[TeMPOraL]

Fundamentally they can't, but that's not what the concept is aiming at. What we can do is to drop costs of things people need (or want) in their daily lives to the point that supply/demand basically stops working for them on an aggregate scale. If we do this to the point that any person can live a full life and participate in the society at large without having to exchange labour for resources or worrying about their wealth, then we achieve "post-scarcity".

Even in Star Trek, there were scarce things that needed to be allocated. Not everyone got their own starship. But we consider this fictional economy a post-scarcity one, because food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and entertainment were basically free for everyone.

[rmah]

That happened about 50 years ago in the developed world. A well off family in the mid-1800's would purchase a new set of clothing once or twice a year. Each person would have maybe two or three pairs of shoes. They had enough funds heat their homes during winter. Poor people had far less. By the 1950's, a developed economy could easily provide that level of comfort to everyone. We just (mostly) chose not to.

Today, it's quite cheap (relative to average incomes) to provide for basic needs if you define basic needs to food, a few sets of clothing and a heated place live. Problem is, we define that as being in deep poverty now. Now most people living in developed economies include things like 12 years of basic schooling, health care for most ailments, a dozen sets of clothing, reliable home heating, indoor plumbing, various in-home kitchen appliances, indoor plumbing, communications tools, some entertainment, the means to travel many miles every day, etc, etc as "basic needs". 100 years ago, at an absolute level anyway, this was an upper class level of wealth.

In other words, the bar constantly rises as society's overall wealth increases.

[pault]

I don't know how I would have access to food, shelter, and healthcare if I decided to stop working and spend the rest of my life doing recreational engineering. Post-scarcity requires automation to the point that the cost of survival becomes a rounding error on the rest of the economy. When it's possible to survive without engaging in trade (or spending the majority of your life gathering food and shelter from raw materials), we'll be in a post-scarcity economy (and I will be first in line to take the offer).

[afarrell]

> Healthcare

We'd have to either normalize suicide or prevent aging in order to get to a world where the demand for healthcare is basically met for everyone. Before we even get there, we've still got a lot of people whose healthcare costs are infinite with current technology.

The NHS is fantastic, it doesn't operate in a post-scarcity environment.

[TeMPOraL]

Right. Healthcare seems like probably the last thing that has a chance to enter post-scarcity environment, simply because as long as people get sick and die, there's always something to spend more resources on. But solving food and shelter would be a good start.

[vzcx]

Ah, but what is a "full life?" Might someone believe that they need something more rare in order to attain it?

Isn't "post-scarcity" just taking the limit as supply reaches infinity, and thus just another term for "asymptotically cheap?" Do we really need a "fresh new" economic theory to talk about this?

[TeMPOraL]

> Ah, but what is a "full life?" Might someone believe that they need something more rare in order to attain it?

That's indeed a fuzzy term right here. Can't come up with a better one, though. I'm thinking here of a life of an average person, though, not about outliers.

> Isn't "post-scarcity" just taking the limit as supply reaches infinity, and thus just another term for "asymptotically cheap?" Do we really need a "fresh new" economic theory to talk about this?

Maybe? Whether you call it "post-scarcity" or "most stuff is asymptotically cheap now", our current economic theories (and practice) don't handle near-free things well.