Great series! I broadly agree with it and the approach. However, this post has given me a vagueish “no matter how many things are abundant, the economic rat-race is inescapable” vibe which I disagree with.
Towards the end, a grocer explains the new status quo eloquently:
″… not very many people will buy beans and chuck roast, when they can eat wild rice and smoked pheasant breast. So, you know what I’ve been thinking? I think what we’ll have to have, instead of a supermarket, is a sort of super-delicatessen. Just one item each of every fancy food from all over the world, thousands and thousands, all different”
I see the idea here but I disagree with it. I’m a human for goodness sake! I eat food to stay alive and to stay healthy and for the pure pleasure of eating it! Neither my time nor my money is a worthy trade-off for special unique food if it’s not going to do any of those things significantly better. I grant that there might be a niche market for this kind of thing but, the way I see it, being free of the need for material goods will free people from the rat-race: It will let them completely abandon their existing financial strategies insofar as those strategies were previously necessary to keep them alive.
This is what the FIRE community does. They save up enough money so that they only participate in the economy as much as it actually improves their lives.
Why? Because material goods are not the only economic constraints. If a medieval book-maker has an unlimited pile of parchment, then he’ll be limited by the constraint on transcriptionists. As material goods constraints are relaxed, other constraints become taut.
Broadly speaking, I agree with the description here of economic supply chains as a sequence of steps (ie potential bottle-necks. But, in general, I perceive these sequences of steps as finite. For example, the book-maker has unlimited parchment and is then limited by transcriptionists, so the book-maker automated transcription and is limited by books, so the book-maker automates writing (or it turns out the number of writers wasn’t a real bottleneck) so what then? Bookstores are shuttering. I have the internet and the last time I handed money to anyone in the book-making supply chain was because I wanted something to read on the plane.
Again, maybe there’s a niche market for more unique books or more elegantly bound collectible books but that’s a market I can opt out of. It’s superfluous to me having a good life.
Here’s one good you can’t just throw on a duplicator: a college degree.
A college degree is more than just words on paper. It’s a badge, a mark of achievement. You can duplicate the badge, but that won’t duplicate the achievement.
I didn’t get my college degree to signal social status. I got it because I wanted to get a nice job. I wanted to get a nice job so I could get money. I wanted to get money so that I could use it towards the aim of having a fulfilling life. Give me all the material goods and I would’ve probably just learned botany instead.
So, to me, college degrees (and other intangible badges of achievement) haven’t become the things they are because of abundance, they’ve become the things they are because social status will be instrumental to gaining important life-enhancing things for as long as those things are not abundant.
Social status might be vaguely zero-sum but, beyond a couple friends, it’s not critical for living a good life. Given the tools to live a good life, I imagine many people just opting out of the economy. I’m not going to work for eight hours a day to zero-sum compete for more social status alone.
But given that things have in fact become way more abundant, why haven’t we seen more of this opting out happening? Two answers:
1.
We have. Besides the FIRE community, we see it in retirees. I’ve personally seen it in a number of middle-aged adults who realize that trying to find another job in this tech’d up world just isn’t worth the hassle when they have enough to get by on.
2.
With all this talk of zero-sum games, the last piece of the post-scarcity puzzle should come as no surprise: political rent-seeking.
Once we accept that economics does not disappear in the absence of material scarcity, that there will always be something scarce, we immediately need to worry about people creating artificial scarcity to claim more wealth.
Yep. I’d generalize rent-seeking beyond just politics and into the realm of moral maze rent-seeking but yep. I’d actually view the college-corporate complex as a subtrope of this. Colleges as a whole (for reasons of inadequate equilibria) collectively own the keys long-term social stability (excluding people who want to go into trades, and who are confident that those trades won’t go away). They do this and charge a heckuva lot of money for it despite not actually providing much intrinsic value beyond fitting well into the existing incentive structure.
Remove material goods as a taut economic constraint, and what do you get? The same old rat race. Material goods no longer scarce? Sell intangible value. Sell status signals. There will always be a taut constraint somewhere.
Great series! I broadly agree with it and the approach. However, this post has given me a vagueish “no matter how many things are abundant, the economic rat-race is inescapable” vibe which I disagree with.
I see the idea here but I disagree with it. I’m a human for goodness sake! I eat food to stay alive and to stay healthy and for the pure pleasure of eating it! Neither my time nor my money is a worthy trade-off for special unique food if it’s not going to do any of those things significantly better. I grant that there might be a niche market for this kind of thing but, the way I see it, being free of the need for material goods will free people from the rat-race: It will let them completely abandon their existing financial strategies insofar as those strategies were previously necessary to keep them alive.
This is what the FIRE community does. They save up enough money so that they only participate in the economy as much as it actually improves their lives.
Broadly speaking, I agree with the description here of economic supply chains as a sequence of steps (ie potential bottle-necks. But, in general, I perceive these sequences of steps as finite. For example, the book-maker has unlimited parchment and is then limited by transcriptionists, so the book-maker automated transcription and is limited by books, so the book-maker automates writing (or it turns out the number of writers wasn’t a real bottleneck) so what then? Bookstores are shuttering. I have the internet and the last time I handed money to anyone in the book-making supply chain was because I wanted something to read on the plane.
Again, maybe there’s a niche market for more unique books or more elegantly bound collectible books but that’s a market I can opt out of. It’s superfluous to me having a good life.
I didn’t get my college degree to signal social status. I got it because I wanted to get a nice job. I wanted to get a nice job so I could get money. I wanted to get money so that I could use it towards the aim of having a fulfilling life. Give me all the material goods and I would’ve probably just learned botany instead.
So, to me, college degrees (and other intangible badges of achievement) haven’t become the things they are because of abundance, they’ve become the things they are because social status will be instrumental to gaining important life-enhancing things for as long as those things are not abundant.
Social status might be vaguely zero-sum but, beyond a couple friends, it’s not critical for living a good life. Given the tools to live a good life, I imagine many people just opting out of the economy. I’m not going to work for eight hours a day to zero-sum compete for more social status alone.
But given that things have in fact become way more abundant, why haven’t we seen more of this opting out happening? Two answers:
1.
We have. Besides the FIRE community, we see it in retirees. I’ve personally seen it in a number of middle-aged adults who realize that trying to find another job in this tech’d up world just isn’t worth the hassle when they have enough to get by on.
2.
Yep. I’d generalize rent-seeking beyond just politics and into the realm of moral maze rent-seeking but yep. I’d actually view the college-corporate complex as a subtrope of this. Colleges as a whole (for reasons of inadequate equilibria) collectively own the keys long-term social stability (excluding people who want to go into trades, and who are confident that those trades won’t go away). They do this and charge a heckuva lot of money for it despite not actually providing much intrinsic value beyond fitting well into the existing incentive structure.
Status symbol competition doesn’t scare me in a post-material-scarcity world; I can do just fine without it. What terrifies me is the possibility of rent-seekers (or complex incentive structures) systematically inducing artificial scarcity into material that I care about despite it not literally being scarce.