Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
Then lets just say that your definition of post-scarcity is so different from mine that I do not believe we can usefully discuss the matter.
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I find it a little odd to have someone telling a trained professional economist that they don't like the economist's definition of "scarcity" and prefer to stick with their own definition. It's kind of like telling a physicist, "I don't like your definition of energy," or an accountant, "I don't accept your concept of subtraction." I mean, it's a technical term of economic theory, and a quite basic one—the postulate of scarcity is the postulate that economizing is necessary in the first place.
And it's not just a semantic or pedantic quibble.
Imagine, for example, that we have a TL12 society. Per the Basic Set, starting wealth is $100,000, and monthly income for an Average job is $10,600. Now, take that as your starting point, assume there is all the standard TL12 tech and everything else that would logically go with it—and ask what people in that society would feel they didn't get enough of, what they would be motivated to work and struggle for, what would be the possessions of the wealthy or high status or much loved that not everyone had. If you can imagine such things, you have scarcity
of those things. If you can't, then you are envisioning a society where there is no scarcity that you can see—but you also don't have a setting for much in the way of drama or adventure!
(Perhaps you want to say that "scarcity" only relates to goods and services exchanged in the market? But the market is not a universal. Most of human existence had no markets; but it still had scarcity. It just had other ways of dealing with it—gifts, sharing, obligations, shaming, kinship ties, rituals. A future society might have bandwidth so inconceivably higher than ours that it would never boil information down to simple market prices, but would always represent a thing's value as some sort of N-dimensional vector, enabling it to move things to preferred uses more effectively than markets can. But as long as things had preferred uses, there would be scarcity.)
Bill Stoddard