Searching and it looks like it has been well over a decade since this subject had a discussion and the subject has come up in the Cafe Society thread about the Star Wars show Andor, with one post arguing that the Star Wars universe “should” be one of “post scarcity”, positing that those who disagree just don’t understand.
I think discussing further there would be a hijack of discussing the show, so I am opening here.
My proposition: post-scarcity is impossible.
The mundane reason why is that ultimately resources are finite, no matter how advanced the technology, while populations can continue to increase exponentially.
But there is a more fundamental reason in my thinking: we can meet everyone’s needs and still have desire for more, specifically more than the other person. The bottom line is the potential capacity to have what is by today’s standards an unimaginable amount of stuff is of no matter: the substance that will be of importance is power, everything else will be constrained as levers of that. Information does not want anything, certainly not to be free. It is an instrument of power and power will never be evenly distributed. Goods and services accessibility is a means of exerting power and will be constrained as those who have more power compete against each other and amass more.
When vacuum cleaners and dishwashers were invented, the inventors expected people to spend less time cleaning, and more time on artistic and intellectual pursuits.
What did people do? They decided that they wanted cleaner stuff. So they spent the same amount of time cleaning as they had before.
I don’t believe in post-scarcity economies, for the same reason I don’t believe in perpetual motion machines. Resources are finite, and thermodynamics limits how efficiently they can be used. There will never be enough raw materials, and there will always be too much garbage.
I don’t think resources would be limited in the Star wars universe because they have access to an endless amount of planets that supposedly have the raw materials needed to make droids and such.
I agree with the general claim that there’s no post-scarcity.
But also, as technological economic growth occurs, while it does not occur totally evenly, the rising tide really does lift all boats.
A world in which AGI droids are readily available is not very consistent with one where there are human slaves and the level of poverty and drugery that is generally on display in the Star Wars universe.
I don’t think this is quite right. My mechanically-washed plates aren’t “cleaner” than hand-washed ones, they are more plentiful. My robot-vacuumed floor isn’t cleaner than a hand-vacuumed one (arguably, it is less clean, since the robot is not great at its job), but because I spend less time washing individual dishes I use more of them, and because I spend less time vacuuming (and on everything else), I can have a large house and a lifestyle that probably would have taken a few full-time servants to run a hundred+ years ago.
Labor-saving devices didn’t reduce the amount of time we spend on things, but it made the time we spend result in more material splendor.
None of that is post-scarcity, but it is noticeable economic improvement. And it’s true even at lower economic echelons. Poor people also have more dishes and clothes and other material goods than poor people did in the past.
One mitigating factor towards post scarcity is declining birth rates in wealthier countries. This has existed since Rome in a relative sense, certainly. Probably would occur in an absolute sense as well. Consumption is going to be less of an issue if there are fewer and fewer people around to do it.
If it is a matter of being able to produce enough to meet everyone’s needs, then we’ve been post scarcity for quite a while now.
If it is a matter of being able to produce enough to meet everyone’s wants, then we never will or can be, as those are unlimited.
We could all be living on our own individual planet, with billions of robots dedicated to attend our every desire, but some of us would want a bigger planet, or two planets, or five or a hundred.
Even a galaxy’s worth of planets and stars is finite, not endless. It just seems like that from the perspective of thinking about the needs of a single one. Today’s earth has technology and resources that were unimaginable even just a few centuries ago. I’d suspect that someone from 500 years ago could say that a world in which devices that have the magical power of current “phones” are readily available is not consistent with one in which so many lived in forced labor conditions and the level of poverty and drudgery that is on display in much of our world. Arguably we have enough resources that no one need be homeless or hungry, yet many are. Unfortunately a society becoming wealthier is often associated with greater wealth inequality, and fairly little decrease in poverty, and power increasingly becomes amassed to the hands of fewer and fewer.
In the hypothetical of the SW universe those with great power, have an interest in keeping those without power powerless, able to eke out their existences, but being kept busy doing so. And those with greater power have an interest in keeping those with great power from gaining more.
Even in a galaxy resources will always be finite; greed however is infinite.
I think that’s true to a point. But the level of grinding poverty in our world keeps decreasing as the world gets richer. There is still inequality for sure, but the floor is rising. And I expect it will continue to rise.
Imagine the Earth after another few orders of magnitude of technological progress, which I think is what Star Wars represents. There’s casual interplanetary travel and cheap artificial intelligence.
Will there still be people who are relatively poor compared to the rich in that world? Sure. Will there still be people in grinding poverty? I don’t think so. People haven’t gotten less greedy in the last 100 years, but vastly more people live lives without grinding poverty. Because of technological improvements.
Also, you’d have vastly fewer people doing forced labor if you had cheap AGI machines for the same reason that there aren’t a lot of plow horses around any more.
“Star Wars doesn’t really have a coherent economic model when examined closely” seems like such a likely claim it should be the null hypothesis for pretty much any fiction set in a fantasy universe. Honestly, it would be very weird if it did! It’s a fun space wizard fantasy!
Even here on Earth, some advanced technology eventually becomes so ubiquitous it ends up in the hands of even the poorest among us. Take cell phones for example. People living in mud huts in a Middle Eastern desert have cell phones. Homeless people have cell phones. There’s an entire industry that produces cheap cell phones that are literally disposable. This was a cutting-edge technology under 40 years ago. That 80s “brick” phone cost $4,000.
I would argue that hunter gatherer societies generally had few that went to bed hungry most nights or were unsure if they would have protection from the elements. OTOH currently about 10% of the world population suffers from hunger. One in five children under five are “stunted” from malnutrition and infections. The world has gotten wealthier and our wants have increased more than proportionately, with pursuit of those want leaving many still without.
HG societies are considered poor by many metrics but others have noted that to no small degree they were pre-scarcity. If being wealthy is having what you want and wanting what you have, then they were perhaps much wealthier than most modern humans.
I see your point, particularly about your robot vacuum cleaner vs. a push model. However, I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison, because the earlier method of cleaning rugs-- hanging them up and beating them-- was far inferior to vacuum cleaners. I think it’s fair to say “People wanted cleaner stuff” in that people kept their rugs much cleaner with frequent vacuuming, than they had with the beating method-- and had they chosen to maintain similar standards with the vacuum that they had with beating, they would have been vacuuming pretty infrequently.
On the other hand, I’m not sure that vacuum cleaners would have worked that way-- they work on rugs that are well-maintained. If you vacuum twice a year, there’s so much crud they get clogged.
Washing machines definitely had people keeping their clothes much cleaner. This just isn’t even close. Anyone who remembers when delicate and occasionally wool, garments had to be hand-washed, can well-imagine how low standards probably were in the days before the washing machine, and why undershirts existed.
Vaccinations and antibiotics are extremely recent things on the time scales we are talking about, not even a blink.
This may be a digression but diseases vastly increased as the world became “wealthier” - the juxtaposition of crowded humans to livestock, a product of technology and something that allowed for more food production than was imaginable to a hunter-gatherer, resulted in many germs crossing over. A process we still see producing major new diseases to this day.
I would agree. While some resources may become abundant, others will still serve as bottlenecks to growth. In the Star Wars universe, they have resources like “coaxium”, “kyber crystals”, “tibanna gas”, and other mcguffinites and unobtaniums that power their civilization and presumably can only be found in rare locations or manufactured through complex processes.
More importantly, post scarcity also requires having access to those technologies, resources, and infrastructure. If you live on a desert planet like Tatooine or Jakku you probably don’t have access to droid factories or automated shipyards.
My understanding of post scarcity is a situation where everyone has access to everything they need to live a reasonably happy life, without having to pay anything.
But it can be effectively endless while the population is small enough. Which means the finite number of planets is not a limiting factor on achieving post scarcity, for some finite interval of time.
Why does everybody assume exponential growth of the population?
The idea started 250 years ago with Malthus, and continues to be one of the basic assumptions in the Fermi paradox in 1960.
It may have seemed logical back then, but we now have hard scientific evidence that it is not true…For 100% of the intelligent species we know of (i.e. us homo sapiens)
Birth rates have fallen to below replacement level in every country on earth where there are modern societies with technology capable of space flight.
Why, given the appearance of unlimited resources, would you assume not?
You would extrapolate from a few decades long anomaly within a few individual societies rather than from the long arm of human history and across the globe?
If anything I see this as the exception that proofs the rule: what are the accepted reasons for these societies to have dropped birth rates?
Several.
Women and men both are investing in more education and spending more time establishing careers to have that investment pay off, with neither parent commonly willing to put off career to devote to chid rearing. Why? Because we want the incomes of that work to support having more or better stuff and services. It’s the way to gain more of a share of resources that are functionally scarce, limited by competition with others who also want more and better, or sometimes not even better, just signaling higher status.
Also because raising kids to compete so they can have more and better and higher status stuff and services costs more now. Lots more.
Would those factors apply in a universe in which everyone could have everything without work, without competition?