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

I assumed that yes, shelter was part of the package. Doesn't have to be lots of room - Korean livingtel communal apartments were the baseline in my head - but it has to be clean, safe, and functional.

How is this different from what we have now? And more importantly: how does threatening starvation prevent this activity or make people better?

Post-scarcity isn't being proposed as a way to make everyone into better people. It's being proposed as an economic system that gets us more bang for our buck.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Then I do wonder if there's no space for more housing where people actually want to live — would that mean building new buildings, say, on artificial islands, or gigantic tower blocks?

And build them well — don't want them falling apart after twenty years...

edited 19th Aug '13 3:18:38 AM by Greenmantle

Keep Rolling On

#1 lesson of Tower Blocks — install onsite management systems: don't uninstall them, privatise them and/or cut their funding, however tempting.

edited 19th Aug '13 3:18:36 AM by Euodiachloris

@Radical Taoist: I did not make my points clear. I believe a post-scarcity economy would make boredom a worse social problem; I believe a post-scarcity economy would not reduce envy as a social problem (barring radical egalitarianism—which "Manna" convinced me a sufficiently productive economy might make tolerable.)

The argument that not everyone would use their free time to get into trouble doesn't disprove my belief that more people would get themselves into trouble. The assumption that boredom *sometimes* leads to idle sabotage is...not hard to find evidence for. And as I said, it doesn't take a whole lot of Beavises and Buttheads playing with matches.

(Note: this would be a nicer social problem to deal with than the ones we have. Just like an obesity epidemic doesn't look like much of a problem—in fact, looks like Heaven on Earth—to people who have to worry about famines.)

The rationing and robots come from "Manna", one possible form of post-scarcity economy. As you said, they are not essential parts of a post-scarcity economy.

The "punish the rich"...well, when you call yourself a progressive in your sig, with a link to a progressive manifesto, it's not that much of a stretch to think egalitarianism might be part of your desired Utopia.

It sounds like you're not anywhere near satisfied with what we have now, even though you can go to a lot of poor neighborhoods now where almost everyone already has adequate food, shelter, furniture, and clothing and even a modicum of luxuries and some access to health care. (And the ones who don't...it's all too often self-inflicted. For one thing, drug habits can cost a lot of money.)

@ Meklar—"I don't think the former will choose to have free time and then be so bored that they'll go around breaking stuff."

Why not? Some people do so now. I really do not think people having more free time would make this happen less.

Point taken that the more productive the economy, the cheaper it is to fix vandalism, so probably the less serious a problem it is if someone vandalizes your stuff. Though I'm not sure that actually discourages it from happening.

It is a fact that 'boredom', if you mean what I understand you to mean, does not provoke delinquency on the same level that poverty does, if only because people who are poor are more likely to commit crimes to provide income than people who are not.

Compare crime rates in affluent suburbs, where youth can indeed be quite troublesome, to crime rates in poverty stricken communities, where they often form violent, organised gangs. The conclusion is clear.

edited 20th Aug '13 3:40:14 PM by stripes-the-zebra

And I don't. See stripes' post above. Again, it's a question of tradeoffs. How bad does boredom have to be for the consequences of post-scarcity to be worse than the consequences of poverty in our society now? Thank you for answering my rhetorical question above. This is why I dislike "political spectrum" judgments. I'm to the "left" of Barack Obama, whatever the hell that means, so clearly I want to loot mansions and oppress the bourgeoisie. *rolls eyes* You can find a lot more poor neighbourhoods now where people don't. As for blaming the poor for their poverty in the parentheses, please. You want to know one of the most expensive costs of being poor? Being poor. Having more money to invest allows you to get better deals and save in the long run. Terry Pratchett could figure this shit out.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Not sure that would actually change. Poverty is strangely subjective. Even in post-scarcity, poor people would still exist. There would still be prejudices, class lines, and wage wars. People don't tend to think about what they have; they tend, more often, to think about what they don't have. The poor will always covet the rich, and the rich will always covet the richer still.

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

Poverty below a particular level does cause massive property crime (and in America, the super majority of crime is related to drugs which occur in poverty stricken areas) and that is an easy statistic to look at when comparing to countries with more severe poverty versus ones with more affluence. Wealth imbalance causes certain political instability but crime? Not sure about that.

I'm not sure if there is much evidence lending to "boredom" causing much problems. The spoiled rich problem is one of which we have elites and even then I find it hardly universal that being rich causes such children to then become horrible drug snuggling delinquents. That's only in a minority of cases. And in a post-scarcity society, the goal would be to have a very large affluent middle class. These kids will have parents. Parents will tend to want their kids to do useful things in their time; sports, music, chess, school etc. By the argument of "boredom", we should see middle class neighbourhoods descending into flaming holes of chaos and scumbaggery. They do not.

I think most of the problems of post-scarcity isn't what do you do when you're there it's about the transition period. What happens about people who work in an industry where humans must remain in but the cost-model breaks down? For instance, look at digital media today. Humans must remain in the industry and they require money to produce new products but distribution is basically zero dollars. So what's the price of a good? Is it ethical or moral to artificially restrict a good in order to fit it into our general market system with items that have non-zero distribution costs?

The solution (both economically and philosophically) is quite simple: Pay content creators for the act of creation, not the act of distribution.

I'm not sure how closely this is related to post-scarcity, though. It's an obvious step that should be taken with or without the kind of advanced economy that could trivially provide everyone with basic necessities. As such, there might be other threads better suited to the topic.

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If you pay them for the act of creation alone, then where is the quality incentive? I'd rather allow people who want to make a living as artists to have a guaranteed stipend* plus a bonus for plays/downloads, to be paid out of a general fund established for that purpose. Media distribution itself is free but regulated so that plays/downloads can be tracked. Arts funding comes out of general tax revenue, but consumers have the option to donate to artists they enjoy.

Advertising would undoubtedly play a part, too, as would sponsorships, merchandise sales, and the like.

Entertainment is an interesting study in artificial scarcity; at one time it was a genuine issue, but with the advent of recording media — and digital distribution — the only scarcity that's justified now is for live performances.

*Actually, in the scenario we're depicting, everyone would have a minimum standard of living regardless of employment. We're talking about post-scarcity in terms of food, clothing, shelter, etc., after all. Under these conditions, artists would be able to pursue their trade for love, and the successful ones (by popularity) would enjoy additional benefits in terms of a share of consumers' discretionary spending on merchandise, live shows, direct donations, etc.

edited 21st Aug '13 12:08:22 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Not unless you think things like, say, Disease of Poverty care about inflation.

edited 21st Aug '13 1:26:44 PM by KingZeal

Reputation is the obvious one. Even with the current system, there's a colossal amount of customer feedback these days. That wouldn't change. Moreover, customer feedback during production would probably be more prevalent (look at how Kickstarter already works).

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You'd want some form of compensation to accompany the feedback, whatever form that takes. People work for incentives, and incentives in a post-scarcity world are access to some form of scarce good, be it luxuries, approbation, whatever.

edited 21st Aug '13 2:22:48 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Actually, for many forms of art I think we're already in post-scarcity society.

People are demonstratably willing to produce videos, webcomics, fanfiction, and more for nothing more than a little bit of fame. The more successful artists can sell T-shirts or take commissions or ask for donations, and make some extra pocket change. Only a very few can quit their day jobs—but only a very few artists ever could, really.

The net result is: a lot more, and a lot more varied, art—available on demand for free to anyone with a computer or a smartphone. (Or in a pinch, access to a public library, or in most of the world to a cheap Internet cafe. For some reason they have those in places like Pakistan, but not much in the US.)

This breaks down for some artforms. Movies, for example. It's still free to make copies of a movie—but most movies require millions of dollars to make the first copy. Not a whole lot of people can spare that kind of money just for ego boost—especially since some movies flop. We haven't really solved that problem yet.

But still—I say we're already living in a post-scarcity media world, and it's working out pretty good.

(The biggest complaint remaining isn't that there's nothing available for free—it's that many specific works aren't available both for free and legally. You couldn't read all the free books on Kindle in a lifetime. And pretty much everything is available pirated.)

I never meant to accuse anyone of "eat the rich" attitudes, merely assumed a self-proclaimed progressive would want to include a certain amount of wealth redistribution as part of your post-scarcity economy. Which I admit, may have been a false assumption on my part, in which case I apologize.

And on rereading this thread, you have indeed expressed more willingness to accept imbalances of wealth than most progressives I've met. So my assumption was incorrect, and I do apologize. As you explain, you're talking about making the lot of the poor closer to middle class, not about resentment of the rich. You're actually working from compassion rather than rage or envy. Which I find rather refreshing.

In return, please don't assume that I want poor people to have to struggle for necessities because I'm mean?

In a non-post-scarcity society, people must struggle for resources because resources are scarce. And TANSTAAFL—There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Somebody's got to pay for it.

In a post-scarcity society, lunch might become like the electricity and computer memory used in downloading media—so cheap we can round down and act as if it were free. But we aren't there yet for material goods.

I think we're arguing about how much should go in that "guaranteed free basic necessities" basket in a post-scarcity society. Most likely yours would include more than mine—but that's an argument of degree, not of principle. And therefore solvable by haggling and compromise.

@DCC regarding media: How about patron agreements, or "pay what you will and I will list your name as a supporter of my art"? Then the artist gets money in addition to their prestige, and people who back the right horse get the prestige of supporting the finest arts. This would require a bit of a cultural shift though.

My idea of wealth distribution is a financial transaction tax to kill the global currency casino, separating investment banks away from commercial banks to stop speculative trading, including capital gains in normal income and having top tax rates like we had back in the 50s and 60s. Three out of those four things are situations that were historically the case in the U.S. already. Lenin I ain't. Deal. The thing is, we are there for food. We have to capability to produce food to meet everyone's nutritional needs, worldwide; it's a question of organizing distribution and reducing waste. Likewise, the only reason shelter is scarce is because we're not willing to build enough housing and make it easily available. We haven't achieved post-scarcity on the energy front because we're not willing to make the investments in infrastructure and technology and efficiency, as that steps on the toes of existing economic interests. We're not post-scarcity because of a lack of political will and a strange cultural addiction to punishing the poor, not because of a lack of resources.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Does that include Political Will from the voters as well as the Politicians?

Keep Rolling On

Politicians are an extension of the political will of the voters. So yes, there's a sizable portion of the population that does want the poor punished for being poor.

This is exacerbated by the role of money in the political process, whereby a small core of dedicated voters, abetted and encouraged by wealthy interests whose primary objective is to gain more wealth, can hijack the political process and effectively block efforts to eliminate certain forms of resource scarcity.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

What Fighteer said. We are our political system.

I just noticed that we've gotten pretty far away from the "ethics" and "morality" section of the discussion. Should I repost the questions in the OP?

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

I wanted to put up the digital media example because that is half-way to a post-scarcity society; meaning that we can have as much of the products they have produced as we want but we are choosing as a society to allow the artists to artificially restrict their distribution despite the zero-cost of it.

So overall, if we want to go back to the OP questions.

1) Is it ethical/moral to have people not work?

Why not? I'm not sure why anybody should care what anybody else is doing. In a post-scarcity society, the presumption is that the ability to provide (at least) the basics is of no concern to any individual person. It presumes our productivity is so darn high that every can have food, clothing and shelter and no one is unfairly shouldering the burden of providing it.

2) Responsibility

I have no idea why we need to teach anybody responsibility. I get the sentiment. But, people have lived through poverty and make it to the middle class... maybe they want everyone to start off in poverty and have to "make it" to the middle class. Would it be fair for all children to start off in the bottom 10% of income?

Besides, there are ways to teach responsibility to people that don't involve earning money. Family structures still exist and they would likely expect their kids to join in on "healthy" activities such as sports, cooperative video games, school activities, religion etc.

3) Punishing lazy people?

I think this is largely pointless. Do we punish people for being unemployed today? I think we're pretty much done with the concept of "poor laws". If they fail in life, that's bad. You can opt to say you don't believe in welfare (and thus exit from a post-scarcity society) but I don't see any need to then punish people.

4) Is it moral or ethical not to establish such a society in a capitalist economy?

Because I largely feel that the vast majority of jobs in our economy are superfluous (humans don't need to do them if robots can), I would say that I would prefer to have a post-scarcity economy no matter your overall outlook (capitalist, socialist, communist etc).

Of course, the higher percentage of people in jobs they actually like the higher your overall productivity. So basically, ethical or not, it would just be stupid not to get into a post-scarcity society.

5) Immigration

I think that it is ethically fine to limit immigration because I presume that the post-scarcity situation is limited to your population size. Now, the presumption is that your post-scarcity isn't based off of handing secondary costs to foreigners or that your country engages in foreign activities that deprives economic wealth from others and gives it to your own people.

There are other considerations with immigration beyond economics which include culture clash, language barriers, job opportunities and so on. I would expect that a nation could try to determine some maximum level of influx and allow up to that many applicants to enter. The only thing I want to say is that if you let someone in then they're in and if you don't then they're out. No waffling.

The most ideal outcome is that everyone can enter into a post-scarcity economy so that immigration is no longer a consideration.

@Radical Taoist: Well, you might as well assume I hate poor people because I'm mean. Fighteer and breadloaf are more than willing to do so. C'est la vie.

No, we aren't there for food—because the process of establishing a central global authority controlling the world's production and distribution of food would almost certainly reduce agricultural production. Namely, by the global war that would be required.

(Don't believe me? The institution which is already closest to being a world government is the United States of America. We could have global governance right now if everyone just agreed to get with the program and do what Uncle Sam says. Not going to happen, is it?)

And that's assuming that the centralized global economy wouldn't reduce agricultural productivity by itself, even if established peacefully. And...that's a big assumption.

"Likewise, the only reason shelter is scarce is because we're not willing to build enough housing and make it easily available."

Nope. TANSTAAFL. Housing costs money. A lot of money. (More precisely: resources and labor.) We're nowhere near the point where we can treat building a house like copying a file (ie, as if it were free).

Countries like Venezuela can and do go broke doing well-intentioned plans to build free (or highly subsidized) housing for everyone, but running out of money before finishing all the planned housing.

Energy is the same—if solar power or whatever were really that ready for primetime (ie, significantly cheaper than fossil fuels—forget post-scarcity; significantly cheaper would be enough), there'd be more of it. The Evil Corporations don't rule the whole world. That's coming—but we aren't there yet. (And considering I remember hearing the same solar hype in the 1970s, when it was much cruder than it is now—I'm thinking it really is technical problems, not political conspiracies.)

The United States is nowhere near to being a global authority. The closest things we have to that are the United Nations and the World Bank, and they are a good start.

Further, you have offered no justification for your assertion that centralized global control of food distribution would reduce production.

As for housing, you forget a very important point. The supply of money is not finite. Money represents the flow of commerce. If we employ people to build housing, those people have money, which increases consumer spending, which makes more money available to pay people to build houses, etc.

The limitation is the number of able bodies and the availability of physical materials with which to build the houses. There is no such thing as a "money shortage". That's a myth invented by people who are still addicted to gold currency and its illusion of stability.

edited 28th Aug '13 8:51:21 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

"Is it ethical/moral to have people not work?"

Until the late 20th century, that question was irrelevant—society couldn't afford to let labor go to waste. It was impractical to have more than a few people not work.

That ship has sailed. We already have trailer parks where many people, even a majority, do not work. Sometimes their parents or even grandparents didn't either.

Obviously, we can get decent levels of production without needing that labor.

For more than a century, in fact, humanity has been coming up with innovations which take people out or partially out of the labor pool. Everything from the 80 hour work week, to child labor laws, to increasing compulsory education, to higher education, to retirement pensions. In addition, the entertainment industry has made great strides as people have more free time to fill. Come to think of it, TV was the first post-scarcity entertainment: buy a medium-sized appliance, and you could get unlimited amounts of entertainment for effectively free.

Note that unemployment, especially youth unemployment, is still considered a social problem. Even where the youth have adequate food, shelter, clothing, medical care, etc. I don't just mean in the US.

It's a social problem when you combine the factors of people wanting to work but being unable to, and the lack of access to necessary goods and services caused by un-/underemployment.

We train people for their entire childhood to expect to enter the workforce after school. When they get out of school, they find that they have no opportunities, or the opportunities they have don't make use of their skills. It is hardly surprising that they would feel embittered and betrayed as a result.

Post-scarcity must obviously be accompanied by shifts in cultural mores, or you'll run into this problem of expectations colliding with reality.

If you tell a working single mother with four children, "You can be given enough money (or equivalent in the form of vouchers/whatever) to obtain good food and clothing and have adequate housing and healthcare for yourself and your family, without having to work at all; or you can struggle with minimum wage jobs that leave you below the poverty line and keep you too tired to raise your kids," I have a hard time imagining that they'd pick the latter.

edited 28th Aug '13 9:02:50 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

@ fighteer: "Further, you have offered no justification for your assertion that centralized global control of food distribution would reduce production."

I have the history of attempts to collectivize agriculture, which generally reduce productivity for various reasons.

(Mostly, the problems of large organizations with centralized control, combined with the problems of ideologies where disagreement is considered treason. Though refusing the profit motive does create the economic problem of ignoring feedback on your efficiency.)

"The supply of money is not finite. Money represents the flow of commerce. If we employ people to build housing, those people have money, which increases consumer spending, which makes more money available to pay people to build houses, etc.

The limitation is the number of able bodies and the availability of physical materials with which to build the houses. There is no such thing as a "money shortage". That's a myth invented by people who are still addicted to gold currency and its illusion of stability."

I wondered if I was being too pedantic with the parenthesis on "more technically: resources and labor". Evidently not.

Money is not finite. Resources and labor are. (Money is just the points you use for keeping track of things.)

Increasing the money supply without increasing the goods and services it represents is called "inflation."

In some circumstances, to some extent, job programs can work like you say. But not always. Or Venezuela would be the richest country on earth thanks to their housing program.

For starters, you do have to pay those workers for it to work. Which means not only that you have money—but that you have stuff they can buy with that money. Stuff is finite, even though money isn't.

PS The US has not been on the gold standard for 40 odd years. Oh, and I'll take a loyalty oath if you like: I am not now nor have I ever been a supporter of returning to the gold standard.

"Post-scarcity must obviously be accompanied by shifts in cultural mores, or you'll run into this problem of expectations colliding with reality."

I agree with you on this. If we don't *need* a whole lot of people's labor—if their labor is worth nothing much to society—then we need to abandon a lot of the incentives needed in the past to get people's labor. Without losing what labor we still need. If people's work is worthless, we don't want people's self-esteem tied to their labor.

A fictional example: Nancy Kress, "Beggars in Spain". Basically, America had two social classes: the Donkeys and the Livers. The Livers (so named by themselves because they didn't work, they lived life), about 70% of the population, had a "gentleman of leisure" type ethic—work was beneath them. The Donkeys (named by the Livers) did what work needed to be done—mostly planning, research, and some maintenance.

It wasn't a stable arrangement, but it does indicate how post-scarcity could work.

"If you tell a working single mother with four children, "You can be given enough money (or equivalent in the form of vouchers/whatever) to obtain good food and clothing and have adequate housing and healthcare for yourself and your family, without having to work at all; or you can struggle with minimum wage jobs that leave you below the poverty line and keep you too tired to raise your kids, " I have a hard time imagining that they'd pick the latter."

You do realize you made pretty much a right-wing argument against welfare programs there? The main difference is you stacked the deck with "single mother of four" rather than "single able-bodied male"; the economic incentives are the same for both case.

But yes—if welfare is too close to minimum wage, then people will rationally refuse minimum wage jobs. You alluded to "being too tired to raise your kids"—to be more explicit: welfare means you have more leisure time than a minimum wage job allows, and leisure time generally is considered a good. Even if it's hard to measure it in GNP terms, poor people will take this fact into account rationally when deciding whether to work.

PS One problem that really needs addressing, but is politically impossible to address—welfare programs that inadvertantly built in perverse incentives discouraging men from marrying and living with the mothers of their children. Which is a big ol' can of worms. (Especially if, as Americans usually do, we assume it's a race-based issue, which it really isn't.) Just an example—if post-scarcity means really generous welfare programs, there could be problems with some behaviors they might accidentally encourage.