Yes, that's my point. In economics a scarce resource is a limited resource. Defining post-scarcity as an abundance of goods is a bad definition, unless the goods are truly unlimited. Neither us nor 24th century Star Trek has post-scarcity. Star Trek TNG has a post-capitalist, non-monetary economy, but it's not post-scarcity.
Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely
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Post-scarcity does not require all goods/services to be infinitely abundant.
The article actually acknowledges that point, stating that the Star Trek universe (and the Federation within it) is not really a post-scarcity society. There are lots of examples on the show indicating that scarcity, resource-allocation problems, and supply/demand crises still exist.
Even Star Trek TNG didn't have a true post-scarcity economy.
At least 5 things were key parameters in their economy and were scarce:
- dilithium crystals, which were used to power ships, and thus also powered the replicators
- Enterprise class ships were definitely scarce/precious
- labour
- land, especially on Earth
- hand-made goods
STTNG didn't have a money economy. That doesn't mean they were post-scarcity.
The closest analogy on today's Earth would be the unmetered water connections that some towns have. Just because the water isn't metered doesn't mean that the water supply is unlimited.
I take it when they say "Star Trek", they're actually talking about the United Federation of Planets, and Starfleet... with their supposedly "unlimited" resources.
Of course, they don't go into details otherwise they'd quickly realize that it's not really a post-scarcity economy. It might be a "post-scarcity" on a lot of resources that we currently find scarce, but not in the true definition. E.g. labor is scarce, property is scarce, and energy is scarce. Also, Remember they need a mined resource to power those giant warp-cores that make it seem like they have unlimited energy to "create" any resource.
Much like the laws of physics constrain us from creating a perpetual motion machine, they also constrain us from having a post-scarcity economy.
Post-scarcity is kind of a bad term. You’ll always have scarcity at some scale. I think as popularly used this refers to a society where the “floor” is at the level of say a US lower middle class person with some level of health coverage. This could be something like a society where tech driven deflation made most necessities dirt cheap, we started building housing again and reduced housing costs, and there is a UBI.
True post-scarcity would mean anyone could have their own private plane, spaceship, etc. That couldn’t happen without some kind of speculative singularity scenario where we get Mr. Fusion and benevolent superintelligent AI or something. Star Trek levels of post-scarcity are sci-fi.
I suspect this is why "post-scarcity" is generally used to describe a state of affairs that does not currently exist, such as the idyllic Federation in Star Trek. In this context it was used to describe a society fundamentally different in significant ways from any past or present human one.
I don't know if I agree that post-scarcity cannot exist. I know that imagining a way to get there is very challenging. Knowing that scarcity is real certainly informs my politics, though.
If you want to look into it more, that situation is usually called a post-scarcity economy[1]. It's talked about and depicted in a few fictionalized places, including Star Trek.
Post-scarcity in some ways, perhaps. In many other ways, they're not.
Star Trek still had merchants who sold various wares. That would not be profitable if nothing was scarce.
They still had planets that lacked necessary medicine, requiring The Enterprise or some other ship to go on mercy missions to deliver the meds.
The Star Trek universe had pleasure planets which had highly desirable things that other planets did not.
There was clearly a shortage of starships and crew, as The Enterprise explored alone and not in a fleet, and couldn't just create a hundred others to help it when it was attacked by some alien enemy.
The Enterprise couldn't even use their on-ship replicators to make themselves some dilithium crystals (fuel) when they ran low.
The article forgot to mention that in the Star Trek timeline things didn't go so smoothly: a third World War eventually occurred and only the invention of warp drive and the first contact with the Vulcans turned things around.
But I think the point is another: for as much as I love Star Trek and advocate a smooth transition to a post-scarcity economy, I don't think Roddenberry and the writers that succeeded him are experts in currency, economics or even in the techologies that made that fictionary society a perfect post-scarcity economy.
There are, however, some interesting thoughts that could serve as a basis for a more deep look into the post-scarcity economics. Organizations such as the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist Movement tend to advocate it under the "resource-based economy" name and I find their views interesting, relatively to this topic.
The core of the Star Trek post-scarcity is a) near-free energy, and b) ubiquitous access to matter replicators. The replicator is kind of magic, but not total impossibility, and rough approximations are within realm of conceivable "future technology".
But I think first and foremost, Star Trek is being brought as an example of post-scarcity so often because it's pretty much the only story that presented such society and reached general audience. It's pretty much a lone beacon of hope in the sea of dystopia.
Still, I agree with your point. Star Trek is a nice dream, but not a good source of information for reasoning about reality.
It's true that some things are naturally scarce (like land, or celebrity exposure, or attention), and that people can make things scarce on purpose. It probably isn't possible to work around this - but this doesn't mean we couldn't have a post-scarcity society in spite of it.
The way I see it, if "nobody has to starve, work, or even die from anything besides a freak accident ever again", if everyone has free access to as much varied, healthy and tasty food as they want, if they can pursue almost arbitrary hobby[0], or do interesting and challenging service adjacent to their interests - then the bits that remain fundamentally scarce (like land or attention) won't be enough to justify having a money-based economy, and without it, people will lose the reason for creating artificial scarcity. Some people may end up trading IOUs over trivialities like clever Instagram handle - something that, on a global scale, nobody cares about. But there would be no need to e.g. DRM movies or games anymore - the producers aren't getting paid for it, they do it for fun/reputation/self-actualization - so what's the point of making infinitely-copyable good artificially scarce?
Post-scarcity doesn't have to be absolute for it to be a money-less utopia - it's enough to make enough goods too cheap to meter that money becomes irrelevant for everyday life of average citizen.
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[0] - There will always be limits to what individuals can do - post-scarcity is a practical concept, not an absolute one. Even Star Trek societies wouldn't be able to afford people having a hobby of "detonating warp cores to use the gamma ray flash for interplanetary Morse code".
It's not post-scarcity, it's post-labor. Which is a prerequisite for post-scarcity, but not sufficient. Resources, even allocated optimally by a superintelligence, are still constrained based on the number of people living and the material contained on Earth.
(And, to be clear: I'm sharing their perspective, not mine).
Well, no. That is not what scarcity means. If we had an economy where you could replicate cars, food, houses, spaceships and so on for free, that would be post-scarcity, even though it takes some work for it to be engineered at the beginning.
Bits on a computer that can be reproduced forever are not scarce.
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