Ah, there you got me wrong. I said that only capitalism has made post-scarcity even remotely possible. We're seriously discussing the possibility and implications of full automation within the next fifteen years; that never happened in the Soviet Union, their government collapsed first. In principle, any society with enough scientists and engineers could implement full automation.
As a side note: post-scarcity is really only possible in virtual worlds like MineCraft. There's a limited amount of land, people's time is limited, people's attention is limited, and what other people will participate in is constrained by their desires and their ambitions. Unless somehow compelled, there's nobody who will set me up with a nice automated farm where I can live out my days playing mandolin and reading mathematics as I would like when they could set themselves up and not have to hear my racket across the fence. Though it's counter to our desires, we are forced to compete for resources ... even if most of us aren't struggling for survival.
The idea is that it's not something that we can really choose to try or not. If/when we get to the stage where enough is produced to allow post-scarcity even in theory - i.e. the technology and the logistical science is there - it implies an extreme degree of automation. But if we have that, how would a traditional capitalist economy even work, if all that automation is concentrated in relatively few hands as it is now?
It works today because the owners of capital need workers to make that capital produce something useful, and even with all the economic rent fleeced from them, those workers still retain enough to then buy the products (if not their own, then that produced by somebody else). This enables money to cycle in the economy. But the more things are automated, the more people are unemployed, and - in capitalism - effectively excluded from the productive economy. So it's a question of how many people you can so exclude before the whole thing crumbles down.
Communism or something like it can easily work post-scarcity.
You can't trust human nature to toil away in factories and hard jobs and do so efficiently for 1/2 of waking life.
Make that fraction a lot smaller... say the only people that needed to work on whatever were the ones that actually wanted to... and suddenly communism works. Open source software works and so much of it is done because people just want to do it. Some day automation and efficiency will get to a point where nerds who have interests will end up doing all of the work because it's what they want to do. Imagine a 3d printer capable of making complex metal/plastic/ceramic/electronic/whatever objects. You'd get hordes of people designing and sharing things just because they wanted to. Design a 3d-printer that can print copies of itself (as well as most of the things a person could want) and suddenly a huge chunk of capitalism is just unnecessary.
50 years after the creation of Star Trek, we should be able to at least imagine the Star Trek economy being technically feasible in the not too distant future.
I think that capitalism's endgame may be a post-scarcity society, where technology allows us to have almost free energy, and very cheap everything that we may require for survival, with minimum human work.
Capitalism, the economic theory as posited by Adam Smith in "The Wealth of Nations" fails when stuff approaches infinity.
We already have a taste of it with the internet, where it's 'Create once, share everywhere'. The idea of scarcity is forced via legal tools, where scarcity means little.
And now, with cheap solar, leads to cheap/free energy. And robots are creating more and more goods. And we're on the cusp of a level 4 vehicle automation systems. As this trend continues, many things will approach 'infinity' the same way they do already online.
What does that mean? It means that people could have the requirements of life provided as a citizenship right: food, water, shelter, electricity, internet, plus a bit more. Unlike the older socialism and communism systems, that required people be slaves to the state and work in prescribed manners, robots and computers could be the provider of these essential resources.
And that starts looking at post-capitalism systems. Would there be money? Of course. Some resources would still be rare. But this idea of "go to work so you can eat and survive" would no longer be hanging over people's heads like a guillotine.
Yes. Capitalism will exist so long as there is scarcity. Humanity has proven that when technology gives us abundance, we will reproduce until there's scarcity again. Machines can make things more efficient, but not faster than humans breed.
Is capitalism actually assumed to go on forever though? The idea of a post scarcity society isn't new. Hell, Marx's presentation of how communism would arise was largely rooted in the idea that capitalism would increase efficiency to the point that it would no longer make sense to follow its model any longer.
this reminds me of two other hypothetical projects: Fully Automated Luxury Communism, and The Australia Project from Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna1).
This is the (I would think, obvious) utopian ideal of a post-scarcity or late-scarcity economy. The hard part is actually making it possible, ie routing through the potential futures to get to this destination. You have all of Earth's accumulated sociopolitical baggage as a headwind, plus the challenge of designing and implementing a global adaptive logistical system. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the fantasy is the easy part.
Can there be a way for capitalism to work highly efficiently and not in a hostile, adversarial manner, in some post-scarcity environment? Or will it always require scarcity in order to function or develop things?
Economics will never disappear because many goods are fundamentally scarce. Fortunately, the necessities of life really aren't, so the economy could conceivably be pried away from its current position as holder of both carrot and stick (I'm defining "stick" as "withholding the necessities of life" here) and reduced to simply offering carrots. This would be an extraordinary improvement and would put capitalism on course to actually live up to the "consensual transaction" and "monotonic improvement" rhetoric so frequently brandied about by the younger members of the capitalist camp. And the communist camp? Well, people owning the means of production is what their philosophy was about all along. If it becomes practical to achieve such a state of affairs without government enforcement then the controversial and historically failure-prone side of their beliefs becomes moot. Capitalism and communism become more or less compatible, which will be no surprise at all to the people who have familiarized themselves with both schools of thought but possibly a bit of a shock to anyone who took the highly polarized rhetoric surrounding the issue at face value. In any case, this type of thing has been thought about and discussed before at great length, but there's a strong taboo hanging over the discussion which makes it easy to inadvertently ignore.
> a single person can use automation to make everything he needs
This would require a large amount of infrastructure per person. An intermediate target would be the point at which communes become viable -- share the heavy infrastructure across some number of people larger than 1 but smaller than 8 billion (or 300M if you think the US government is already sufficiently protectionist). The macroscopic trends of "increasing automation capability" and "decreasing market value of many peoples' labor" make it inevitable that this will happen at some point, the big question is when. It's possible we're approaching or have passed the tipping point but don't know it yet because we haven't invested enough effort in developing infrastructure optimized for decentralization, which is the opposite of what current market structures require. Also, there are a few big social sticking points, namely specialists who are necessary at the margin but who are still treated well by the traditional system (doctors). If workable alternatives can't be developed then the whole endeavor will have to wait until the market turns on them as well. One way or another we'll get past the issue, but getting around the social problems could take decades longer than getting around the industrial problems.
The big danger is that we don't get to the point of viable decentralization before the automation economy makes enough people redundant to create large-scale human misery and political unrest. Arguably this has already happened, but it can get a lot worse -- and I sure hope that we don't get a chance to find out just how much worse that is.
There are post-scarcity examples in human history (see gift economies and potlach societies - common among native americans and in the pacific islands) where social pressure caused any accumulation of wealth to be shared with the entire society (this is a bit similar to Andrew Carnegie's dictum that to die rich is to die disgraced, now leading to the billionaire's pledge). Of course, this only worked because the societies were individual tribes/villages and fit within Dunbar's number, where every individual knew every other individual in the society.
If post-scarcity is brought about by automation, then there will be no need for most people to work, and socialism won't be the appropriate economic model (since people will not be directly involved in production). At this point we'll probably need to return to a gift-like economy.
A post scarcity society is likely to be inerently more libertarian than communist, true post scarcity does not need a centrally managed economy.
Communism doesn’t simplify the human condition as much as it replaces it, the scary part of communism isn’t the economy but the eradication of the self in favor of a group identity.
Of course there isn't. Capitalism guarantees no such system is allowed to exist.
But capitalism is based on jam today and famine tomorrow.
This works just fine for people - as long as they're not thinking straight.
Intelligent resource allocation understands that famine ten years from now is a bad thing and should be avoided, even if it means lower short-term profits.
Any system that thinks ahead like that would be much more innovative than capitalism, because it would be able to make long term plans and invest in long term projects with pay-off times measured in decades or even centuries - something capitalism is manifestly unable to do.
It would also be better at avoiding the usual capitalist kooky idiocies like poisoned water tables, avoidable drought, accidental anti-terraforming, and the rest.
Of course. Such automation wouldn’t be sustainable under capitalism because the rate of profit would drop even further, but it would be entirely possible under a socialist economy that produces for use instead of for profit.
Excellent question. Capitalism is a model to allocate scarce resources where they are most productive. Take scarcity out of the equation and suddenly Capitalism makes a lot less sense.
What comes afterwards? I have no idea. Everytime one imagines a post-scarcity world under our current model, questions like yours arise; a symptom that at some point in the future, we'll need to invent and transition to a new society model. It's pretty obvious it's not the current model, it's entirely non-obvious which model will it be.
Human greed pretty much takes over. Social pressures won't work because people will always want to "keep up with the jones" or show off what they have done. The only way you could have post scarcity is if everything and anything in the living reality could be created, which of course is just highly improbable if not impossible due to the emotional nature of our species as well as differences in individual needs and wants (I.e. Not everyone can fall in love and be married or be just as popular or be just as good I sports). Personally, I don't think there is a reason we can't have a better welfare system, I just don't think we should care about those who do not contribute to society. If all people in Star Trek are now in it for the bettering of the human race than that would mean not a single person is thinking of themselves, which much like greed, is a natural human state of mind. Do we know what/who is going to better society, no we don't. However, with capitalism people democratically choose what does and doesn't. To have government subsidize specific items/ideas we leave capitalism and start having a centrally governed panel who picks the winners, or at least subsidizes them. Let the free hand of capitalism decide who can contribute the most to society and let the people also decide who much they should be rewarded. If anything it's not economics that needs to be changed, rather the human psychology that needs to be reformed.
I think you assessment of the article is fair. It's not the best piece I've read on this topic, but I found it interesting enough to share on HN.
Do you think it's possible we'll get to the point where technology makes labour so cheap that capitalism and markets as we know them now will no longer make sense?
With software that already replaces a lot of human labour, and things like 3D printing continually improving, it seems like it's at least possible for us to reach a point where the means of production are so easily available and so dispersed throughout the population that the current system as we know it won't really make sense anymore.
So I'm not even sure "postcapitalism" would be the right word to describe it. Things will still be produced, and the idea of markets won't go away. But this new system might not be recognizable to us at all. I often wonder if we can even envision how the transition could happen, because we're so used to reality as it exists for us now.
I don't mean to sound like a naive technological utopian. I suspect that something better than what we have now is possible, but the transition, if it happens, will be messy and painful.
Volunteerism isn't "post-scarcity". If you're fed and watered by providing value in a capitalist system, and choose to spend your spare time volunteering, that's great, but it's nothing utopian. Volunteerism is a free choice of work in exchange for a price of £0. That's regular old capitalism at work.
If you could just generate energy out of the ether and use it to materialise food and anything else you might want, for example, that would be post-scarcity.
As a side note: post-scarcity is really only possible in virtual worlds like MineCraft. There's a limited amount of land, people's time is limited, people's attention is limited, and what other people will participate in is constrained by their desires and their ambitions. Unless somehow compelled, there's nobody who will set me up with a nice automated farm where I can live out my days playing mandolin and reading mathematics as I would like when they could set themselves up and not have to hear my racket across the fence. Though it's counter to our desires, we are forced to compete for resources ... even if most of us aren't struggling for survival.
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