[literalusername]

Post-scarcity has already arrived for every resource that has a marginal cost of production equal to zero. That includes every digital product.

That's not to say we're living in the age of post-scarcity. Most of our resources are still limited, and you're right that non-digital resources are likely to retain scarcity for a very long time. Furthermore, post-scarcity will never arrive for inherently limited resources, such as time.

But PG's essay addresses industries selling digital products, and within that realm, post-scarcity has indeed arrived.

[davidw]

> marginal cost of production equal to zero

I think it would be more correct to write "reproduction" or "distribution", because it costs a lot to produce a movie or a book or a big, complex piece of software.

[literalusername]

Marginal cost does not include initial investment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost

[rictic]

It seems like you're miscommunicating over where to delineate the product. You are right that the marginal cost of the Nth copy of a particular film is about zero. The marginal cost of making the Nth film is still decidedly nonzero.

[davidw]

Right and in any event it's ridiculous to talk about a "post scarcity" world when there is oodles of scarcity surrounding the creation of information goods like movies.

[galadriel]

That's exactly what Marginal cost is, the change in total cost to produce one more copy of the same product.

[anamax]

> Post-scarcity has already arrived for every resource that has a marginal cost of production equal to zero. That includes every digital product.

I must be doing it wrong because I don't know how to copy bits for free, let alone distribute them for free. I'm in good company - neither Amazon nor Apple knows how to do those things for free either. (The fact that their current costs may be dominated by billing doesn't imply that billing is their only cost.)

[wtallis]

Amazon and Apple aren't in the business of distributing digital goods with low marginal cost. They are in the business of distributing digital goods with the highest marginal price possible, so they have little incentive to reduce their marginal costs as much as possible. (Even so, their profit margins are very high.)

When you stop trying to impose artificial scarcity and simply try to distribute with the lowest possible marginal cost (things like Project Gutenberg or Bittorrent), you find that even if the marginal cost is not exactly zero, it is close enough that the marginal cost does not affect the pricing across any real-world range of quantities. Thus, the traditional supply/demand model no longer applies.

[anamax]

> They are in the business of distributing digital goods with the highest marginal price possible, so they have little incentive to reduce their marginal costs as much as possible.

Oh really? You think that Apple and Amazon don't care about their bandwidth charges? That will be news to the folks from whom they buy bandwidth. You also think that they don't care about the cost of the servers to send that content out?

> you find that even if the marginal cost is not exactly zero, it is close enough that the marginal cost does not affect the pricing across any real-world range of quantities.

There's your problem - you think that when the cost is minimal, supply/demand doesn't apply.

Your "economics" is several decades out of date. Lots of things aren't priced by cost, but by value. Supply/demand works just fine for them.

> When you stop trying to impose artificial scarcity and simply try to distribute with the lowest possible marginal cost (things like Project Gutenberg or Bittorrent)

Ah, you think that bittorrent is cost-efficient. It isn't. It's a way to spread infrastructure costs across a lot of people.

In other words, you're confusing cost and price again.

[wtallis]

"You think that Apple and Amazon don't care about their bandwidth charges?"

I really didn't say that, and you know it.

Apple and Amazon don't want to have a very high marginal cost, but they really don't mind small costs like credit card transaction fees. They don't need to eliminate those costs in order to be profitable. Minimizing their marginal costs is not their top priority.

[anamax]

>>You think that Apple and Amazon don't care about their bandwidth charges?

> I really didn't say that, and you know it.

The person who wrote "They are in the business of distributing digital goods with the highest marginal price possible, so they have little incentive to reduce their marginal costs as much as possible." either thinks that bandwidth costs aren't marginal costs for content distribution or did write that A&A don't care about bandwidth charges.

> They don't need to eliminate those costs in order to be profitable.

So? Lots of companies are profitable without eliminating certain costs, but that doesn't imply that they don't care about those costs.

You seem to think that a company that has "enough" margin doesn't, or shouldn't, care about costs. Some evidence would be nice.

> Minimizing their marginal costs is not their top priority.

Move those goal posts.

[literalusername]

Sure, if the cost of infrastructure is taken to be a result of the requirement to replicate data. But given an infrastructure that is maintained irrespective of its use for data replication, replication is free. The former case may describe Amazon and Apple, but the later case describes pirates.

[anamax]

Using that infrastructure has incremental costs. Plus, building it to accomodate data replication in addition to other things costs more than just building it to accommodate those other things.