[lovecg]

But don’t you think your desires would grow accordingly? To go back to my “medieval peasant” example, a simple shirt is something we take completely for granted and is arguably “post scarce”. But before industrialization, people would think of a shirt sort of like we think of cars today. It took months of labor to make one, and it cost orders of magnitude more what it costs today. So to those people “I would own a couple of really nice shirts” would have been a reasonable goal to aspire for. They simply could not imagine cars or iphones.

Your second point is an interesting one. I do think we’re gradually moving to a world of artificial scarcity (brand names, luxury goods, bitcoin etc.), plus some things will always be scarce by nature (access to important people, people’s time). So perhaps we’ll just discover that the connection between resource scarcity and human desires is accidental.

[ivalm]

Yeah, my point rests on the idea of dematerialization going forward. I think people have finite capacity of desire for natural resource limited products and it is possible that we are not too unreasonably close to “peak physical stuff.” I can get better more “intelligent” clothing but I will never need 100000 unique clothing items simultaneously. On the other hand, immaterial needs may continue increasing, my desire for AI assistance, computer-human interfaces, and augmented reality may be massive, but those have low marginal cost.

I do also agree that certain things that are scarce by design or by their nature and will continue to be so.