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Comment by danuker | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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