The repercussions, ethics, and morality of a post-scarcity society

I got a better idea, lets pay CE Os what it takes for them to take the job and the value they add to the company.

edited 12th Aug '13 5:57:19 AM by soban

@Taoist: CEO pay and capital gains are two entirely separate kettles of fish.

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg get billions of dollars from capital gains because the company is their personal property. They own that stock, and despite what Obama may have said, they built it. Subject to reasonable taxation, one has the right to the fruits of what one creates.

CEO paychecks are not capital gains, though stock options often come with the package. CEO pay is excessive usually because of incestuous relationships between management and the Board of Directors; directors have a tendency to not exercise proper oversight over their executives, and so said executives cream off seven-figure salaries in exchange for managing companies that are owned by impersonal investors.

As an aside, when he was CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates' salary was $1 a year.

edited 12th Aug '13 6:17:31 AM by Ramidel

Basically that the bootstrap myth is a myth.

Getting back to the OT. I think we have defined post scarcity as the lack of scarcity of essentials. (Food, Housing, ect.) Because we understand that even in a theoretical ultimate post scarcity, there would still be some things that would have value. The original Mona Lisa for example. It is not going to matter if we could duplicate it at the Quark level, the original is still the original and has value as that.

I think that there is something very specific that we do have definite post scarcity on. (In the United States) Water. I used a lot of water this last month, gallons and gallons of it. If I wanted more, I could have all of it that I wanted. Around my work place, there are at least ten faucets on every floor. If I really wanted, I could just use the water from my work for everything and no one would really care. (Bit of an exaggeration on the everything.)

Does water still cost money? Yes, it does. However, when I'm consuming water, the cost is not an issue. That's what it means in my mind to be post scarcity.

And that is what a post-scarcity society is — not a lack of scarcity of essentials. It is a lack of scarcity of everything — even intelligence.

In my opinion immoral actions essentiolly equals violent actions. Scarcity is the main cause of violence, so essentially achieving a post-scarcity society is basically the best way to solve the problem of immorality.

Well, let's set a baseline for nutrition, water, housing, and medicine, plus transportation so they can get to better job opportunities as necessary.

Honestly, I think a post-scarcity society will have more violence. This is a problem we're facing in our society today: hardship creates emotional callouses. People who have led a harder life, tend to have more experience dealing with those hardships.

We'll never be able to rid ourselves of hardship, even if we can rid ourselves of scarcity. We'll still have things like hard breakups, bullying, greed, ambition, etc. The problem is, these things will have more weight, because the people experiencing them have less experience dealing with hardship. If you think Americans are spoiled, entitled little prats today, wait until they live in a world where they don't ever have to work, and they are raised from childhood secure in the knowledge that they have a God-given right to everything they will ever need.

Pain, hurt, and anger are all relative. "No, you cannot have X" is an ordinary part of life. We live with it. We deal with it. We move on. But in a world where children have grown up to expect that what they need will be given to them freely, rejection can become the most devastating thing in the world.

There may also be a potential for a surge in suicide rates due to how meaningless life would feel in a world where there may not be anything left for you to do, other than exist. Kids today are already feeling that pressure; that there's no big adventures to go on, no part of the world unexplored, no scientific advances they can think of that would reinvigorate human civilization. To some, it feels like all the adventures have already been had. Hardship is one of those things that gives people purpose, and in a post-scarcity society, that purpose would be gone too.

tl;dr: My biggest concern about a post-scarcity society is the generations that follow, and their potential for growing up as an entire generation of Lindsey Lohan. Having nothing to live for, nothing worth doing, and no ability to handle those minor hardships that still exist in the world could easily result in society imploding on itself.

edited 12th Aug '13 9:05:10 AM by TobiasDrake

If there were genuinely unlimited or ridiculously abundant resources, why would I care that some people would sit on their arses all day? I guess it would bug me that they would be wasting their lives, but I don't think I'd be able to work up any real indignation.

In a post-scarcity society Mc Donalds and so on would go out of business, yes. Sucks to be them, but since they (as a corporation) are exploitative shitheads at every point of their supply-chain, I wouldn't be crying any tears.

On the flipside of fast, junk food going down the shitter, we'd surely have an upturn in artisan restaurants where people cook for the love of it & to show off their skills to others. There are already cases of that happening in the wealthy parts of some cities.

More important than meaningless wage-slave jobs is maintaining the public infrastructure. Local co-operatives could probably maintain a majority of that — it's in everyone's interests to keep the power grid going — but national roads and things are a bit trickier.

My first instinct would be to implement a sort of industrial draft... though I think it would be best to make it non-mandatory, based on peer pressure.

I immensely disagree with that. "Hardship" is relative. The average American may not have to deal with starvation or poverty, but the average American also has a lower happiness or satisfaction in their everyday life. And it has nothing to do with a lack of hardship. To compare, I was reading an article fairly recently that was stating that hunter-gatherer societies probably had it a lot easier than we believe they did, but they were generally more satisfied with life than the archetypical American. What makes Americans miserable isn't so much a lack of hardship and inability to cope as it is the incredibly stupid gap between where they want to be and the impossibility of achieving it. Hypothetically, a post-scarcity society would remove some of those impossibilities by giving people more time to focus on self-improvement rather than bare subsistence.

edited 12th Aug '13 9:18:24 AM by KingZeal

true, also I'd think in a post-scarcity society, industries that would be described as luxuries would probably grow in size, since people would be freed up from the basic essential to enjoy themselves more (creating more consumers) or to try their hand at whatever impassions them (creating more product).

I'd think, personally, the arts would flourish in such a society

Isn't Star Trek meant to be a post-scarcity society?

Yep.

Joy has less meaning without pain. My opinions are biased, based on the people I've known, but here is what I've seen.

A - Scott's parents take care of him. He's 26 and his parents pay his rent, all of his bills, and bought him a truck. He occasionally donates blood in order to have some spending money to buy new video games. His life is post-scarcity, and he is miserable. He complains frequently that there's nothing to fill his life with. He gets no satisfaction from his hobbies, and constantly tries to find new hobbies to fill the void in his life, but they're temporary distractions before he's miserable again. He has no tolerance for minor aggrievances, frequently going off on angry tirades over the slight things like his mom talking too much, or light coming in through the doorcrack when he's sleeping and waking him up.

B - Mike spent most of his life in a room with a computer. He didn't go to school, didn't work, didn't do anything but be provided for by his mom and tool around on the internet. He has no work ethic as a result of this, and becomes angry and defensive when people expect him to do basic things like wash dishes or take out the trash. He's also developed into a sociopath, incapable of forming emotional relationships or even understanding basic human emotions, and has to have things like, "A parent would still be mourning a child two years after their death," explained to him frequently. He's bitter at the world for not functioning on cold, hard logic, and also hates the government because he believes that even basic laws like "You can't steal from folk," should be abolished and nobody has any right to tell him what to do with his life.

These are the kind of people I think of when people talk about post-scarcity. I've never met someone who spent their life having everything they could ever need provided for them and didn't become either miserable or an utter shit as a result. Hell, we see this in celebrities all the time; is there anybody who has lived a life of plenty and is happy?

edited 12th Aug '13 9:42:24 AM by TobiasDrake

People are complicated, so a couple of anecdotal examples are insufficient to really establish a societal pattern. If anything, "Mike" seems to have a flat-out Lack of Empathy.

The issue I take with the "there is no happiness without pain" idiom is that while it's often used prescriptively, it can just as easily be used descriptively. Meaning, no matter how happy someone is, they'll get pain from somewhere, often caused by their newfound happiness.

Besides that, the idea that people need to be miserable before they become happy has two other problems: first, the entire point of a progressive society is to remove a basic level of misery. If you want to argue that a child needs to suffer death in order to mature, then what's stopping someone from arguing the same thing about women and rape? And that leads into the second problem: not everyone handles the same type of misery the same—what was merely character-building for one person can severely fuck another person up for life.

edited 12th Aug '13 9:50:19 AM by KingZeal

People don't need to be miserable before they become happy, but pain does need to be an existing element of their life, because you're right: everyone gets pain from somewhere. There is no way to eliminate all forms of pain entirely. But how impactful that pain is on their life is entirely relative to the pain they've experienced in the past.

Losing some of the more basic hardships can make lesser hardships more impactful. Scott, in the example above, can't handle things like someone trying to talk to him while he's playing a video game, or light through a doorcrack, and flips out because of it. Why does he do this? Because that's the greatest pain he's ever experienced. What would be a minor distraction or annoyance to us is a horrific atrocity to him.

To someone who has never experienced pain, even so much as a papercut can feel like the most horrific thing in the world.

edited 12th Aug '13 9:53:48 AM by TobiasDrake

Not necessarily. As I said, people are complicated. While prior pain can help you develop a "thick skin", it can just as easily make you "snap". For example, most people who commit suicide do it as a spur-of-the-moment decision and, if stopped, will rethink the decision.

There's no magic way to end suffering—other than ending suffering.

Humans are very good at seeing differences and conflict. (Sometimes I wonder if conflict and conflict resolution is our hat.) Is it possible that happiness and scarcity are unrelated variables?

Is it just me, or is this discussion hampered by an assumption on the part of people that post-scarcity society means bland communist wasteland? I'm talking about a society that's just like ours, except we don't need to spend money on food, water, shelter, or medicine. That's it.

@Tobias: Gandhi had it right when he said he mistrusted any political system that claimed to be so perfect, people didn't need to be good. If you watched the links before, you'll note that fear is not actually good at motivating people to do higher cognitive tasks or teaching them how to do such tasks. You want to train people to handle hardship and find meaning? Then train them to do so. And train them the way we train people to do such difficult, complex tasks: practice, exercise, breaking the task into smaller chunks.

@RT, I agree that a post scarcity society has to be all that different. I think that in the United States we are post scarcity in water, I'll accept the possibility that England is post scarcity in medical care. (I'm 100% sure I agree, but I'm the hopeful type.) Food is a bit trickeyer, but when you have more people dying of over eating than under eating, it is arguable that you are there. Shelter is the only think that I think we might not have post scarcity anywhere in the world.

I think that it's in sight. It might not look like what we think it will though.

…What exactly is stopping Scott from getting a job? Does he need one to survive? No. But I think he wants one anyway, because of greed (I don't just want enough money, I want lots of money), pride (nobody can call me a freeloader if I earn my keep), and self-esteem (when I work, I feel good, and people praise me). His depression and feelings of uselessness seem strong enough to overcome laziness and a resistance to change.

I question if one can "develop" into someone so antisocial unless they were always such to a certain degree. Mike is an anomaly. People like him have always existed, and will continue to exist, regardless of economic climate or the state of society itself.

edited 12th Aug '13 10:24:52 AM by Robotnik

I wish people wouldn't label isolation as sociopathy. -_- May's well call him "depressed" or "introverted". But, noooooo: go for the big label. <_<

edited 12th Aug '13 10:33:43 AM by Euodiachloris

Sounds like a bland hippy wasteland to me.

I don't know, the ideas people have been throwing forth of some sort of utopia where people only do the things that they want to do, and never the things they don't want to, and we all sit around having art classes and making little trinkets because we want to without working just sounds.. Meh.

I just don't sound particularly wow'd by that. It doesn't sound so great to me. Maybe it's because so much of my life is about conflict, but I don't particularly want to live in the land of crystal spires and togas. The Athenian paradise of art and culture you guys are talking about just seems sort of shitty from my perspective, and part of that is a distinct lack of.. well, problems.

And I don't mean problems as in "Our scientists are having a tough time figuring out this equation or building this thing." But I just can't think of a world without the average problems we have of conflict, danger, and problems. It doesn't seem particularly realistic or possible, and honestly, it seems.. boring?

The poster above me got it right though, that the form that post-scarcity may take will probably be very different from what a lot of people are invisioning. I doubt it will be post-scarcity in the sense that you can just have all of those things without giving up any labor or effort in exchange for free. The abundance is there, but you have to be able to get access to the amount that you require in order to not have a personal scarcity. Honestly, reforming the type of education that we push for to align with the industries that we have so that jobs aren't a problem is how we'll reach our form of post-scarcity. We aren't going to turn into some globalized socialist utopia any time within any of our lifetimes, it just isn't going to happen.

And I'm not trying to knock socialism by saying that, I think there are plenty of very admirable aspects to it. But I feel that going too overboard turns into "Free rides for everyone who wants one! Fringe benefits for those who don't!" and that just seems... wrong.

Nothing's stopping him from getting a job. He's had four jobs in the past. He usually worked for about two weeks to four months, then quit because of reasons like, "working made him unhappy".

You can't really train people to find meaning in life.

He's not just isolated, he's physically incapable of forming emotional bonds to other people. Even he admits that he's sociopathic.

edited 12th Aug '13 10:35:26 AM by TobiasDrake

Why not?