First Steps Towards Post Scarcity | Hacker News Reader

First Steps Towards Post Scarcity

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15 pointsph0rque6 comments

This may seem to be OT but it's going to affect most people deeply. What does it mean when most goods are very cheap or meaningless. We have been edging into post-scarcity since the 1960's, but we dont realize it yet. We shouldnt need two income families just to tread water. We have a lot of surplus, but it has been sucked away. The biggest offender has been housing. Not just that houses are larger than we need, but that speculation has driven land prices to outrageous highs. Now we are at the point where we can live anywhere and telecommute. Does the value get sucked out of the suburbs? Does the value of a university education become meaningless because we can learn off the web? What to the whole automotive/energy industry when cars are electric and long lived, may be one or two cars last your whole life? Do we all become service workers or do the service industries collapse, because we can do it outselves? What do we do with 20-hour workweeks?

although people here may have an aversion to the word 'anarchy' - "Post Scarcity Anarchism" is a great book on this topic: http://www.amazon.com/Post-Scarcity-Anarchism-Working-Classi...

Scarcity is infinite. Post scarcity is, as they say, not even wrong. Totally meaningless.

I agree with you -- decades of psychological research show that people acclimate to what they have, and then want more.

Imagine cavemen postulating about what we'll do when we have these big machines that can carry us around at great speed, and when our food is already made for us and no hunting is required. Could they have guessed we'd work in glass office buildings so we can buy iPods and McMansions?

I suspect we're in no better position to guess how we'll use our future economic output, only that we will definitely want to spend it.

yes, but not everyone in the world currently has this set of things: [1] shelter,[2] food, [3] water. there are some things that are basic to our survival and experience, and from there we build the 'more.' when i think post scarcity, i think post-scarcity of life essentials. the quest to explore and build new things is infinite.

Wealth has increased enormously over the past couple centuries, but, as you say, we've absorbed it. But at some point as the curve trends up, we'll be able to work less and have more anyway on a year-to-year basis. Even though scarcity will technically never end, it might still feel like you can do anything you can imagine, for average levels of imagination.

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