Labor
Housing
Gas
Food
Freaking computer components are more expensive! Those have always gone down.
I wanna know who the clown was that came up with this term, because there's a ton of stuff in the world that is scarce, you know, like homes.
There are no post-scarcity economies currently in existence, but with increasing automation such a thing may become possible in the future, and the transition may take a long time. There's no physical reason why homes must remain scarce forever, for example. That said, I don't think what paulpauper describes sounds like post-scarcity, as it's just about money; I think of things more like Iain M Banks's Culture.
Are coffee beans free? No. Will they ever be? No. And yet, the world over produces tons of the stuff. What’s going to change in the next 50 years that would make them free? Nothing.
If anything, they’ll be more expensive then! Enjoy a cup while you’ve got the chance.
Are sure coffe beans wouldn't be free if we had Dyson-sphere leves of free energy providing magic-like stuff like replicators? Because that is a context in which post-scarcity is used literally
Bits aren't free, but they are too cheap to meter. If I divide the time it takes to download an ebook by the amount I pay for Internet per month, it comes out to bupkis, even after I try and account for the percentage of my storage it uses up.
But a cup of sugar, and anything else made of atoms, is fundamentally different. There's no obvious route to sugar being too cheap to meter.
An old English idiom for getting something very cheap was "I got it for a song". So this kind of post-scarcity has been with us for a long time: anyone can sing a song, singing was never scarce.
You may feel otherwise, but if the distinction never makes a difference in the practical world then it does not enter my mind. Based on that metric, we already have post scarcity goods like already published books
If we had a sun sized amount of sugar available to humanity then it would be post scarcity even though it was actually getting used up by a measurable amount
The wait time to get a new refrigerator is as high as 6 months right now for some people.
America isn't in any danger of transitioning to poat-scarcity anything anytime soon, and I mean that with “soon” on a geological time scale.
Also, “post-scarcity” and “economy” are mutually exclusive; “economy” is the mechanism by which scarce resources are distributed. If you don’t have scarcity, you don’t have (or have any reason for) an economy.
No, because the wealth is concentrated among a few people.
Those Uber drivers either have confused unrealized gains with wealth, or have realized those gains by leaving someone else holding the bag. Probably someone else just like them.
As for other examples, housing is another popular one.
Housing market is same zero sum as OP described determined by investments in real estate instead of other assets
Any other examples?
Over the long term effectively 100% of all stock market returns comes from either dividends (and buybacks) or the companies increasing ability to pay dividends (through earnings growth).
I'm not sure why you think having a place to live ( or to rent to someone else) is not productive... mind explaining?
What's the evidence that this is happening, or is going to happen? The top 3 categories in the CPI are housing, food, and transport. I can't imagine any of these transitioning to "post scarcity" any time soon. The only thing that can plausibly head toward post scarcity are education and recreation, which can be delivered digitally, but those only make up 3.0% and 5.8% of the CPI respectively.