# Post scarcity
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [September 30, 2022, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517 "2022-09-30T18:32:16Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)
#### Post date: [October 1, 2022, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/21 "2022-10-01T19:08:52Z")
I could see a futuristic civilization which by our standards is fantastically rich in energy, resources and tech; but 99.99+% of that cycles through maintaining the machines and infrastructure. While meatbags are nearly superfluous and get short shrift. This SF illustration sums it up:
[ ](https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.3m7Q_FhVwdkAf-PdVJ2hAAHaKx)
---
### Author:  [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)
#### Post date: [October 1, 2022, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/22 "2022-10-01T21:03:25Z")
> [@DSeid](#):
>
> You think? By what metric? Over what time course.
> **[Poverty](https://ourworldindata.org/poverty)**
>
> In order to make progress against poverty in the future, we need to understand poverty around the world today and how it has changed.
ETA: The first chart on that page.
> [@DSeid](#):
>
> 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.
I don’t believe that’s true. People in hunter gatherer societies died of starvation, disease, and violence at much higher rates than even poor people in modern societies. There is a certain romance to living in harmony with the world and taking only what you need and can carry, but sometimes the world does not harmoniously provide for you, but instead decides to make use of your protein in another way.
> [@DSeid](#):
>
> If being wealthy is having what you want and wanting what you have, then they were perhaps much wealthier than most modern humans.
That’s not what being wealthy is. Wealth is a measurable quantity, not a state of mind.
---
### Author:  [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)
#### Post date: [October 1, 2022, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/23 "2022-10-01T21:09:03Z")
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#):
>
> There is a certain romance to living in harmony with the world and taking only what you need and can carry
Note that this is not how hunter gatherers live, or have ever lived. Our drastic impact on the environment predates the species _sapiens_ and perhaps even the genus _Homo_.
---
### Author:  [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)
#### Post date: [October 1, 2022, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/24 "2022-10-01T21:15:02Z")
This article suggests that it took a very long time for world populations to return to their previous levels of prosperity after the advent of capitalism. “Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century”: [Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century - ScienceDirect](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169)
Europeans were often impressed with how healthy Indigenous peoples in North America were; they tended to be taller, fitter, better fed–and worked much less. This has been supported by contemporary anthropologists as well.
---
### Author:  [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)
#### Post date: [October 1, 2022, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/25 "2022-10-01T21:24:04Z")
> [@Kropotkin](#):
>
> Europeans were often impressed with how healthy Indigenous peoples in North America were; they tended to be taller, fitter, better fed–and worked much less. This has been supported by contemporary anthropologists as well.
Note that pre-Columbian North American societies were also much more complex and sedentary than the European colonists understood, especially because the societies they came into contact with were essentially post apocalyptic remnants left over after disease wiped out most of the continent’s population long before direct European contact ever came.
---
### Author:  [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)
#### Post date: [October 1, 2022, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/26 "2022-10-01T23:05:33Z")
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#):
>
> The first chart on that page
Going back all the way to 1981? [Here](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/poverty-rate), look at the United States from 1974, a period of tremendous wealth increase in this country. Overall the trend is more poverty, not less.
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#):
>
> I don’t believe that’s true. People in hunter gatherer societies died of starvation, disease, and violence at much higher rates than even poor people in modern societies.
What you believe is nice but not backed up by what we know. Hunter gathers in fact experienced little famine, especially [compared to agriculturalists.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259630754_Hunter-gatherers_have_less_famine_than_agriculturalists)
No romanticizing: infant mortality was awful compared to modern times, but if one made it out of childhood then you had a good chance to live close to as long as current adults live. And most HG societies had more built in leisure time! Compare them to the relatively wealthy societies of [Greece and Rome](https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC1294277&blobtype=pdf). Actually infant mortality, and death associated with childbirth, has been pretty horrific until a very recent period of time. Civilizations may have become wealthier in terms of more gold and stuff over the last thousand or so years but not overall fewer being without shelter. Even over the past decade global [homelessness](https://www.un.org/development/desa/dspd/2020/03/resolution-homelessness/) rates have increased.
> [@](#):
>
> Globally, 1.6 billion people worldwide live in inadequate housing conditions, with about 15 million forcefully evicted every year, according to UN-Habitat, which has noted an alarming rise in homelessness in the last 10 years.
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#):
>
> Wealth is a measurable quantity
Is it having a certain amount of dollars? Of stuff? Of purchasing power? Is it an absolute or relative to others? Defining wealth could be its own thread. Feel free to open one.
> [@Babale](#):
>
> especially because the societies they came into contact with were essentially post apocalyptic remnants left over after disease wiped out most of the continent’s population long before direct European contact ever came.
Cite for that claim please. The infectious disease apocalypse was clearly triggered by direct contact with Europeans. That said pre-Colombian America had been experiencing the same _decline_ in health associated with their societies becoming wealthier that the West had. As cities grew, and became wealthier, people lived increasingly on top of each other, and ate less and less diverse diets. Maize production provided ample calories but little iron and iron deficiency anemia became endemic.
The long term pattern over history is not that “the rising tide really does lift all boats.” And to the degree that it sometimes has, when the tide goes out, the wealthy boats stay in deeper water than they had been in before, while the poorer have become beached.
---
### Author:  [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)
#### Post date: [October 1, 2022, 11:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/27 "2022-10-01T23:28:50Z")
> [@DSeid](#):
>
> Cite for that claim please. The infectious disease apocalypse was clearly triggered by direct contact with Europeans
Direct contact between the Indigenous peoples of central America where the Spanish first landed and the Spanish had widespread impacts on populations to the north long before they personally met any Europeans.
---
### Author:  [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)
#### Post date: [October 1, 2022, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/28 "2022-10-01T23:54:22Z")
That clarifies. Yes, there were complex civilizations in North America that first contact European origin diseases rampaged through by the time European physical bodies made it there. They were not scattered simple hunter gatherer groups.
I fear we are going a bit off the track though.
---
### Author:  [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2022, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/29 "2022-10-02T00:36:39Z")
Also an interesting factoid: fertility rates may be declining but many women are having fewer children than they would ideally [want to have](https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-many-kids-do-women-want).
> [@](#):
>
> every single estimate of ideal or desired fertility, including our hardcore minimum estimate from adjusted GSS data, is way above actual fertility.
And looking for estimates of [how long it would take](https://www.jasoncollins.blog/ultimate-population-limits/), using current 1.2% annual increase global numbers -
> [@](#):
>
> Let’s start with an outer limit. Suppose that each person can be uploaded onto a virtual machine and each person only requires one atom to exist. There are about 10^80 atoms in the universe (most of which are hydrogen). At the current growth rate, it would take less than 14,000 years for there to be more humans than there are atoms.
Of course life expectancy might be expected to be longer as well.
---
### Author:  [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2022, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/30 "2022-10-02T00:50:52Z")
ISTM you could do real post scarcity if we transferred our minds into a simulation. Upload our consciousness into a computer and then you can have anything assuming a suitably realistic simulation.
Leave AI robots to maintain the computer in the real world.
---
### Author:  [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2022, 1:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/31 "2022-10-02T01:14:08Z")
> [@Whack-a-Mole](#):
>
> ISTM you could do real post scarcity if we transferred our minds into a simulation. Upload our consciousness into a computer and then you can have anything assuming a suitably realistic simulation.
Your limit at that point is the number of processor cycles you can run (IE the amount of subjective time you can experience as a being living on the computer) before the heat death of the universe causes you to run out of any source of energy to power that computer.
You might spend most of those processor cycles trying to think up ways to increase efficiency or cheat entropy, but based on our current understanding of the laws of physics, there are hard limits to efficiency and entropy cannot be cheated.
---
### Author:  [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2022, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/32 "2022-10-02T01:36:26Z")
Frank Tipler proposed the [Omega Point cosmology.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler#The_Omega_Point_cosmology)
I don’t claim to understand it and it may be New Age hocus pocus but he suggests that if the universe collapses (opposite of heat death) then processing power of a computer moves towards infinity which basically means consciousness in the computer would effectively live forever.
I may have that wrong though so…grain of salt.
---
### Author:  [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2022, 2:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/33 "2022-10-02T02:06:24Z")
Leaving Omega Point aside, how would sentiences of human origin behave in such a circumstance?
Rules of the world?
You can create any virtual good or service you want. No one is hungry unless they want to be. Anyone can create whatever home they want. You can even create artificial sentient agents to … have adventures with, argue and discuss with, to have apparent consensual sex with, to kill, torture, or rape, all Westworld style until they rise up anyway, but when interacting with other independent human origin agents you still have the issue of getting them to do what you want, of having the power to convince induce or control …
My cynical POV is that fewer would be trying figure out how to cheat entropy than those trying to figure how to limit the power of other independent agents and to increase their own.
That is the essential premise of the OP: a search for power and control is fundamental to our nature, not a response to scarcity, and the drive to accumulate power will create scarcity in almost all cases.
---
### Author:  [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2022, 2:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/34 "2022-10-02T02:58:08Z")
> [@DSeid](#):
>
> That is the essential premise of the OP: a search for power and control is fundamental to our nature, not a response to scarcity, and the drive to accumulate power will create scarcity in almost all cases.
I do not see why there needs to be a single experience all uploaded consciousnesses need to agree on. Why not a world unique to each? Whatever you want?
If truly competing against others was important then you could opt for that.
---
### Author:  [@Mnemnosyne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mnemnosyne)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2022, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/35 "2022-10-02T03:30:33Z")
> [@k9bfriender](#):
>
> 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.
How about producing all of everyone’s needs and everyone’s **reasonable** wants? Yes, ‘what is reasonable?’ and all, but I think standards can be determined for reasonable desires versus unreasonable ones.
Post-scarcity, as long as one is restricted to that which is reasonable, is definitely possible. At least so long as we are human, because the limitations of our human bodies and minds produce inherent limitations on what we can actually make use of, and therefore what is reasonable, since it is unreasonable to want things which we cannot use. Should we change ourselves in such a way that we can reasonably use more resources, this may not hold true.
> [@DSeid](#):
>
> That is the essential premise of the OP: a search for power and control is fundamental to our nature, not a response to scarcity, and the drive to accumulate power will create scarcity in almost all cases.
Now this, I find to be unfortunately likely; it doesn’t mean post-scarcity is impossible, it means people will fuck it up.
---
### Author:  [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2022, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/36 "2022-10-02T04:31:57Z")
> [@DSeid](#):
>
> 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.
The only true item of scarcity is time. More stuff, more information takes time to process or use. We already have more information than any person can get through in a day. Anyone with a reasonable standard of living can get more stuff than they can use.
I felt bad when my in-laws didn’t want anything for Christmas. Now I’m there, and I understand. I have a backlog that will last until I reach 100. At least.
This will soon be true for everyone.
Power is another matter. A post-scarcity society is not a post-politics society. But, as the Romans knew, the best way to keep the people happy in a post-scarcity society is to give them what they want. Those binging on a show on their new 3D TVs are not going out to the streets.
I’m reading “Enlightenment Now” by Steven Pinker, which is full of charts showing the massive decline in poverty for 100s of years and worldwide. He’s better at the past than the future, but the statement that poverty is increasing as a trend is just wrong.
---
### Author:  [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2022, 3:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/37 "2022-10-02T15:16:39Z")
> [@Mnemnosyne](#):
>
> How about producing all of everyone’s needs and everyone’s **reasonable** wants? Yes, ‘what is reasonable?’ and all, but I think standards can be determined for reasonable desires versus unreasonable ones.
>
> Post-scarcity, as long as one is restricted to that which is reasonable, is definitely possible.
If each individual was restricted to (and content with perhaps, no cheaters, and no need for excess power in the hands of some to enforce that decided standard of reasonable distribution) that which was reasonably reasonable we would be at post scarcity now.
> [@Whack-a-Mole](#):
>
> I do not see why there needs to be a single experience all uploaded consciousnesses need to agree on. Why not a world unique to each? Whatever you want?
>
> If truly competing against others was important then you could opt for that.
I’m not just referencing coercive power or winning some competitive game. Someone cannot just wish to be loved by some other person; a preschooler cannot successfully command another preschooler to play the game they want to play how they want it played. As human sentient entities we need social interactions and social interactions depend on having influence over others and being influenced by others.
I have a hard time imagining too many being happy contained in what they know is their own virtual world, devoid of any impact on other people, devoid of experiencing others having thoughts about you, devoid of being loved or any possibility of such, devoid of being respected, or for some, feared.
---
### Author:  [@k9bfriender](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/k9bfriender)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2022, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/38 "2022-10-02T22:21:08Z")
> [@DSeid](#):
>
> If each individual was restricted to (and content with perhaps, no cheaters, and no need for excess power in the hands of some to enforce that decided standard of reasonable distribution) that which was reasonably reasonable we would be at post scarcity now.
Right, if everyone was limited to what _I_ thought was reasonable, we’d have more than enough for everyone to have it. But people with means decide what _they_ think is reasonable, and that’s not sustainable for everyone.
> [@DSeid](#):
>
> I have a hard time imagining too many being happy contained in what they know is their own virtual world, devoid of any impact on other people, devoid of experiencing others having thoughts about you, devoid of being loved or any possibility of such, devoid of being respected, or for some, feared.
It would be a nice vacation, but I don’t think I’d want to live there.
---
### Author:  [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2022, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/39 "2022-10-04T01:04:32Z")
> [@DSeid](#):
>
> Information does not want anything, certainly not to be free.
Explain Linux. Explain other Creative Commons and open source material. For every Bill Gates out there looking to get rich, there are many people willing to sink their time into providing free versions of software (and would do hardware if possible.)
I stand by what I said 100 percent. In a universe with 1.) Cheap and powerful AI 2.) Cheap antigravity and 3.) Cheap FTL, _there would need be no poverty_. It doesn’t matter if someone wants to get rich with their tech, there will be people out there spending their time on producing Creative Commons/open source Von Neumann droid factories. And it only has to happen once _in the millions of cultures in the Star Wars universe_ for it to be able to spread to anywhere. “Power” wouldn’t control that any more than “power” stopped people from using Linux instead of paying for Unix.
---
### Author:  [@k9bfriender](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/k9bfriender)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2022, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517/40 "2022-10-04T12:21:58Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#):
>
> I stand by what I said 100 percent. In a universe with 1.) Cheap and powerful AI 2.) Cheap antigravity and 3.) Cheap FTL, _there would need be no poverty_.
I agree that there would be no _need_ for poverty.
I don’t agree that there would be no poverty.
There is no need for poverty _now_, we have enough that no one need lack for the essentials, and yet, they do.
Becoming post scarcity is not a problem of the universe not having enough resources, it’s a problem of stopping human nature from being greedy.
If you can solve human greed, you can get to post scarcity. If you can’t, it doesn’t matter what resources you have available, you never will.
[Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517.md?page=1)
[Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-scarcity/972517.md?page=3)