I noted elsewhere that this is undergoing major revisions ahead of submissions to IJPS[1]. Riane Eisler read it and asked that I submit. I started working with a co-author a few months ago and he is a published anthropologist so my hope is to have a version done just focusing on the core claims this year.
This claim seems highly implausible to me as well. There is enough food in my house to feed its occupants for about a week. Is that "hoarding"? I have retirement savings put by so that I will be able to support myself once I stop working. Is that "hoarding"?
What determines what you call "access to resources" (itself a misleading way to put it, IMO) in developed countries is trade. People trade goods or services they produce for money, which they then trade for things they need or want. And this is not "competition for resources". It is cooperation in creating wealth. Practically nobody in a developed country produces goods or services purely by their own efforts; we all cooperate with many other people in the course of doing our jobs. (Which, btw, is perfectly compatible with private property rights--indeed, it requires them. See below.)
The reason this doesn't happen in less developed countries is that it's not allowed to: just as corrupt governments in those countries confiscate aid from developed countries, they also confiscate any wealth that is created by their people. So their people have no incentive to create any wealth through cooperation and trade, since they're not going to gain any benefit from it anyway. In other words, they know they will have no private property rights in what they produce, so they don't bother producing.
That sounds way too much like capitalism.
>What determines what you call "access to resources" (itself a misleading way to put it, IMO) in developed countries is trade. People trade goods or services they produce for money, which they then trade for things they need or want.
"Trade" only makes sense to the extent that human labor is in demand. When there is excess production, the resource already exists and there is no need for further labor. At that point the additional labor has devolved into a hazing ritual. A bullshit job, if you want to call it that. People get access to resources through earning money, therefore even if there are too many resources already, you must add onto this pile of excess resources, for the sake of the hazing ritual, which represents the payment of the entrance fee.
Even a single sci-fi fanatic, who genuinely desires a giant Star-Trek like spaceship, requires more 'resources' to satisfy their desire then the entirety of mankind has access to at the present moment.
Let alone the billions of people with more modest but still quite sizeable desires.
No, it's basic free market economics. "Free market" does not mean the same thing as capitalism, although many capitalists (i.e., people who want to get their hands on as much capital as they can, by hook or by crook) like to claim that it does. Free markets promote freedom and wealth creation. Capitalism can under some circumstances, but under others it undermines those things. Many people feel that currently it is doing the latter.
> "Trade" only makes sense to the extent that human labor is in demand.
Human labor is always in demand. Even for "resources" which are in "excess production", those resources still have to be transported to the people that need them. For example, food grown in the US in excess of what people in the US need to eat needs to be transported to somewhere else in the world where people are hungry. That requires human labor, and that need for human labor is ongoing, because people don't stop needing to eat when you've given them food once. That process represents wealth creation and is always happening.
Also, people have needs and wants far above bare subsistence. The medium in which we are having this conversation would not exist in a bare subsistence world. Neither would countless other things that people value even if they are not strictly necessary for bare subsistence. There are always things that can be produced and traded to create more wealth.
> A bullshit job, if you want to call it that.
Sure, there are lots of bullshit jobs, but even if you eliminated them all, you wouldn't be eliminating the need for human labor. You would just be redirecting human labor towards more productive uses, i.e., towards actually creating wealth instead of just pretending to. That's a good thing.
Even in some utopian future where the vast majority of production processes are automated, so the amount of human labor needed to, say, produce food, is minimal, there will still be human labor required to do other things--like decide what things to produce. Also, in such a world, the price of all those things produced by automation would be close to zero, since the marginal cost of their production would be close to zero. So the drastic reduction in human labor required to produce the necessities of life would be reflected in a drastic reduction in the cost of the necessities of life. That is what "no more scarcity" should look like.
"[I]n-groups controlling abundance have increasingly chosen to produce non-necessary goods, rather than produce services to distribute necessary goods to regions with less abundance of necessary goods"
This claim seems, to say the least, highly implausible given the amount of aid and charity that developed countries give to less developed countries. The chief obstacle to that aid having more of an effect at relieving scarcity in less developed countries is political corruption in those countries: the governments of those countries confiscate the aid and use it to enrich themselves and their cronies, instead of getting it distributed to the people it is supposed to be for.
In other words, solutions to the scarcity problems you describe in less developed countries appear to me to be primarily political, not economic.
I don’t suggest a solution
I’m pointing out that the individual desire to increase personal happiness beyond basic needs for reproduction, significantly outweighs their desire to end that same extreme poverty condition for others.
This might be a “duh” but the point is that my hypothesis is that this is a learned/taught perspective, and based on a foundational idea that is no longer true, aka a myth.
It is a simple three step solution:
1. Identify sources of wealth that cannot be reproduced and therefore be hoarded to exclude access
2. Let the government tax or own the asset and grant every citizen equal rights to the asset in question.
3. Let people perform the act of producing reproducible assets on their own, now that they have the ability to do so.
Extreme hypothetical: AGI is real and everyone has a personal AGI. Given enough energy the AGI can produce anything in autarky. The primary resource that matters in this hypothetical economy is access to energy. Most people in today's society are born without any access to energy. Their access to energy is conditional upon performing labor, but labor is worthless in the hypothetical economy, therefore people without access to energy will simply die out.
There are many forms of economic democracy such as Freiwirtschaft or Georgism. These "economic systems" are built around the idea that non-reproducible assets should be taxed over time to prevent hoarding.
I think you're missing my point. My point is that, before we even get to your hypothesis about why the claim you make is true, we first need to agree that it is true. And I don't think it is. I think people in developed countries have a significant desire to help people in less developed countries--but our political system, which allows corrupt governments to stay in power even though their actions are making their people starve, frustrates that desire. We have been sending huge amounts of aid to the Third World for more than half a century, and we continue to do so, but it hasn't helped and it isn't helping.
In other words, to the extent that people in developed countries believe that they might as well focus on increasing their own personal happiness, it's because they don't see that trying to help people in less developed countries accomplishes anything. That is indeed a "learned perspective", but it's learned from actual experience of the effects of aid over the past half century and more, not from any kind of "myth" about scarcity. Indeed, if people in developed countries really believed that resources like food were scarce, we wouldn't have been sending all that aid to less developed countries for more than half a century. It's precisely because we know that we have excess resources and can afford to send them elsewhere to help, that there has been widespread political support in developed countries for sending all that aid. Any reduction in that support doesn't come from beliefs about scarcity; it comes from observing that the actual consequences of the aid are not the intended ones.
(Note, btw, that the existence of "excess resources" in developed countries for things like food depends on people in those countries creating wealth over and above the needs of bare subsistence. So "the individual desire to increase personal happiness beyond basic needs" in developed countries is required in order for there to be excess basic needs to be sent as aid to less developed countries.)
To which I would argue, in fact, we have not tried it, even barely
Actually trying would look more like the following:
The children who are currently mining for Mica for beauty products on behalf of LoReal would be stockholders outright of stock in LVM, as a result of their work, not literal slaves
You are suggesting that the process that we have used so far, which is individually determined capital redistribution via means that pick apart the donation through service fees, middleman functions, etc.
This is what you are suggesting is trying?
No. What I’m saying is that the people who hoard wealth and power will hoard more wealth and power up until socially that is no longer acceptable. we need to determine ways to distribute or rather, not steal in the first place, the value that labor is creating.
We have already tried "redistributing wealth" by having rich countries give stuff to poor countries, yes. And yes, it has failed.
> Actually trying would look more like the following:
The children who are currently mining for Mica for beauty products on behalf of LoReal would be stockholders outright of stock in LVM, as a result of their work, not literal slaves
Ok, fine, but how am I, as a citizen of the US, supposed to make this happen? Isn't it a matter of the political system in the country where this is going on? What does any of this have to do with how I, as a citizen of the US, make use of the wealth I have helped to create?
> the people who hoard wealth and power will hoard more wealth and power up until socially that is no longer acceptable.
As I asked you in another post upthread, what's your definition of "hoarding"? Am I, as a citizen of the US, hoarding wealth and power because I have retirement savings and because I choose to spend money on things that are not, strictly speaking, necessities of life? (Which includes the means of participating in this very discussion; the forum we are using, and the underlying infrastructure that makes it possible, would not exist if everyone just focused on the necessities of life.)
> we need to determine ways to distribute or rather, not steal in the first place, the value that labor is creating
In a free market, that distribution occurs automatically, because people get paid according to the marginal value they create. While I am totally in favor of people having ownership shares in things like factories, the reason for that is not that it "distributes wealth better" but that it increases the marginal value that a person can create, and therefore increases their income by straightforward free market economics. (It also, though, comes with taking on increased risk, because as an owner you are directly exposed to all the business risks that a wage-earning employee offloads to their employer. Some people prefer not to make that tradeoff.)
If all that isn't happening, the obvious solution is to fix whatever political issue is making the market not free and therefore preventing it from happening. Again, that has nothing to do with what I, as a citizen of the US, choose to do with the wealth I have helped to create.
The IMF gives contradictory advice that doesn't help. China, Korea, Japan etc all ignored IMF advice and see where that got them.
>In other words, solutions to the scarcity problems you describe in less developed countries appear to me to be primarily political, not economic.
Uhm, that was the entire point of the paper. There is material abundance but no access. Also, you can project the hoarding behaviour onto the corrupt cronies so that objection doesn't go against the paper but is in support of it.
The point isn't why those countries agree to receive aid, it's why there is political support in developed countries for sending it. If the paper's hypothetical were true, that people in developed countries prefer to increase their own personal happiness instead of helping others, the aid would never be sent because voters in developed countries would never support it.
> There is material abundance but no access.
The paper doesn't just make this factual claim (well, it's sort of factual--talk about "access" already presupposes particular ideological views, but let that pass). It makes an additional claim about why this is true. I don't think that additional claim is true (see above and my other post upthread in response to the author).
> you can project the hoarding behaviour onto the corrupt cronies
The "hoarding behavior" that the paper claims is not the behavior of the corrupt cronies in the countries receiving aid, it's the behavior of the people in the countries that are sending aid. And that claim about "hoarding behavior" is wrong, as I've already posted elsewhere in this discussion.
The failure of direct aid as described is entirely inclusive of all actors priorities involved.
There is no true global cooperative desire to solve these problems so it doesn’t happen, and these signaling actions - which is what they are - are known to be ineffective.
CFCs and Polio were eradicated. For all its flaws were pulled together to get through COVID. We can actually do stuff we want to do at global scale when we really want to
Go read the book on medicins san frontiers to get a closer look at the massive differences in what the “Aid” community does versus they claim to do
The fear of scarcity and all its downstream effects of hoarding and individualism
If we include the corrupt governments of the countries where people are poor and starving in "global", yes, this is true.
I'm not sure "fear of scarcity" is a good description of why those corrupt governments don't have this "cooperative desire", though.
> these signaling actions - which is what they are - are known to be ineffective
Here we agree, yes.
> ...embedded in prehistoric storytelling ...
I think worse, embedded in our very vocabulary. In Dutch for example "community" or "gemeinschaft" translates as (the never used word) "gemeenschap" which besides many vague things also means having sex. When used it mostly refers to location rather than ideas or activity. "club" is only used to describe a group of people with shared characteristics humorously. In contrast, if we are going to sail a boat every detail is enshrined in exact terminology as if it's a DSL designed for that purpose.
With the development and expansion of reading and writing our vocabulary "froze" in time and lost much of its dynamic adaptation.
> Economic, Social and Political thought since the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction, assumes inescapable scarcity as a fundamental truth, and assumes in-group resource hoarding behaviors are perpetually adaptive.
I would extend it to include Scientific scarcity? and perhaps even Educational and Technological? My mind has a hard time fitting the 3 under Economic, Social or Political banners. Then again, under which would one fit the Attention market?
> Quaternary Megafauna Extinction (QME) was the well documented, extremely rapid crash in available calories, beginning around 50,000 BC....
If it happened it will happen again(?) despite optimizing for the myth we seem insanely unfit to deal with something like that.
Why did you chose to fight in Iraq?
(asking the question because it might reveal a better understanding of your thought process).
It was a bad time, nothing good came from it, and I missed the first 10 months of my first daughters life. Would not do again.