Comment by kjkjadksj
9 months ago
The idea of abundance vs scarecety makes sense on the outset. But I have to wonder where all this alleged abundance is hiding. Sometimes the assumptions feel a bit like “drill baby drill” to me without figures and projections behind it. One would think if there was much untapped capacity in resources today it would get used up. We can look at how agriculture yields improved over the 19th century and see how that lead to higher populations but also less land under the plow and fewer hands working that land, vs having an equal land under plow and I don’t know dumping the excess yield someplace where it isn’t participating in the market?
I think to the parent's point it is as you say: there is already untapped capacity that isn't being used due to (geo)political forces maintaining the scarcity side of the argument. Using your agriculture example, a simple Google search will yield plenty of examples going back more than a decade of food sitting/rotting in warehouses/ports due to red tape and bureaucracy. So, we already can/do produce enough food to feed _everyone_ (abundance) but cannot get out of our own way to do so due to a number of human factors like greed or politics (scarcity).
And that sort of analysis is exactly what is suspect to me about this. Have people considered why an onion might be in a warehouse or why it might go unsold after a time? The answer is no and reveals a lack of understanding of nuance of how the global economy actually works. Everything has some loss factor and removing it all to nill might not be realistic at all at the scale we do things to feed ourselves. Its like making pancakes: some mix stays in the bag you can’t get out, some batter stays on your bow, some stays on your spoon, you make pancakes with some, some scrap is left in the pan, some crumbs on your plate. All this waste making pancakes and yet to chase down every scrap would be impossible. And at massive scale that scrap probably ads up.
Besides we are crushing global hunger over the decades so something is working on that front. The crisis in most of the western world today at least is that merely wages are depressed compared to costs for housing (really land) versus not being able to afford food.
I'm getting more at things like a perspective shift, like represented with ideas at these links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource
https://www.remineralize.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cost+of+militarism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-competition/
https://www.pop.org/overpopulation-myth/
https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/298-june-19-1979/the-ori...
https://archive.org/details/AdvancedAutomationForSpaceMissio...
https://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanE...
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSoc...
https://pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-pers...
https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080930065642/http://www.whywor... "I [Bob Black] don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."
And so on...