Post-scarcity economy

Post-scarcity is a theoretical economy 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. Post-scarcity is not generally taken to mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all consumer goods and services, instead it is often taken to mean that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services, with writers on the topic often emphasizing that certain commodities are likely to remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.

The post-scarcity model

Speculative technology

Today, futurists who speak of "post-scarcity" suggest economies based on advances in automated manufacturing technologies, often including the idea of self-replicating machines, which in theory could produce nearly all goods in abundance, given adequate raw materials and energy. More speculative forms of nanotechnology (such as molecular assemblers or nanofactories, which do not currently exist) raise the possibility of devices that can automatically manufacture any specified goods given the correct instructions and the necessary raw materials and energy, and so many nanotechnology enthusiasts have suggested it will usher in a post-scarcity world. In the more near-term future, the increasing automatization of physical labor using robots is often discussed as means of creating a post-scarcity economy. Increasingly versatile forms of rapid prototyping machines, and a hypothetical self-replicating version of such a machine known as a RepRap, have also been predicted to help create the abundance of goods needed for a post-scarcity economy. Advocates of self-replicating machines such as Adrian Bowyer, the creator of the RepRap project, argue that once a self-replicating machine is designed, then since anyone who owns one can make more copies to sell (and would also be free to ask for a lower price than other sellers), market competition will naturally drive the cost of such machines down to the bare minimum needed to make a profit, in this case just above the cost of the physical materials and energy that must be fed into the machine as input, and the same should go for any other goods that the machine can build.

Even with fully automated production, limitations on the number of goods produced would arise from the availability of raw materials and energy, as well as ecological damage associated with manufacturing technologies. Advocates of technological abundance often argue for more extensive use of renewable energy and greater recycling in order to prevent future drops in availability of energy and raw materials, and reduce ecological damage. Solar energy in particular is often emphasized, as the cost of solar panels continues to drop (and could drop far more with automated production by self-replicating machines), and advocates point out the total solar power striking the Earth's surface annually exceeds our civilization's current annual power usage by a factor of thousands. Advocates also sometimes argue that the energy and raw materials available could be greatly expanded if we looked to resources beyond the Earth. For example, asteroid mining is sometimes discussed as a way of greatly reducing scarcity for many useful metals such as Nickel. While early asteroid mining might involve manned missions, advocates hope that eventually humanity could have automated mining done by self-replicating machines. If this were done, then the only capital expenditure would be a single self-replicating unit (whether robotic or nanotechnological), after which the number of units could replicate at no further cost, limited only by the available raw materials needed to build more.

Digital abundance

Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU project, has cited the eventual creation of a post-scarcity society as one of his motivations:

In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.

Marxism

Karl Marx, in a section of his Grundrisse that came to be know as the "Fragment on Machines", argued that the transition to a post-capitalist society combined with advances in automation would allow for significant reductions in labor needed to produce necessary goods, eventually reaching a point where all people would have significant amounts of leisure time to pursue science, the arts, and creative activities; a state some commentators later labeled as "post-scarcity". Marx argued that capitalism - the dynamic of economic growth based on capital accumulation - depends on exploiting the surplus labor of workers, but a post-capitalist society would allow for:

The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.

Marx's concept of a post-capitalist communist society involves the free distribution of goods made possible by the abundance provided by automation. The fully developed communist economic system is postulated to develop from a preceding socialist system. Marx held the view that socialism—a system based on social ownership of the means of production—would enable progress toward the development of fully developed communism by further advancing productive technology. Under socialism, with its increasing levels of automation, an increasing proportion of goods would be distributed freely.

Marx did not believe in the elimination of most physical labor through technological advancements alone in a capitalist society, because he believed capitalism contained within it certain tendencies which countered increasing automation and prevented it from developing beyond a limited point, so that manual industrial labor could not be eliminated until the overthrow of capitalism. Some commentators on Marx have argued that at the time he wrote the Grundrisse, he thought that the collapse of capitalism due to advancing automation was inevitable despite these counter-tendencies, but that by the time of his major work Capital: Critique of Political Economy he had abandoned this view, and came to believe that capitalism could continually renew itself unless overthrown.

Social anarchism

Advancement through technology towards a condition of post-scarcity has formed a large part of the social anarchist tradition. Carlo Cafiero claimed that libertarian communism would enable humanity to transcend the traditional communist principle "from each according to ability, to each according to their needs" with "from each and to each according to their will".

Peter Kropotkin wrote Fields, Factories, and Workshops, using empirical data from the technological capacity of the time to make the case for a decentralised and moneyless economy of abundance - which integrated city and country - allowing for a high standard of living with only a minimum of labour from each individual between the ages of 20 and 40.

Post-scarcity became a central concern of anarchism in the 1960s with the publication of Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin and the formation of social ecology as a critical theory of human society and the natural world. Social ecology claims that capitalism and the state system have surpassed the point where they can serve a progressive role in the creation of useful technologies and can now only continue to function through the creation and maintenance of artificial scarcity.

Fiction

Science fiction

The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Over three novels, Robinson charts the terraforming of Mars as a human colony and the establishment of a post-scarcity society.

The Culture novels by Iain M Banks are centered on a communist post-scarcity economy where technology is advanced to such a degree that all production is automated, and there is no use for money or property (aside from personal possessions with sentimental value). Humans in the Culture are free to pursue their own interests in an open and socially-permissive society. The society has been described by some commentators as "communist-bloc" or "anarcho-communist". Banks' close friend and fellow science fiction writer Ken MacLeod has said that The Culture can be seen as a realization of Marx's communism, but adds that "however friendly he was to the radical left, Iain had little interest in relating the long-range possibility of utopia to radical politics in the here and now. As he saw it, what mattered was to keep the utopian possibility open by continuing technological progress, especially space development, and in the meantime to support whatever policies and politics in the real world were rational and humane."

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom features a moneyless society where material goods are no longer scarce, and everyone is granted basic rights that in our present age are mostly considered luxuries.

The Rapture of the Nerds a post-scarcity society about "disruptive" technology. The Rapture of the Nerds is a derogatory term for the Technological Singularity coined by SF author Ken MacLeod. There is also a 2012 SF novel about the technological singularity called The Rapture of the Nerds — (written by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross).

Con Blomberg's 1959 short story "Sales Talk" depicts a post-scarcity society in which society incentivizes consumption to reduce the burden of overproduction.

The 24th century human society of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has been labeled a post-scarcity society due to the ability of the fictional "replicator" technology to synthesize a wide variety of goods nearly instantaneously, along with dialogue such as Captain Picard's statement that "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."

See also

• A Whole New Mind
• Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
• Artificial scarcity
• Attention economy
• Cycle of poverty
• Commons-based peer production
• Communist society
• Imagination age
• Information society
• Knowledge economy
• Post-capitalism
• Post-Scarcity Anarchism
• Scarcity
• Technological utopianism
• Technocracy
• The Venus Project
• The Zeitgeist Movement

External links

• The Economics of Abundance
• Infinity Is Your Friend in Economics – contains links to a series of Techdirt articles on economics when scarcity is removed
• The Post-Scarcity / Culture of Abundance Reading List v2.2
• Abundance is our future, TED talk by Peter Diamandis