This is because having a reliable food supply everywhere is not the same thing as growing enough food, on the aggregate, to be able to feed everyone. That's not even half of it. Distribution and logistics are key, particularly making it robust to all sorts of shocks (droughts, conflict, etc). A lot of areas experiencing famine/hunger are places with very bad governance and infrastructure. Fixing that is Hard and Expensive, and once you do they'll never go hungry again because existing food available for sale elsewhere in the world will make its way there, either always or when needed.
>I don’t have the answer. But I know there’s more to it than technology and innovation.
The answer is in social innovation, and half the issue is letting go of ideological baggage. Socialists need to stop having pavlovian responses to the word 'capitalism' and 'markets', and economic liberals need to stop treating markets as a sacred cow and instead think of them as one tool in a toolbox. Most importantly, we need way more experimentation.
It's more that the people who cant get enough food dont have anything that the people who have an excess of it really want.
Global wealth distribution is more the issue than logistics and that wealth includes legal monopolies on all the worlds most arable lands intrinsically backed by the threat of violence.
Sure they do. It's just that forefingers own everything of value in their countries and every time they elect someone to do something about it, the US violently overthrows them, covertly or overtly.[1]
1. https://github.com/binka/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md
What are these legal monopolies on arable land? Do you mean the countries that contain the land or something else?
This is silly. You say that as if the western countries aren't the same and didn't put those people in power...
Also, it's funny how you blame socialists for society not being able to fix the problems of capitalism.
Suppose I were to suggest that we think of Feudalism as a tool in the box, or Slavery/Forced labor. Some economies used to be run like that. And nobody said you have to use that "tool". The thing is - it's not really a tool, which "we" can collectively apply towards reaching accepted social ends. And neither is Capitalism.
I hate how people push centralized government and economies without a single shred of evidence that they have ever produced anything other than misery.
What kind of nonsense is that? We already have the tools, land value taxes and negative interest rates aka demurrage money.
The solutions are trivial, and that is exactly why curing the symptoms can be nothing but complex.
Demurrage money results in the neutrality of money and thereby activates a lot of economic theories that free market advocates take for granted when there is endless evidence that they don't work in a permanent money aka non neutral money system.
Full employment is the default in a market economy, there is no such thing as a business cycle. It is only once you add non neutral money with the artificial zero lower bound that you get monetary cycles.
If money is neutral, then debts won't have to grow eternally and there is no need to erode them with inflation.
You must be one of those anarcho-communists.
people say that, but it's not true.
We barely have enough to launch stuff into space. There's plenty of limits of resources, and are hard to obtain (e.g., rare earth metals, fossil fuels, etc).
Even a small shortage of fertilizers will reduce food production such that some people are looking at starvation - of course, not in the western countries, but that's not what a post-scarcity society looks like.
Just because it's easy doesn't mean we don't fuck it up, because of course we do. We push everyone as hard as we can, sending the benefits up the social pyramid and the problems down the social pyramid. When the system experiences a shock, it gets sent down the social pyramid and crunches the people at the bottom.
We could do better, but we choose not to. This is what post-scarcity looks like in a world that hasn't figured out how to share. The core problem is: the more someone has the ability to change the system, the more incentives they have to not change the system.
(Those priorities are not, in fact, more important.)
Strictly speaking, this is false.
By the lack of being able to send much to space, we must not currently be in a post-scarcity society, because space exploration is such a good and exciting thing to do, you'd expect that it's one of the first things to get accomplished by a post-scarcity society.
You're making claims about how space things align with post-scarcity that doesn't match up with the accepted meaning.
Even still, we _can_ send stuff into space, now cheaper than ever. What is the threshold for "send much to space"? Any person can order up a rocket payload on Amazon.space and have it placed in orbit? That doesn't sound good even if it were free. Especially if it were free...
> space exploration is such a good and exciting thing to do, you'd expect that it's one of the first things to get accomplished by a post-scarcity society
Why?
People can still lead a good life by focussing upon social rather than material facets. We do not need communications networks to socialize, nor do we need overpowered silicon chips to entertain. This is not to dismiss the positive roles of those technologies. Better communications and computation certainly help in everything from agriculture to medicine. It is just that using them as a proxy in applications where they do not contribute to human welfare can be tremendously counterproductive. The same thing can be said for space exploration, perhaps even more assertively since it is a huge drain of resources with a disproportionately isolated gain.
We could absolutely give everyone on earth the median standard of living. If we divided everything up equally (84.71 trillion [global GDP] / 7.753 billion [world population]) we are talking about something like 11 grand per person, per year, total overall spending. That's housing, food, healthcare, fire, police, roads, schooling, etc.
For most people on earth that would be a big raise[0], although virtually everyone in the west would be dramatically poorer.
[0]https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/08/news/economy/global-low-inc...
This is only because we pretend that the free market can solve these kinds of problems. If it weren't for supply chains that optimize in cost efficiency and nothing else, these sort of problems don't necessarily have to exist.
I genuinely do not understand how people can claim 'post scarcity' ( unlimited ) access to resources on a, clearly, very limited resource that is Earth.
exactly, this is what i have issue with calling post-scarcity.
may be the term could be "universal basic income capable" (UBI-able).
It isn't as simple as "just send other places more food" when the local power-tripping dictator will just seize the foreign aid
This.
I repeat this over and over again, so sincere apologies to those who are tired of it, I'm a Bucky Fuller fan boy. He was an engineer who had a kind of epiphany one day, and he realized that he could maximize the benefit for humanity of his personal skills and talents if he did his best to work on behalf of all humanity. He went on to invent things like the geodesic dome, and was one of the most famous Americans world wide in his time. He traveled around the world something like eighty times (not eighty days, eighty times.)
Anyway, he calculated (remember he was an engineer) that if we applied our technology and resources efficiently to solving our basic human needs (the lower tiers of Maslow's pyramid, eh?) then by sometime in the 1970's it should be possible that people could have careers of only two years duration and then retire, having accrued enough wealth to live "happily ever after" for the rest of their lives.
> ...there’s more to it than technology and innovation. Because those have already given us what we need, in many cases. But we have so far failed to leverage them fully.
Yes. The technology arrived right on schedule, but the (relatively simple) logistical arrangements have not yet materialized.
This seems to me to be a straightforward social/political movement. But it seemed that way back in the 60's with Bucky's "Design Science Revolution" as he called it, yet here we are.
So, yeah, we have all the technology we need, we just have to organize and apply it efficiently and everybody on Earth could have food, shelter, clothes, energy, etc. Not only that, but we could do it in ecologically harmonious ways so that we're increasing the healthy and vitality of the world rather than grinding it down (as most of our systems do today.)
It would be fun and easy.
I have no idea why it's not more popular.
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
Energy is also scarce. A limited amount of solar energy falls on the Earth, and if you need more than that, it gets very expensive (from space somehow).
Food is limited by labor (which scales with people) but also by energy and land (which do not).
As such, there will always be scarcity, signalled through prices. One way of making resources more abundant per person is capping/reducing population.
One of the big things we learned during the 20th Century is that this is not true. As basic needs are met, and people (especially women) are educated and socially empowered, population growth slows regardless of how much land is available.
So much of society in western nations and especially the US is seemingly optimized to be as wasteful as possible. We live in mansions surrounded by unused land so we have to drive our personal gas-burning suit of armor everywhere, and then we store it in fields of asphalt at our destination. We put resources subsidizing foods that no one will eat, and then ship them to people in ways that maximize the labor to goods transported ratio.
In the US at least, there really just isn't much motivation to be more efficient because the past couple of generations have been raised on perpetual abundance.
For space rockets, the further you want to go, the more fuel you must carry, but all that fuel weighs something until burned, so you need yet more fuel just to launch the other fuel into space. So as your rocket's range increases, the needed fuel to reach that range grows at least polynomially.
For cars, having one enables you to drive to places... but those places need gas stations and parking. The more cars there are, the greater the proportion of land dedicated to roads, refueling and parking. But then there's less space for the places you'd actually want to go, pushing them further. And then you need more gas stations and parking to get that far. And then there's less space again. Repeat ad infinitum.
Food is not limited by labor, or specifically scarce any more than any other good. In fact it's not obvious to me it will always require labor at all.
Strictly speaking, all goods are scarce if you don't have an infinite number of them. But I think we are lazily saying "scarce" when we mean something like "unavoidably zero sum". The only thing you list which has that is land.
Of course, all of this is on a scale well beyond what we need to (currently) be concerned with- we don't have the technology to fully utilize what we have to fully eliminate scarcity in the first place.
Energy? Is not scarce. I'm not even in the top 25% of travel for people who have been in an airplane one time, and I've done the equivalent of several circumnavigations.
Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget to split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and lately they can have a small solar panel and light as well. That's not scarce energy.
It would be great if it was even less scarce, sure.
This is a terrible bar. By even being on an airplane just once you are already in the top 20% of the world. If you’ve done several circumnavigations you’re outside of the category of flying once or twice for major life events which puts you in the top 1%.
> Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget to split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and lately they can have a small solar panel and light as well. That's not scarce energy
This is a really uninformed view of the energy requirements to sustain human life. Transportation, getting people food/water, and HVAC dominates this. Enough energy to run a cell phone is a joke.
A world in which anyone at all is flying around the world in dozens of passenger jets several times just in the course of living has an enormous amount of available energy relative to any time in history. If this is scarce, we don't have a word for what it was like before.
> A lightning bolt would be worth only about a nickel
Actually they are. My city is dumping earth into a lake to make new land for residential development. And China is literally building islands in the sea to extend its domain.
After all, a zero percent interest rate implies the non scarcity of capital.
Not if you include the population of the world outside of a few rich western countries.
The problem isn’t we haven’t solved how to make enough food to feed everyone, it’s that it’s not profitable to feed those that can’t pay for it.
There's nothing simple about distribution. It's at least as hard as producing stuff in the first place.
Solving distribution in a way that is both fair and economically sustainable has also proved to be extremely hard--much harder than just producing enough.
Despite the moral problems inherent to market-based pricing (the poor go to the back of the line), all the alternatives we've tried so far have led to far worse results.
For example there is plenty of food to feed the entire world, but some people still go hungry. There is plenty of land and buildings to house everyone, but some people are still homeless. There is far more than enough clothes, but some people still have to wear rags.
I don’t have the answer. But I know there’s more to it than technology and innovation. Because those have already given us what we need, in many cases. But we have so far failed to leverage them fully.