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).
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.