
Some Economics of Abundance - ojarow
https://musingmind.org/essays/economics-of-abundance
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marcusverus
I love these arguments.

"Abundance is the process through which more and more citizens gain
unconditional access to the material resources for survival and participation
in society. Abundance is not receiving an income high enough to afford all you
need, because income is conditional upon labor, which retains scarcity, or the
conditional access to resources, as the organizing and motivating principle of
one’s time use.

Rather, abundance has more to do with wealth: unconditional access, or
ownership, to all the material resources one requires."

In other words, with the current workforce, the GDP pie is real big. So we're
going to take the pie, and cut it so that people have a high standard of
living _without having to work_. The wonderful thing is that, _like magic_ ,
the pie stays big! Even as the workforce plummets as people retire and young
adults fail to enter the workforce.

~~~
ojarow
I don't think anybody's arguing that we can just redistribute wealth to the
degree that there's enough for everyone to do absolutely nothing and still
enjoy high living standards (though folks like Buckminster Fuller make a case
that this will grow increasingly possible, and the proverbial 15-hour, or
less, workweek should be feasible while maintaining the same, even higher,
output). But Andrew MCafee's (research scientist at MIT) recent book "More
From Less" is a contemporary take on this idea.

The traditional GDP would shrink in the long-term, but the idea (drawing from
Charles Eisenstein, Paul Mason, etc) is that gift economies and communities
would grow to replace the goods & services we currently rely upon
traditionally economic transactions for.

And you're right that policies trying to democratize abundance (unconditional
affordances like UBI, healthcare, etc) would restructure the labor force. But
David Graeber's 'Bullshit Jobs' is a strong case that the labor force needs
restructuring anyway.

And it grows increasingly difficult to earnestly frame these abundance
arguments as fanciful, wishful thinking, when some of the most reputable
economists who've ever lived argued the same. Thinking of John Maynard Keynes,
JK Galbraith, and so on. There's a serious economic discourse, and
potentiality, around the idea of lessening the amount of necessary labor to
negligible amounts in order to secure access to all one needs, leaving
production and 'participation in the workforce' to be an increasingly
voluntary decision, taken on because one wants to make something, rather than
one needing the paycheck to continue living their lives.

What do you think? The idea of abundance doesn't seem like a hippie discourse
anymore, especially in light of folks like Mcafee's work. Why do these ideas
continue striking folks as wishful thinking?

~~~
marcusverus
The author of the article is advocating exactly that, though. I quoted him
saying just that.

The move toward a shorter work week seems like a good idea, but this would
reduce GDP and the tax base, and would necessarily be counterproductive to the
author's goal of redistributing more wealth to the poorest.

Why would we expect gift economies to increase as total output decreases and
gift dollars are more dear?

I haven't read 'Bullshit Jobs', but based on a quick Google, he uses the
meaninglessness of some jobs as an argument for UBI. His first premise may
have merit (it has probably applied since the industrial revolution) but his
prescription of UBI as a cure is odd. I would be interested to see a
comparison of the mental states of people with "bullshit jobs" vs people who
live off the file. And anyway, a Libertarian may make a decent case that
taxation is theft, but that doesn't magically make the Libertarian ideal of a
voluntary society a realistic proposition.

Your reference to Keynes and Galbraith seemed to argue for a general
endorsement of a vague notion of progressive tinkering-- what exactly did they
endorse in this regard? In any event, there is nothing wrong with tweaking the
economy in considered and careful ways. UBI is neither considered nor careful,
which is why it does not deserve serious consideration. Big ideas (like actual
socialism, communism, and UBI) that require a massive top-down rework of the
global economic system are doomed to fail. And that makes them dangerous.
Careful, considered action over long periods of time aren't sexy, but they're
safe(r), responsible and more easily refersable.

