence once you have abundance people come up with the broken window fallacy, because nobody has figured how to reduce the return on capital to something a saturated economy can support.

> We live in a post-scarcity society now.

Not if you include the population of the world outside of a few rich western countries.

No that's their point. We could provide for everyone but we do not. I disagree with that like you might, but you're missing the point.

No we can’t, that’s the point.

The only people who live in an almost post-scarcity society are people living in rich regions of rich countries. Most of humanity is nowhere near there.

I think OPs point is that we could be living be a “post-scarcity” world today if we simply distributed existing resources equitably to everyone.

The problem isn’t we haven’t solved how to make enough food to feed everyone, it’s that it’s not profitable to feed those that can’t pay for it.

"...if we simply distributed existing resources equitably to everyone"

There's nothing simple about distribution. It's at least as hard as producing stuff in the first place.

Solving distribution in a way that is both fair and economically sustainable has also proved to be extremely hard--much harder than just producing enough.

Despite the moral problems inherent to market-based pricing (the poor go to the back of the line), all the alternatives we've tried so far have led to far worse results.

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