[andrew1]

I don't understand what you mean. Even imagining a world where we didn't need any food at all; we'd still have teams of builders building the houses we live in, teams of teachers teaching our children, teams of bankers doing what it is they do with our money, teams of printers printing the newspapers we read, teams of IT workers at ISPs. How would any of those jobs become obsolete because of the fact that we wouldn't need to eat food?

[lurkerperpetual]

Imagine for a moment that you do not need food, then see how many of the services you currently use you can do without as a consequence. Bankers? Really? What to use money for when nobody is anymore threatened by hunger. Even today you have plenty of people doing volunteer work, any problem in a society where there's no competition for resources would make that the norm. I am very disappointed that the answers to this thread are given without much thought.

[andrew1]

There are hundreds of millions of people in the Western world who are not 'threatened by hunger', and yet the vast majority of those people still go to work every day, still use banks, still want to earn more money than they could ever need for food. You seem to imagine that if everyone had enough food then our economy would grind to a halt; that there would be no commerce anymore. I think this is unrealistic because people will still want 'things'. I might want a larger house to live in, I might dream of owning a Ferrari, you might want to learn to fly a helicopter, someone else might want a new refrigerator. The point is that there are luxuries, as well as necessities, which people will want; it's possible that in this magical hunger-free world people will produce these things and give them away for free, but it seems a lot more likely to me that these things will be available to buy, and that if you want to buy them you will have to go and do some work, to earn some money, to pay for them. And so yes, bankers, really. In a world where you have to pay for things, even if those things are not food, people will want a way to maintain the value of their money, at the very least so that when they're old they'll be able to heat their homes, repair their homes, buy new clothes to wear, afford transport and afford medical treatments.

I don't understand your disappointment with this thread, you're taking a line of argument which I find completely fanciful, and which I'm sure at least some others do, where you remove one factor from the world (hunger/the need to eat) and extrapolate to all the ills of the world being cured, with no logic in between.

[lurkerperpetual]

why would one need a new refrigerator??? Having hunger solved in the western world is vastly different from having it solved globally and even more different from not needing food at all. Not having plenty of food. Not needing food at all. I am disappointed by what seem very shortsighted, almost knee-jerk remarks which illustrate the poster did not think much about the problem. As if the logical next step after realizing you do not need to eat is to go and work some more in that saved time to have more money. Depressing :)

[andrew1]

I think we should stop this discussion. You don't seem to have any interest in discussing how this hypothetical society would actually work, only in nit-picking mostly irrelevant points (and in response: given that people would be free to eat if they wished, why should they not want refrigerators).

Thanks.