Comment by WaxProlix
2 days ago
People band together for sports teams, open source software, volunteer fire brigades, drinking clubs, fantasy football leagues, cover bands, all kinds of things that require all kinds of levels of investment, toil, coordination, and subjugation to a greater cause without monetary gain.
Now, how prime real estate is doled out back in earth...
Some things will obviously always be scarce, but the demand for merely positional goods in something like the Culture would likely not be that big. The values and norms and desires of people raised in a post-scarcity society would simply be very different from ours. The need to "have more than someone else", just for its own sake, would unlikely be common or socially approved of.
Though I wonder if something like nobility would make a comeback – when you can have almost anything you want, one of the things you can’t have is someone else’s family line! "New money" is meaningless in a society without money, but "old money" has the same value as it always has had – and it’s obvious why the former isn’t really held in high regard in many real societies either, compared to the latter. Banks talks about this a bit in Excession.
The demand for prime real estate is largely solved in the Culture by Orbitals anyway; indeed preferring to live on something as space-inefficient as a planet is seen as quaint and slightly eccentric.