
Star Trek Is Wrong – There Will Always Be Scarcity - porsager
https://mises.org/library/star-trek-wrong-there-will-always-be-scarcity
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maxander
All this article does is attack a straw-man version of post-scarcity
economics. What sufficiently immature humans want is arbitrary, _of course_
they can want more than whatever they happen to have. You could want all the
figurines Matel ever made or beer made from yeast that went into space or any
number of silly things. _But_ , most people accept that there is a finite
amount that humans could _reasonably_ want, and experience carries out this
view- consider the studies showing that the happiness gained from wealth tends
to plateau somewhere around 100K/year. Everyone having that kind of wealth
someday is plausible, and that's what most reasonable people mean when they
talk about post-scarcity. (For more on people wanting things in post-scarcity
societies, see the Culture series.)

>Unfortunately for all of us, however, scarcity isn’t going anywhere. And the
only way to maximize human want satisfaction with a limited pool of resources
is with unhampered markets: private property and prices.

...I'm not sure if they take free-market dogma as a given or if they think
they've supported this argument somehow. As it stands, the gross inefficiency
produced by free-market capitalism is one of the biggest reasons we're not
there yet. Corporations are held as paragons of resource efficiency
individually, of course, but collectively they're as wasteful as anything
else. For example, billions of dollars are spent in marketing wars between
equivalent products (iOS and Android, DC and Marvel, Pepsi and Coke)- what do
those conflicts produce, in sum? Wasted money.

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norea-armozel
_sigh_ I really use to like LvMi but these days they seem to prefer to be
pedantic than applicable.

Here's the thing I get from post-scarcity (so-called) economics.

1\. Production efficiency out strips demand for what's produced. 2\. This
leads to a radical reduction in pricing schemes to the point that most goods
becomes free (gratis). 3\. Which leads to further devolution of the economy
away from complexity (simpler financial instruments, fewer investment
vehicles, fewer businesses big/small in general).

No where in this assessment do I see cakes made out of thin air. What I see is
the cost of creating a good or providing a service falling so close to zero
that in most cases the businesses in question only offer the good or service
as part of something else. Think of it this way, if Apple found a way to
produce the iPhone for cents on the dollar wouldn't it make more sense for
them to just give it away and sell music and software (as a service)? Or how
about if energy production becomes extremely cheap and common. Wouldn't
utility companies find something else to sell you to use their energy
(providing the energy as a gratuity for said good/service)?

Essentially, that's what has happened throughout history. Stuff gets so cheap
that either producers make up the difference on volume of sales or they just
"give away" the product as part of some other product. Eventually,
extrapolating that sort of situation out it seems logical that inevitably most
things become free even without the sale of another premium good or service
only because you got two choices in the situation as outlined: stop making
stuff or race to the bottom (sell the stuff at the same price until the
economy implodes from all wealth concentrated with the capitalist class).

~~~
Canada
> if Apple found a way to produce the iPhone for cents on the dollar wouldn't
> it make more sense for them to just give it away

I'm reminding of TNG every time I walk past the electronics section at Costco.

On the show people just give each other their tablets, like it's not even
worth bothering to send the file or explain where to open it. They treat their
computers like we treat paper. Here's my report sir, right here on this
worthless piece of computer.

~~~
norea-armozel
I should put a caveat on that assertion I made. If it were extremely cheap to
make an iPhone then Apple probably would sell the whole thing as a service
instead. Why bother buying an iPhone ever again when you can update for the
small yearly subscription of 100/USD or whatever they felt would work for
their business model in that situation. I think we're starting to see a slow
movement toward the hardware of smartphones being mere platforms for exclusive
content (Google Play Music vs Apple Music like how it's Amazon Video vs
Netflix). Sadly, it means information won't be so free (libre or gratis) as
it's always something you can justify as an extremely scarce, hard to produce
item.

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poelzi
his physical understand is wrong. just because common physics does not
understand the ZPE(s) (zero point energies (there are actually 2)) gives very
wrong perspective on our physical world. Once you understood that 1 cm³
contains ~ 244 times the gross energy humanity used in 2012, perspective
changes. Once you really understand field propulsion (EM-thruster goes in this
direction, just very bad design), your perspective changes as well....

