Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth
The low value of labor does seem irrelevant
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It's what the setting in question does have rather than being post-scarcity. It's also what would actually result from many of the tendencies that futurists ignorant of economics incorrectly suppose will bring post-scarity.
This is actually quite an important point for a lot of, especially recent, science fiction. Writers and fans who haven't thought about it very carefully suppose that advances in automation that substantially relieve Mankind of the need to work will bring universal plenty — not all of them say "post-scarcity", but some do go that far. But in a careful analysis a low or zero marginal productivity of labour is not the same thing as plenty, not by a long shot. For example, in conditions of famine owing to crop failure you often find that people are miserably poor and have no practical opportunity to do anything productive. In fact it's perfectly possible and quite common for the unemployment and starvation to occur before food becomes short, because of the lack of agricultural employment.
The case in which cheap automatics have driven down the wage rate of labour to below a socially acceptable living wage is of course not the same thing as a drought throwing agricultural workers into idleness. Nevertheless the point remains that a post-industrial economy in which the equilibrium wage rate is unacceptably low is a very different thing from, and ought not to be confused with, the absence of scarcity. The problem of automation is a very important one for modern science fiction, I think, because it doesn't look like that genie is going back into the bottle, so the future is going to have to address the problem in some way. It's my opinion that you will get more varied and more interesting results by doing the economic analysis properly, discerning the true nature of the problem, and working out (a) ways that it could play out if not successfully addressed or (b) different ways that it could be addressed and what the resulting societies would become like.
But perhaps that's radical hard social SF and not space opera, even new space opera. Oh well. We've already got a couple of hundred words about The Leisure Society on p.183 of
GURPS Space.