I see it as much more likely that things become monopolized instead
But specifically for food the situation is different. There’s so much food that much of it gets thrown away, instead of getting to the hungry in time. It’s an allocation and efficiency problem.
It's convenient to measure whether food production would theoretically be enough: take the quantities an adult need, count the throughput of optimal production of proteins, carbs etc. The cost however is meaningless because most of what we spend on is transport, marketing, storage, packaging, shelving, etc. that's what we count when we say that a household spends x% on food.
We can do the same for the volume of T-shirts, sqm of housing, etc.
This is roughly comparable to Cambodia or Myanmar in 2011.
The world is still extremely poor.
[0] - https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/9360016358808857...
We didn't manage to have an apparent state of abundance with slavery, which is arguably the finest of our exploitive practices. We do manage to have a state of abundance because of the ubiquity of cheap sources of energy, oil in particular.
I'm deeply convinced that current exploitive practices are a consequence of inequalities, no resources scarcity.
Were we not in abundance the day before but now we are? What changed?
Also, bringing money into the game makes the responsibility stronger. Especially if those two persons are not living in a vacuum, but have other bills to pay [edit: i.e., to make other people do things for them]. Money is there to make people do things more reliably if there is no other relationship between the buyer and the seller.
“ Economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income. The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.”
This isn't the case with purchasing-power adjusted GDP, which is specifically adjusted to account for the actual purchasing power of people's money.
Look at the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_GDP_per_capita_vs_me... - huge disparity between mostly flat income versus rapidly growing per-capita
Not sure where PPP puts it but the median figure will be lower because you can get a lot richer than you can get poorer.
Nobody's stopping you giving all your excess income above 18k to charity. If you try to make other people do it, you'll find a lot of people would rather just stop working than give away the majority of their income, which is why the economy collapsed and tens of millions of people starved in China and Russia after their communist revolutions.
Americans in the 50s were a lot happier than Americans in the 2020s, very little mental illness or obesity, housing was affordable, people weren't at each others' throats like nowadays.
Shame about the institutional racism, mysoginy, homophobia, etc though.
It basically says more about the overriding culture the games are made within than anything about market economies.
I also find myself thinking like a rat in a maze towards markets as well. But I also remind myself that far more innovative thought is put towards hustling other rats in the maze than working out how to get out.
The problem is inequalities and the inefficiency of how we use the resources, it doesn't look like we'll change that soon, sadly. I'm more prone to think that in a "virtual" economy we'll still have miserable workers to empty the chamber-pots of the lucky ones who are plugged in the new world.
It's only a post-scarcity world if you define scarcity by absence of enough resources to satisfy the bare-minimum required for existence. People don't want to live at the subsistence level, and we're not evenly remotely close to having enough resources to satisfy everybody's wants.
What people want is defined by society. Somehow some people want to be alone in a 2 tons EV, a 200 sqm mansion for a family of 4 and retire at 40. Others are tremendously happy with a much, much less resources intensive lifestyles.
You would also need to define what is part of the subsistence level. I'd put it roughly at what my grandma wanted: food, shelter, healthcare, some leisure time.
A bit more than that is absolutely doable in a civilisation that went from one farmer to feed 1.3 people to one farmer to feed 60 people.
You just undermined your own assertion. If what people want was defined by society, then everybody would want the same things. But in fact as you stated they don't; some people want a lot, some people want little. There's no way you're going to stop people wanting nice things short of killing the 90% of the population that aren't ascetics, which you'll never be able to do (at least in the US) because that's also the part of the population that owns most of the guns.
I'd go even a bit further as to say that what is important is probably what people "need", not "want". Apparently we mostly "want" as much as we can have anyway, because that used to be helpful for not dying before being able to reproduce enough.
> because that's also the part of the population that owns most of the guns
That made me giggle
Which makes you a self-righteous prick, thinking you have the right to determine what other people should and shouldn't have.
What does it make you, to think that you are entitled to anything you want regardless of resources limits and collective good?
We have enough food to feed the entire world, and enough clothes to cloth the entire world. It could be a good start