Markets and Post-Scarcity

Post-scarcity is impossible to achieve.
A hundred years ago people were rioting because they lacked bread.
Today they are rioting because they lack iPhones and plasma TV-s.
 
Post-scarcity is impossible to achieve.
A hundred years ago people were rioting because they lacked bread.
Today they are rioting because they lack iPhones and plasma TV-s.
I don't really understand the connection between the first sentence and the second two. (Possibly the spuriousness of the analogy is throwing me off?)
 
To me, "post-scarcity" means "don't need to work ever again". While I think it's possible to create such a society, I don't think it's possible to maintain it without seriously restricting the people with ambitions.
 
I don't really understand the connection between the first sentence and the second two. (Possibly the spuriousness of the analogy is throwing me off?)
Why do you think the analogy is spurious?
The moment society becomes advances enough to make something abundant/free, people will want the next thing to butter their self-respect and social status. Ultimately, all resources are limited, nanobots or no nanobots. Hence, no post-scarcity.
 
Can you elaborate on what you define as post-scarcity?
Very broadly, a society in which goods were abundant enough to meet the wants of all. As El Mac says, it also tends to suggest a level of automation enough to allow the abandonment of work, although that gets into competing interpretations of what "work" is in the first place. (Personally, I would understand it as an absence of what you might call "toil", in the sense of drudgerous and uncreative work, rather than as work as such.)

Why do you think the analogy is spurious?
Firstly, it involves considerable over-simplifications and over-generalisations of both historical and contemporary riots, and, secondly, the second example you give assumes as self-evident a proposed cause which is both extremely contentious and poorly supported.

The moment society becomes advances enough to make something abundant/free, people will want the next thing to butter their self-respect and social status. Ultimately, all resources are limited, nanobots or no nanobots. Hence, no post-scarcity.
What's the basis for this claim, exactly? It's not self-evident. (Certainly, the idea of humans as endlessly craving social status as embodied in material goods already seems an outdated notion, as many cultural critics have observed in discussion of recent "spiritual" commercialism, the integration of New Left critiques of consumer society into consumerism itself.)
 
Thank you. Now, do you believe it is ever possible to meet the material demands of all? Let's say I like blowing up 747s full of TVs by crashing them into battleships (everything unmanned, of course.) What if I want to build a stadium full of computers, 50 stories high, that all crawl the internet and record everything they find? Can you seriously envision an economy where this is possible? That's why I think it's not really a question that can be answered; there will always be scarcity because wants are infinite and resources are not.
 
Thank you. Now, do you believe it is ever possible to meet the material demands of all? Let's say I like blowing up 747s full of TVs by crashing them into battleships (everything unmanned, of course.) What if I want to build a stadium full of computers, 50 stories high, that all crawl the internet and record everything they find? Can you seriously envision an economy where this is possible? That's why I think it's not really a question that can be answered; there will always be scarcity because wants are infinite and resources are not.
Does anybody actually want things like that, though? Or, at least, a significant enough number of people for it to haver any meaningful influence on social organisation? As I said, scarcity and finiteness are not the same thing, so simply observing that it's not possible to have anything that we could imagine doesn't actually tell us anything that wasn't obvious to begin with.
 
I already elaborated a lot in a previous post.
even if you have nano-replicators, the availability of raw material (iron, gold, etc.) is limited.
I meant elaborate on why the finiteness of raw materials acts as a basis for wealth inequalities of the degree GoodSamaritan was suggesting.
 
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