Scarcity is elastic. There’s literally thousands of times the resources and only 20 or so times the population as 1000 years ago. Humans CREATE conditions of scarcity, and then treat each other horribly within those conditions.
Scarcity is literally all we’ve ever seen because it’s universal. It’s relative to imagined/preferred resources, and that imagination grows faster than actual resources.
That’s true, but not infinitely true. There’s a difference in the drive for getting shelter when you’re cold, and getting another hundred followers when you’re rich.
That’s why I mentioned death and sickness. We haven’t yet eased the scarcity of good years of life and living dying without pain by more than a fraction.
It’s an unproven hope, but I do think that the direction of less meanness with less material scarcity and danger is pretty certain. How much it changes, including cultural change over time, is to be seen.
Ok. Not sure if that’s true, but even if so, we’re a long long way from infinite. It’s quite possible there is no infinity.
There’s a difference in the drive for getting shelter when you’re cold, and getting another hundred followers when you’re rich.
Right, there’s lots of differences in scarcity of different things. However, for each thing, more of the thing is better than less. There may be declining marginal utility for many many things, and even declining close enough to zero for some things, but there will always be stuff for which marginal utility is positive for each and every distinct human.
Scarcity is elastic. There’s literally thousands of times the resources and only 20 or so times the population as 1000 years ago. Humans CREATE conditions of scarcity, and then treat each other horribly within those conditions.
Scarcity is literally all we’ve ever seen because it’s universal. It’s relative to imagined/preferred resources, and that imagination grows faster than actual resources.
That’s true, but not infinitely true. There’s a difference in the drive for getting shelter when you’re cold, and getting another hundred followers when you’re rich.
That’s why I mentioned death and sickness. We haven’t yet eased the scarcity of good years of life and living dying without pain by more than a fraction.
It’s an unproven hope, but I do think that the direction of less meanness with less material scarcity and danger is pretty certain. How much it changes, including cultural change over time, is to be seen.
Ok. Not sure if that’s true, but even if so, we’re a long long way from infinite. It’s quite possible there is no infinity.
Right, there’s lots of differences in scarcity of different things. However, for each thing, more of the thing is better than less. There may be declining marginal utility for many many things, and even declining close enough to zero for some things, but there will always be stuff for which marginal utility is positive for each and every distinct human.
Yeah, and an unlikely one IMO.