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Comment by ccc3 | Hacker News Reader

This struck me as a ranting collection of unsupported claims.

Unfortunately, scarcity is, and always will be, a reality. And that is a fact hard-wired to natural science. Sure it may be possible to create an economic system that delivers "free software to everybody," but it could never go much further than that. We still need to live in houses and wear clothes and even build the computers that will be used to write all this software. All of these goods are made from scarce natural resources and no amount of tinkering with the rules of the economy will change that fact.

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Indeed, the main concept of economics is scarcity, not free market or anything like that. Actualy, the basic rules of economics are felt even stronger in non-free markets.

I still remember when I was a kid growing up in communism, there would be days with no potatoes in any store in the city, but there were heaps of rotting oranges that nobody wanted, while the store was not allowed to lower their price. Butchers and gas station operators were among the richest citizens, since those jobs allowed for the easiest cheating on both customers and the state.

While economics is nowhere near an exact science, some people would do better to learn about its very foundations, rather than write lengthy, post-modern-sounding, uninformed criticisms of it.

I still struggle with this, and maybe someone can provide some insight.

I am a sloppy thinker. When I read the word science in a casual setting, like the news, I think of men in white lab coats and rocket ships, rather than the messy unreliable quest for truth that is really going on. This usually leads me to conferring the predictive power of physics on whatever science is being discussed. Everyone's job is hard, but the predictive power is the thing that makes my life easier, and as a consequence the thing i remember instead of the struggle against the unknown.

I don't think I am alone in making this mistake. Furthermore, i doubt that most people who make this mistake ever become aware of the error. I think articles like this are the result of the exact same error. Rather than accepting economics as a science this particular guy went back and redefined terms, and wants us to do the same.

If only there was some way to replace "a scientist said x about science" with "an expert in a field that requires a confidence interval this big (big number) for theories to be taken seriously, said x about something in his field"

The, "economists predictive power sucks so they aren't scientists" is a trap.

> Unfortunately, scarcity is, and always will be, a reality.

It's true that scarcity is a reality. It is far from certain that scarcity always will be a reality. Unless of course you define scarcity to mean that not everyone in the solar system can have exclusive use of more than 50% of the mass of the sun.

Scarcity will indeed always be a reality. Physical resources will always be limited compared to what we could use them for, so they will always be scarce. Time to do things will always be limited compared to what we may want to do, so we will always have to prioritize and take into account opportunity costs, time will always be scarce. And similarly for other "resources" you may consider (energy, attention, etc).

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