Pretty sure health problems, debt, and shelter are universal problems that you'll find in every society since the dawn of civilization. I've yet to see evidence that these problems can be solved at scale, for every person. So unless you can solve these timeless, hard problems at scale for everyone (which I don't think you can), then we're DEFINITELY a post-scarcity society.

this seems more of an argument that a post-scarcity society is impossible than an argument that we are already in one!

It is impossible because basic needs are a moving target.

> health care

Most heart disease and cancer, the two biggest cost centers, are somehow self-inflicted. People choose to eat badly and take drugs. In fact, moving away from a post-scarcity society would be the best at mitigating healthcare costs. If people were too poor to afford anything but tiny servings of grain and produce, they would have less health problems and live longer.

> student loans

This is also self-inflicted. People do not need to get the vast majority of degrees that they have. Most people are attending college to get the college experience. They want to party and waste time because stacking up loans is easier to them than actually working a job they are fit for. The degrees they are choosing to get are not serving to increase their employability, and burdening society's balance sheets for the debt they never pay off. We should start aggressively denying "education" to those that cannot be educated.

> housing

Housing is extremely cheap. It is not extremely cheap in the Bay Area, but if we forced the chronically homeless, criminals, and indigents on section 8 to move to affordable locales we would not only no longer have a housing crisis, but we could restore the cities that have been lost to their degeneracy.

This is probably the worst take on all of these issues, I am trying to figure out which one is the most absurd.

Is it - cancer is self inflicted or homelessness disappears if the homeless are removed or kids get 100K+ loans to party for unemployment.

>If people were too poor to afford anything but tiny servings of grain and produce, they would have less health problems and live longer.

One small disaster that disrupts the food supply chain and they'll quickly be starving and turn to violence.

>We should start aggressively denying "education" to those that cannot be educated.

I don't even know how you would begin to definitively determine that for the lifetime of a person, much less denying something which is handed out freely in other countries.

>but we could restore the cities that have been lost to their degeneracy.

Income inequality is vastly more responsible for city degeneration than the homeless.

> I don't even know how you would begin to definitively determine that for the lifetime of a person, much less denying something which is handed out freely in other countries.

I believe there is already data out there that correlates a specific college degree with average income post-graduation. Lenders should require degree focus and inversely scale interest to expected income. Getting a loan at 14% to major in history might steer people towards engineering, nursing, or go into a trade.

Think of it like how the US does credit scores: the lower the score the higher the interest rate.

Most cancer is definitively not self-inflicted, it's actually a fairly natural consequence of aging.