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

Who said anything about collectivizing agriculture? I'm talking about the distribution end, not the production end. We make more than enough food to feed everyone in the world; the problem is getting it to them, not producing it.

Frankly, agriculture is Big Business these days in the First World. Privately owned small farms are important to local commerce but have virtually no impact in the big picture. There is no reason to expect that Archer Daniels Midland or Monsanto would suddenly decide to close their doors if we stop subsidizing them and/or ship a bunch of the stuff they make to Africa at controlled prices.

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With respect to the money supply, you're incorrect about the cause of inflation. We have lots of studies showing that the amount of currency in circulation has next to no impact on prices. What does matter is demand versus supply. If people want more stuff than the economy can produce, prices go up. This attracts investment into production, since you get a higher rate of return. Production increases supply, causing prices to stabilize, and so forth. Economics 101.

If you suddenly pour resources into a segment of your economy, like housing, you can expect a large surge of demand. If you are unable to meet that demand, because (for example) you've invested so much in home building that nobody's growing food, then you'll experience a crash when the demand eventually recedes.

The objective is not to create bubbles, but to create a sustainable growth curve. Give people jobs to increase their income, which they may then spend on goods and services, creating jobs to produce those goods and services, which increases income, which increases spending, in a positive reinforcement loop. Too many governments get stuck on "we don't have enough money to do things" without realizing that they have cause and effect backwards. Doing things is how you get money.

Now, if a country lacks control of its own currency, or has large external debts that are denominated in other currencies, or has a massive resource shortfall, then it has artificial constraints on its ability to stimulate demand. In these cases, a change in monetary policy is needed.

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Really? I thought I made a great argument for getting people out of minimum wage jobs and into basic economic security. The pressures are not identical for "single mother (or father) of four" and "single able-bodied adult with no children". The latter requires far less income to keep him/herself out of poverty, for one thing.

Now, if society expects him to become a "provider" and he can't find adequate work, then he's going to experience diminished self-worth and may act counterproductively, such as engaging in criminal activity. That's what we want to prevent — a person who feels that they have no value to society is naturally not going to become a productive contributor to it.

The "perverse incentives" that you are talking about are a result of tax and welfare policies that penalize a couple for being married in the form of reducing their real income after taxes.

True reform would require fixing these issues, but the opposition to this type of reform uniformly comes from the people who insist that welfare is an incentive to laziness and insist that everything be strictly means-tested and regulated to keep people from "mooching" off of it.

edited 28th Aug '13 10:00:06 AM by Fighteer

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

Yes, you did.

I should probably have qualified that as "getting out of poverty wage jobs". Minimum wage can be changed, and in fact should be, to be a living wage, so that an able person who works full time will always be able to live better than being on welfare/income support.

Also, in that "single parent with four kids" scenario, I'd challenge anyone to show that raising children as a single parent is not a full-time job that's worthwhile to society.

edited 28th Aug '13 12:52:53 PM by Fighteer

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

Does not really change the argument that much. If someone can be just out of poverty working or just out of poverty and not working, they are going to choose not working.

Absent other factors such as social pressures and expectations, yes. If it's expected that a person will seek work, or if they want to work, they may choose a job that doesn't pay better than welfare. However, this is not necessarily beneficial to society. It depends on whether they are giving up other, useful activities, and whether the job they do is itself useful.

One of the killers of the "bootstrap yourself to fortune" mentality is the sheer lack of available jobs. I know we talked about this before, but if your only options are a poverty-level wage or welfare, it's not that much of a choice. If technology is displacing skilled work and thus being a skilled worker has increasingly little value, then telling people to "acquire skills so you can get a better job" is pointless.

The most efficient way to resolve the dilemma is to provide a minimum standard of living and allow people who desire to increase their living standard (seek luxuries, in other words) to find work suiting them.

edited 28th Aug '13 12:58:26 PM by Fighteer

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

Not working can get rather boring rather quickly.

Not to mention there's a gap between "I have what I need to survive" and "I have what I want in life".

After all, middle-class teenagers who don't need jobs to avoid starving will still sometimes get them to afford things their parents won't give them.

Right, they are seeking luxuries. That's entirely fine; in fact, it ought to be the point of work, not bare survival.

If we can guarantee everyone survival and decent living conditions, then we should. The mere act of doing so will provide sufficient commerce to keep the economy running — booming, in fact.

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

Not necessarily. If you're already providing everyone with a basic standard of living, the paradigm could just be that those who want more can work to earn more on top of that, to the tune of whatever an employer is willing to pay them. I mean, the payment from the employer doesn't have to replace the universal welfare.

Join my forum game!

That's a valid point. It could work that way as well.

As long as having a job doesn't reduce your standard of living, the precise form it takes doesn't matter that much.

edited 28th Aug '13 5:41:03 PM by Fighteer

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

So, I feel the central question is more like this with regards to a post-scarcity society.

If you had the ability to provide everyone with something OR you can charge money for it even though it costs no additional money to provide that good/service, which do you believe is ethical/moral to do?

That's the question that permeates a post-scarcity society.

I think the moral option is to let the person who owns it make that choice. Some will share, some won't.

Yeah, but then you have a society that's terminally dependent on the least selfish of its citizens. You've just introduced the Prisoner's Dilemma in a situation where we could do away with it entirely. No, thanks.

I get the whole "I must have freedom to do as I wish" thing, but unlimited liberty cannot work in a large and complex society that is dependent on all its people working productively together.

That said, I see no problem with independent food growers selling stuff to people at a local farmer's market. As long as people have a choice to buy that food versus what they can get as part of their standard living stipend/whatever, the system is fine.

edited 29th Aug '13 7:47:26 AM by Fighteer

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

Interestingly, Edmund Burke, basically the father of conservatism, wrote very strongly against discarding collective ideas entirely. Similarly, John Locke, whose brand of classical liberalism the saner Republicans espouse, believed that the poor had a moral right to (some of) the property of the rich.

edited 29th Aug '13 7:59:15 AM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Adam Smith, father of modern economics, insisted that regulation was needed to keep the excesses of capitalism in check. Henry Ford, father of the modern automobile, insisted on paying his workers enough to buy the cars they made. John Maynard Keynes, reviled this day by the right for daring to suggest that government can intervene in markets, was a firm believer in capitalism as well.

I swear, nobody on the right these days has the slightest understanding of the people they hold up as their idols. The actual beliefs they follow are straight out of the playbook of fictional characters like Gordon Gekko and John Galt.

Maybe I'll start a political movement on the ideology of manufacturing magic rings to fight off an Evil Overlord. Or of not buying poisoned apples from evil witches. Or of rescuing buxom alien women from monsters. Or solving all our social problems by learning to speak Martian.

edited 29th Aug '13 12:56:21 PM by Fighteer

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

Thought this article would be relevant to the discussion.

University of Warwick In Britain has conducted a study suggesting that being impoverished has a negative impact on individual congitive skills. The worry of making ends meet takes up a lot of the inviduals "mental bandwidth" as they put it.

edited 29th Aug '13 4:58:11 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Who watches the watchmen?

I'm going to mentally file that in the "no shit, Sherlock" category. Not that it'll convince conservatives. "Bootstraps", amirite?

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

To quote a fictional example, Horatio Alger Jr.'s Ragged Dick starts with Dick unable to think beyond two, maybe three days in the future, because that's as long as any money he makes is going to last. The very idea of planning for the future is alien to him. Once it's introduced, Dick just happens to get an opportunity to get a nest egg of five dollars, which he parleys into a plan to lift himself out of homeless poverty.

Later in the book, he uses a newly acquired ability to do sums and discovers that he actually can't afford to take a straight job as it would pay less than he's making hustling on the streets. He has to spend another year as a bootblack to save up enough money so he can last the year or so until he'd get a raise as a clerk.

In a post-scarcity society, Dick would we hope never have fallen through the cracks in the first place, and his hustle would be applied to even greater things.

I was going to make a long post here, but I decided to cut it short.

Me: *mumbles something about what they can positively do to be more successful*

Rest of the Thread: Your an idiot Soban!

Now that we have that out of the way. I'm not surprised by this finding. Worry is something that can easily distract you from more important things. One thing that they might try is taking a minute to write down what they are worried about down. then write an action plan about how they can deal with it. I'd be willing to bet that this would cause them to worry less. I know it works for me.

I think part of the problem is they are more frequently in a more survival oriented mind set. Short of changing their resource issue not much is going to help.

edited 30th Aug '13 9:32:09 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Who watches the watchmen?

@Soban: That is pretty much the problem, you've offered no real solution, just vague suggestions.

Action plans only apply if there are known resources that can be used in the action plan. (For example, Ragged Dick's windfall nest egg allows him to have a plan, whereas just telling him to have a plan to get out of poverty would have been hollow words.)

A post-scarcity society would have bootstraps available for everyone who wanted them.

To an extent. There is only so much wealth to go around. When everyone is wealthy, it ceases to be wealth.

Luxury is defined by its scarcity. When luxury is commonplace, it's not luxury anymore, it's just the expected standard. We've seen this happen with things like a college education; at a time, having a college diploma meant something huge for a person; it was a rare and special thing that identified these select individuals as having the knowledge, training, and experience to excel at whatever field.

Now, it's the standard. Everyone's just expected to have it if they want a job. People with Master's Degrees in Physics are flipping burgers, because it's so commonplace. To be able to hire a college-educated employee is no longer considered a luxury by our society.

That's the unfortunate truth of bootstraps: there just aren't enough to go around. When everyone's rich, inflation hits, the standards go up, and suddenly everyone's just getting by.

edited 30th Aug '13 10:33:08 AM by TobiasDrake

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

Which probably includes people that others would call merely rich^note  Not the Super-Rich, just the well-off — even they're getting by and having trouble maintaining their standard of living.

edited 30th Aug '13 2:25:12 PM by Greenmantle

Keep Rolling On

I suppose that idea is behind the claims that, because people today enjoy a standard of living unimaginable to most people 100 years ago, that we no longer need to worry about the wealth divide. Even the poorest among us "has enough" and so it's no problem if the wealthy take an increasing share of what's left over.

The problem is that, as you said, wealth is defined by access to luxury. The baseline is irrelevant; what matters is how rich a given person is relative to another person. The greater the divide, the less "free" a nation is and the greater the unrest.

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

@ Soban

So the issue with letting the creator choose is... how to prevent people he did not choose to share with from having it? Zero cost distribution implies that the person can obtain the item easily (afterall, it costs zero for you to build another copy so the person could ask another person to make a copy for him or he could obtain a copy himself)?

The moral quandary isn't about the creator's choices but how to enforce them. Do we have content police smashing up people's houses for copied goods despite the fact it cost society nothing except the invasion of this moral principle?

@ Fighteer

Relative poverty is likely heavily linked to unrest but there still exists real poverty. There's still homelessness, malnutrition and food insecure people by the millions in North America. I definitely believe that lack of absolute poverty lowers unrest. Occupy protests utterly failed in North America and one of the factors being cited (of course not proven) is that we've all full bellies whereas people in the Arab Spring were starving to death (and already previously engaged in food riots).

edited 30th Aug '13 8:29:14 PM by breadloaf