[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.

[Emma_Goldman]

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

The productivist society in which we now live is not natural or the aggregate consequence of so many individuals choosing their preferred levels of production, consumption and leisure. It is a result of a system of competition that compels firms to plough productivity gains into capital reinvestment, and individuals to work beyond their happiness to succeed in the job market and afford themselves the markers of social validation. Any society has to collectively decide what it's priorities are, and how to balance production and consumption, this one included. However it is won, it should be won through democracy.

Interesting point about using interest rates to slow the economy.

[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.