[alangou]

This argument has a lot of big words, but in the end, we humans run up against the hard wall of reality in a world of scarce resources. To say that the nearly all misery arises from how we currently work is laughable. Let me know when winter stops being cold and food falls from heaven onto our dinner tables.

[postingpals]

I find people who argue scarcity more often than not don't have actual numbers to back it up. Amongst human beings biggest necessities, what are actually scarce?

Food? Not at all, tons and tons are thrown out daily. Housing? Well there's enough of that for everyone we just don't know how, and don't want to, distribute it. Clothing? Even though people burn through clothing almost as quickly as food, it is produced in surplus so much that we invented fashion.

What necessity exactly is scarce in 2020? Classical economics has no explanation for this modern surplus of production.

[chordalkeyboard]

> I find people who argue scarcity more often than not don't have actual numbers to back it up. Amongst human beings biggest necessities, what are actually scarce?

Scarcity in the economic sense just means there are material limits to the things people want. It's not a synonym for "rarity."

> Food? Not at all, tons and tons are thrown out daily.

The places that are throwing out food also have charities and food banks so that few people actually starve to death. People who starve to death are in parts of the world with poorly functioning distribution systems. The people in those parts of the world who have food don't throw it out, they lock it up so they can give it to their friends.

> Housing? Well there's enough of that for everyone we just don't know how, and don't want to, distribute it.

This is a good point and there are homeless people in cities with vacant housing.

> Clothing? Even though people burn through clothing almost as quickly as food, it is produced in surplus so much that we invented fashion.

Crucially, there are very few naked people but the things people want to wear are still of limited supply.

> Classical economics has no explanation for this modern surplus of production.

Its literally called "capitalism"; People with means of production make profit by producing commodities and this incentivizes other people to invest their surplus in additional capital and compete to produce more commodities. This expansion of production drives the marginal rate of profit down which causes people to invest in producing other things; the capital and products are thereby multiplied over and over and the result is a system that makes these basic things extremely plentiful and low cost.

> What necessity exactly is scarce in 2020?

Human labor, time, space, raw materials, and products that are the output of specific processes that cannot be commodified in this way (art, haute couture, and antiques are examples)

[Emma_Goldman]

The person to whom you are responding spoke of necessities, you speak of scarcity as the fact of demand exceeding supply. Clearly the crux of your disagreement is what is involved in a good life and society. The argument against your view is that human desire is not fixed, but expands with the development of every new frontier of consumption. The more we can produce, the more we want. Should we let that process run indefinitely?

The costs are multiple. We organise society around the productivist maximisation of output, requiring us all to work at a dizzying pace despite the dramatic increase of productivity per hour of labour over time. We compensate for the modest time we have to ourselves, 'leisure', through a lifestyle of extreme consumption. One of the underlying reasons that we want to consume more, is as a marker that we are the kinds of people capable of high consumption. Having a nice house, clothes and car, going on nice holidays, validates our social status and esteem, or worse, feeds our pride and envy. We organise the whole of human life and society around production to satisfy our ape-brain psychology, to feed our bottomless status-seeking. It's a huge collective action problem, and we would all be better off if we jointly committed to working less, and shifted away from private consumption to public goods that can be shared in common.

There are also important questions about where spiralling levels of consumption run-up against natural resource and ecological limits, and the fact current rates of western consumption depend on cheap labour in the global south that won't last indefinitely - and in the case of China relies on a historically unprecedented reallocation of national income away from its citizens, and towards gargantuan capital investment at home and abroad.

[chordalkeyboard]

> The argument against your view is that human desire is not fixed, but expands with the development of every new frontier of consumption. The more we can produce, the more we want. Should we let that process run indefinitely?

The problem is that we are not inherently given the opportunity to make that decision for other people. It's one thing to speak theoretically about this process of exogenous desires forming anew with every novel discovery. It's quite another thing to tell people "no more inventions or creative labor, society is wealthy enough."

> The costs are multiple. We organise society around the productivist maximisation of output, requiring us all to work at a dizzying pace despite the dramatic increase of productivity per hour of labour over time. We compensate for the modest time we have to ourselves, 'leisure', through a lifestyle of extreme consumption. One of the underlying reasons that we want to consume more, is as a marker that we are the kinds of people capable of high consumption. Having a nice house, clothes and car, going on nice holidays, validates our social status and esteem, or worse, feeds our pride and envy. We organise the whole of human life and society around production to satisfy our ape-brain psychology, to feed our bottomless status-seeking. It's a huge collective action problem, and we would all be better off if we jointly committed to working less, and shifted away from private consumption to public goods that can be shared in common.

I agree with (almost) all of this and if you are serious about the above, I humbly suggest investigating the connection between time preference and interest rates.

> There are also important questions about where spiralling levels of consumption run-up against natural resource and ecological limits, and the fact current rates of western consumption depend on cheap labour in the global south that won't last indefinitely - and in the case of China relies on a historically unprecedented reallocation of national income away from its citizens, and towards gargantuan capital investment at home and abroad.

I agree that this is problematic at best and likely to be catastrophic.

[Emma_Goldman]

"It's quite another thing to tell people "no more inventions or creative labor, society is wealthy enough."

I am not a proponent of eliminating growth, let alone creativity and inventions. Those are great things, within limits. I simply think we ought to move away from the opposite extreme of maximalist production and consumption. I agree that how to do that is enormously difficult.

[chordalkeyboard]

> Those are great things, within limits. I simply think we ought to move away from the opposite extreme of maximalist production and consumption.

Who can be trusted to decide what those limits are for other people?

> I agree that how to do that is enormously difficult.

There is a perspective that interest rates are connected to time preference and higher interest rates incentivize a longer time preference, which would make people more inclined to plan for the future and consume less.

I agree that it is enormously difficult and not likely to be solved by merely changing the rate of return on invested capital.

[alangou]

It is true that in a rich society such as that of the United States, we produce in absolute numbers more than we can hope to consume. Not necessarily so in nations such as China, India, and many other developing countries.

The opposite state of this is poverty, a condition in which humanity has lived for 99% of its existence. In the modern day, technology and evolution in economic-political systems have enabled us to produce wealth at a large scale, enough to support hundreds of millions of people living with more material comforts than any medieval king. It took a hell of a lot of work to get here.

To argue that "Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world", then, is to put the cart before the horse. Work is precisely the attempt to alleviate ourselves of poverty. Work, coordinated well and magnified in its output by technology, which itself progressed due to a combination of work and the play of creative-minded individuals, creates the wealth we enjoy today.

I think this essay provides too many fancy words and not enough details about how to achieve this utopian vision of a world of all play and no work, in which economically productive activities are perfectly aligned with our human pursuits so as to produce wealth, leisure, and comfort for all.

For example, this following passage, in which he proposes the abolition of the auto industry:

  Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant — and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model-T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we’ve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.

What does this even mean? We need automobiles to get around — to drop kids off at school, to transport food from the farm to the granary to the supermarket, to visit mom and dad's over the holidays. I take issue when this essay hand-waves away these concerns. I'd rather see a proposal for what might alleviate these needs — better public transport? Electric cars? Logistics handled by swarms of flying drones?

I am all for being an optimist, and all for evolving culturally so that we can work more happily and efficiently, and all for employing technology to achieve these things, but this essay isn't it. It would make sense if we lived in the Culture of Iain M. Banks, cared for by hyper-intelligent AI, but that's so far away in the future as to be barely worth considering right now.

As of today, work and a culture of work has produced our rich society. It's also produced its share of problems — rich diseases, soulless office cubicles, environmental degradation — but abolishing work culture is not the answer. The problems you mention of distribution and recycling of surplus is going to be solved with — dare I say it? — more work.

[Bakary]

It's estimated that around half of produced food is wasted/thrown away so maybe we aren't that far from what you're describing

[notahacker]

Much of the produced food is thrown away because it's no longer considered fit to eat, however. And scarcity also takes into account the where. Malnourished people in poor countries might happily eat bread which is past its 'sell by' date in rich countries' supermarkets, or even the slightly burned leftovers from my plate, but there isn't a distribution system to get it there (and the resources needed to transport that food to them whilst the food is still edible genuinely are scarce)

[Bakary]

I've written a lengthier response to that in the conversation tree, but the gist of it is that it is a political choice whereas the OP sarcastically alluded to a physical problem (mana from heaven, which we already have thanks to tech)

The problem is that the massive tech surplus is captured and not allocated to make life less hellish.

[chordalkeyboard]

> the gist of it is that it is a political choice

I disagree, it is economic reasoning.

> The problem is that the massive tech surplus is captured and not allocated to make life less hellish.

What massive tech surplus is there that could move food across the ocean for free?

[pfalcon]

Let me guess - it's thrown when it's already not in the very edible condition? And it's produced in the first place in the hope that it will be bought at the price asked?

So, I'm not sure that those who produce (or distribute) it will agree at once "let's give right away half of produced for free". But if you pressure them much, they might "agree" to cut the production in half. But you may imagine where that could lead.

Finally, you may expect the government to buy half of it right away to give away for free. Well, good luck with running with that line for president, probably won't work even in Sub-Saharan Africa. And likely the food will still be trash when reaching the target audience, due to government efficiency.

[Bakary]

This misses the point.

The original poster made reference a reference to medieval beliefs in earthly paradise with the idea of food falling from the heavens. In reality, we already sorta live in the land of Cockaigne given the dizzying variety and quantity of food we are able to produce, as well as the amount of energy. We have the technology, and we have the ability. Granted, it would be nice to have much cheaper energy sources but these no longer seem to be a distant dream.

So all I am saying is that the idea that we don't have to work as much is not that unrealistic. Already much of work is relatively meaningless, or merely redistributive. The portion of the economy that actually produces things is small. Most people shift wealth around in the tertiary sector.

So yes, there indeed are enormous challenges when it comes to distribution. But these are mostly the result of political choices and not physical barriers to which the original poster was hinting at sarcastically. If you take electric vehicles, no progress is made for decades then suddenly when people focus their efforts on it the landscape changes completely. Coca Cola can manage an extremely proficient distribution system, so who is to say governments can't? With increasing automation they will have to start redistribution anyway or indeed lose elections.

This reminds me a bit of members of the House of Commons wondering if the poor would become too lazy if we decrease the working day from 16 hours to a mere eight.

>Finally, you may expect the government to buy half of it right away to give away for free

Governments all over the world already prop up agriculture with price controls. India is currently wracked by the largest protests in history because that system was put on pause. So it's not like people aren't receptive to governmental intervention in critical sectors. The notion of government efficiency is amusing in the first place when we consider the half of food that is wasted by market action

[pfalcon]

> This misses the point.

> of food we are able to produce, as well as the amount of energy. We have the technology, and we have the ability.

And you miss my point too. I keep reading "we", "we", "we" in replies here, but who's that "we"? I for one this year was able to produce following food: a few stems of mint, and 5 centimeter diameter watermelon on my balcony.

So let me tell you - "they" are able to produce food. "They" have technology and ability. And that's exactly what people keep saying here: They should collect our garbage. They should turn cities into more suitable for automated vehicles. They should automate agriculture. For I don't see a great desire among participants here to grow their own potato crop (automated or not).

But what if they decided that we want too much from them? What if they decided it would be "easier" or maybe even "better" to just kill us?

> This reminds me a bit of members of the House of Commons wondering if the poor would become too lazy if we decrease the working day from 16 hours to a mere eight.

And they did become too lazy, ain't it? At least they don't die like flies (smells bad) and don't run revolts that often.

[charlesu]

What resource is scarce? We can’t give everyone an iPhone or a McMansion, but we could probably feed everyone.

[ZephyrBlu]

I'd say you're completely right, but there are a couple of caveats.

1) Most people would not be content with just the basics. We like shiny new stuff like iPhones or fancy clothes or nice food

2) Even if there was no scarcity of anything, our distribution systems (Globally) are pretty poor. I doubt we could flip a switch and begin distributing resources to everywhere in the world that needs them.

[postingpals]

We actually can give everyone a phone since there are well over 8 billion in circulation.

[pfalcon]

By taking them from whoever owns them already? That's still popular petty street crime tactics in 3rd-world countries.

[charlesu]

No, we can just give people used phones. We have such a surplus of some things that we can actually redistribute them in a non-zero sum way.

[jancsika]

Just curious-- what action would you take if tech made it so that food fell from the heavens? Are you just saying that you'd slightly alter your opinion of "The Abolition of Work" in response?

Or would you, say, give your life to protect that tech from embargo/destruction?