Why “Post-Scarcity” is a Psychological Impossibility
What “Scarcity” means in economics, and why it is unavoidable
A good is considered ‘scarce’, in economics, when the amount of it that everyone could ever possibly want is more than the amount of it that exists.
This is not just a function of material reality (i.e., how much of the good exists) but of our desires — how much of it that we want. For a good to move from being scarce to being non-scare, for it to become post-scarce, our material reality must come to exceed our desires.
The issue with this is our desires are continually adjusting to exceed what they previously were. We are not built to be satiated. It’s called the hedonic treadmill:
Can you remember the last time you were dreaming of buying a new car, getting a promotion at work, moving into a nicer house or finding a partner to share life with? Do you remember fantasizing about how happy you would be if you attained those things?
If you finally did attain one of those things, you may have found that the “happiness boost” didn’t last that long or wasn’t as intense as you’d imagined. Most of us have gone through this cycle.
The hedonic treadmill (also known as hedonic adaptation) is a theory positing that people repeatedly return to their baseline level of happiness, regardless of what happens to them.
So, even if we were arbitrarily rich, we’d still want more — scarcity would continue. For all the complaints that the poor have gotten poorer, well… if you wanted to live like one of your ancestors a hundred years ago, doing so would be pretty damn cheap. A diet of potatoes, rice, and other low-cost staples (and nothing else) and a 200-square-foot room in either the bad part of town or the countryside, no medical care, no internet, no phone, new clothing every five years, no car, no electricity, no running water, very little in the way of healthcare, and so on, and so on.
Living like that would almost be free. To them, we live lives of imaginable luxury. And yet, we still count ourselves as proles and complain of our immiseration. Why? Because our desires have increased. Partially, this is because we are confronted with the possibilities — dying of curable cancer is a ridiculously unromantic way to go, going without electricity or running water is a grotesque asceticism, eating rice when there are meats and vegetables in the stores is cruel humiliation. The other part, though, is that we aware that someone out there has it much better than us, and they don’t at all seem to have earned that — the Bezoses and the Musks of the world.
So, post-scarcity is a psychological impossibility — we are cursed with the imaginations of the greatest of kings, trapped within the means of paupers. This reality would persist in any economic system, with any amount of technology. There is no endgame.
Well, almost no endgame. Perhaps some sort of darkly transhumanistic tinkering with our capacity to imagine could render us all perfectly content, though I don’t see that as desirable — I’m not sure we’d be meaningfully human anymore.
