Post-scarcity is often talked about in binary terms. We've either reached post-scarcity or we haven't.

I believe the transition to post-scarcity will be gradual, that it will happen faster in some sectors of society than others, and that this process may take multiple generations to complete. This has been the case with every other major economic shift, why would it not be the case with post-scarcity?

If this is how the transition to post-scarcity occurs, societies will eventually hit a point at which many people still need to work to produce our economic output, but far fewer than currently do. How will our economic system handle that situation? The selling of labor is the primary mechanism by which we distribute resources, but if we get to a point where only 20% of the adult population are needed in the labor force then how do we distribute resources to the remaining 80%?

Now, where things get really interesting is that "needed in the labor force" is not a binary thing, either. What if there's a big slice of the population from whom we only need five hours of labor a week? And they coexist alongside another slice of the population from whom we need forty hours of labor a week?

Maybe we're already a few steps down this road.

We are indeed already a little ways down that road, and the answer we've come to is: Everyone still has to work.

Most jobs that people have now aren't strictly necessary. If everyone gave up their leisure time to do all of their own cooking and cleaning, a massive set of jobs would disappear overnight. If we all at local, another. And the list goes on. Effectively, what happens is, we invent new jobs that are based on want as opposed to need. It's easy to look at that picture and say 'there is so much unnecessary work that happens!' but really, that X% of the economy based on want is required for price discovery of the rest. That is what your last paragraph is touching on, how do we decide who does what and how much? In capitalism, the answer is price discovery, and for that to work, everyone has to participate in the market.

If we're to have a true market then we need to eliminate a bunch of market distortions, in particular the 30-hour threshold where a job is considered full-time and the 5-hour binary cutoff for unemployment, so that people who want to work somewhere between 5 and 30 hours a week (which I suspect is actually most people) can actually express that preference by offering a price for that much labour.

> In capitalism, the answer is price discovery, and for that to work, everyone has to participate in the market.

This is precisely what I'm getting at. We've built a system on the assumption of a forty-hour full-time work week, with a goal of minimizing unemployment and (recently) maximizing labor market participation. We did this because we need participation in the market for effective resource distribution.

What happens when our economy simply does not need that much labor to produce all the economic output we want? Do we force people to continue participating in the labor market in makework jobs just so that they can have access to resources? To what extent are we already doing this?

> We are indeed already a little ways down that road, and the answer we've come to is: Everyone still has to work.

But logically it would seem that should be: Everyone still has to work, but a little less than hitherto.

Now the question becomes, how much less?

Meaning, in my view, is not a switch; it's a dial. We can have some more than we have now.

Overall I agree with you: I'm not naive, nor am I a utopianist. I'm fine with more equitable. But we're so entrenched in the status quo that it feels like you have to talk like a revolutionary to get even a shred of "a little more equitable".

Edit: wait though what's a "post-scarcity" economy, anyway, concretely? I've heard since I can remember that we grow enough food as a species to feed everyone (and yet we throw tons of food out) - is that not a decent marker of being post-scarcity? We seem to have enough wealth in the US to be in neverending proxy or non-proxy aggressive wars against various groups of poor and largely non-white people - that wealth, used slightly differently, has got to be some kind of dent in all sorts of scarcity, no? I'm not writing this to attack you whatsoever; I'm genuinely curious. Post-scarcity is a phrase I've heard smarter people than me utter every now and then, and it only just occurred to me that I've never actually figured out what it meant. (I'll Google it now of course but I'd love to hear your perspective all the same. Cheers.)

Post-scarcity just refers to a time after scarcity, which is defined as limited resources. In a world that is post-scarcity, everyone can have everything they want (materially) without infringing on anyone else's ability to have the same.

The reason it gets brought up is because the moment one person's needs or wants infringe on another's, there needs to be a way to decide who gets what. Generally, this is what people are talking about when they talk about various economic systems. You come up with different mechanics that use the distribution of goods to incentivize the production of more goods.

The only way we escape the economic games that need to be played, to keep people working and producing things society needs, is if we no longer need them to produce anything. Then you no longer need the incentives and feedback loops that tie consumption to production, and people are generally free to do whatever the hell they want.

By definition, this is impossible to achieve. Assume that some person says I want what everyone else has. There is no post scarcity. It is better to think of it as meeting a set of pre-defined needs. These needs can change over time. for e.g., internet access. But framing it as wanting everything I could possibly imagine is a straw-man.

Yeah, I've always maintained that there are too many people with unbounded greed for a "complete" post-scarcity to be achievable. There's a "greed is good" crowd, and then beyond that, there are those who aren't even concerned with whether it's good to be greedy, they just want to win at others' expense, spitefully. A world where they can't take from other people is not desirable. The first time I got to know someone with this attitude, I started out thinking it was a front, or a joke, but it wasn't.

The idea of post-scarcity brushes over that dark part of human nature, and assumes we can figure out how to cooperate, even absent antisocial misanthropes. In Star Trek, they have "figured it out", but the transition to post-scarcity is understandably only vaguely described.

I couldn't agree more. The idea itself is grand, but it's not adaptable to chaos. So long as human personalities are scattered around a bell curve, the more competitive and materialistic of us (which includes those of us who want humanity to pursue scientific development since it is extremely capital intensive) will force the competition to continue.

How is it a straw-man? Impossible or not, it means what it means.