Abundance
Post-scarcity, or abundance, is very well conceivable. The technology is here already, or will be developed in the foreseeable future. The main challenge is how to organize it; how to build organizations that can exist in the economic and legal reality of today and that are incentivized to deliver abundance.
“Nature 2.0 aims for an ownerless layer of natural resources and intelligent agents that promote sustainable public utilities in a world of abundance” — Trent McConaghy
Abundance is a difficult concept, not only in economics, but also in philosophy, ethics and even theology. For some people it is evident that the very goal of human progress should be that all basic needs — food, water, shelter, energy — should be freely available for all “like the air we breed”. But for others this is not so obvious. The two main objections are the same as with the idea of Universal Basic Income: 1) we can’t afford it and 2) it would disincentivize people to work and make us all lazy. (There is a third, ethical, objective: life should be earned. Especially among Protestants this is a firmly held belief, relating to the original sin and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. I’ll just leave this here.)
Can we afford it?
The question whether society can afford UBI is obscured by a number of concepts that are very hard to “unthink”: the government would have to pay it out of tax revenues, and this burden on the private sector would crash the whole system when the level of basic income was chosen too high.
The case for abundance is much easier, because it can be made almost entirely without the “veil of money”. Once you take the costs of energy and labor out of the equation, lots of goods can be produced virtually for free, as Peter Diamandis shows in his TED Talk:
- solar cells will become exponentially more efficient, which will bring down the cost of electricity towards zero;
- once electricity is dirt cheap, drinking water can be produced dirt cheap out of seawater, because electricity makes up more than 90 percent of the cost of desalination;
- once drinking water can be produced dirt cheap, the Sahara can be irrigated and food can be grown in abundance.
Would it make us lazy?
Funny enough, the other objection against UBI — people will stop working once they get enough “free money” to live on — can also easily be refuted when we replace “money” with “basic needs”. Even in a post-scarcity world, a lot of things will be scarce. Gold. Van Gogh paintings. 16 year old Lagavulin whiskey. Designer clothes. Tickets to the Champions League finale. Crypto Kitties. But also: everything that requires human time and attention. So apart from the fact that humans are a creative species that always will want to make or do something, there will also always be a market for these products.
Or look at it this way. A lot of stuff actually has become virtually free in the last decennia, due to digitization, after lots more stuff has become affordable in the decennia before that, in the era of mass production. None of this has made us work less hours.
There will, of course, be economists stating that “there is no such thing as a free lunch”, and conservative politicians that ”one has to work for a living”. But in reality there is little reason to fear the Age of Abundance. It will not be the end of capitalism, it will just mean moving a step or two higher on Maslov’s pyramid. People will be working, just on more interesting things.
Problems
There are two related economic problems with post-scarcity or abundance. The first one is: what is the business model? The second one is: who owns the robots?
The business models that brought us free stuff have, until now, not been optimal from a social point of view. “Free” has led to platform monopolies, surveillance capitalism, severe breaches of privacy and an unhealthy concentration of wealth and power. In the Nature 2.0 model, the formation of monopolies would be prevented by means of “rich (or: fat) protocols”; the majority of data, algorithms, blueprints and other means of production would be in “the commons”. As the thought experiments with the RepRap show, this would lead to what economists call “perfect competition”: many producers, none of whom would be able to make an above-normal profit. The main question here is: who will be investing in these means of production? The venture capital model depends on the “award” of reaping monopoly profits every once in x investments, so VC’s won’t be interested in investing in the commons. So who will? Users? Developers? Government?
This is, of course, another way of asking who will own the means of production. It is all very well to talk about “self-owned organizations”, but technically (legally) this is a difficult concept. Most things have owners at the moment they come into existence, and it is in most jurisdictions not trivial to “sign away” ownership (it is of course possible to transfer ownership, but there must be a receiving party). “The community” is not a legal entity. When we crowdfund or crowdsource the means of production, legal ownership rests with the individuals who contributed, not with “the community”. The government is an institution that is meant to represent the interests of the community, but a state-owned commons is not what we want, in my opinion.
Conclusion
Post-scarcity, or abundance, is very well conceivable. The technology is here already, or will be developed in the foreseeable future. The main challenge is how to organize it; how to build organizations that can exist in the economic and legal reality of today and that are incentivized to deliver abundance.
