Oddbean new post about login | logout People claim that this is a contradiction, but I see the prospect & potential for an automated post-scarcity future. (When the production of all major necessities we have is fully automated) The impact of post-scarcity on neoliberalism will be interesting to observe, as it fundamentally breaks their economic model and value system.
would you mind to elaborate further? I’m quite interested bout the topic. there’s this hyped article by birch that forsees full integration between both. I tend to agree with him: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/lwish/nf/2020/00000100/f0020100/art00002?crawler=true&mimetype=application/pdf
Read the article. Its a good summary of current thinking among business pages journalists. Takes Klaus Schwab's "Fourth Industrial Revolution" far more seriously than it deserves. Schwab's is not an industrial revolution of any sort, merely a financial and political one. None of those technological changes discussed are decisive, or even important, when it comes to steel, concrete, plastic and ammonia, the things a first-world lifestyle are actually built from. There is no post-scarcity. Important things are getting scarcer, especially per capita, and that's ignoring war, misrule and climate-change-abatement
there ain't, indeed. tho they might be considered embedded "value"? my generation hasn't taken wef seriously enough. there was resistance, ofc, seattle 99 for instance, then a shy one with wsf that didn't last too long. now, here we are. underestimate wef is not the way, imho. that's exactly what business journalism does – either that or we're not reading the same sources, lol. anyways, post-scarcity to who exactly? first world, as you've pointed out? third world countries are in a never-ending scarcity since always. post-scarcity will be a problem if world population continues growing, which I don't think it'd be the case in the next couple of decades. even so, third world countries would still be first world's backyard so it wouldn't happen to those who survive. africa, mainly, and china is taking care of it. post-scarcity, in this sense, seems more a planned excuse to justify the incoming chaos they themselves are building up. neoliberalism has always been bout monopolies with state's approval (in post-modern era, with global governance's approval) and that's precisely what we're seeing nowadays in an unprecedent way. which would only get worse with scarcity, oke. farmers convoys in germany and france are all bout it. scarcity which, in its turn, will concentrate even more power in the hands of monopolies (AI, quantum computing, power grinds, lab meat, big pharma, big tech etc you name it). thus: I don't see much difference, in practice, between industrial/financial/political arenas. whoever got one of em, got em all.
It's not about production, even for products that need rear resources. Our economies were overcapacity economies in that respect. It is all about distribution. The bad guys must have more than others. There must be poor people even in great abundance. Have you ever heard about the Pareto principle. Some bad guys think that they must value more and rule the others, while in reality they are the 20% of the shity problem. Read about the Pareto principle, you have to know...
Have a read of Vaclav Smil's How The World Really Works: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacebq4tlekrxg3jlpyxzffkahdrswbnh5xnlxfxfdimsazbhztdphme?filename=Vaclav%20Smil%20-%20How%20the%20World%20Really%20Works-Penguin%20UK%20%282022%29.epub He's a renowned scientist and energy specialist. His "four pillars" of industrialised society - steel, concrete, plastics and ammonia - are enormously energy-intensive to make and near-impossible to substitute or do without. The current political order rests on the dreams of second and third world workers working for a pittance on the promise of joining the "Golden Billion". And their ruling classes buying our debt with their trade surpluses. We are not going to be able to fulfill that dream for eight billion people. No way. And that's business as usual with no mitigation of climate change. If we want to address climate change too we're in a world of pain. There is no post-scarcity. There may never be.