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=                           Post-scarcity                            =
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                            Introduction
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Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods
can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor, so that
they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.

Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all
goods and services. Instead it means that all people can easily have
their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion
of their desires for goods and services. Writers on the topic often
emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity
society.


Speculative technology
========================
Futurists who speak of "post-scarcity" suggest economies based on
advances in automated manufacturing technologies, often including the
idea of self-replicating machines, the adoption of division of labour
which in theory could produce nearly all goods in abundance, given
adequate raw materials and energy.

More speculative forms of nanotechnology such as molecular assemblers
or nanofactories, which do not currently exist, raise the possibility
of devices that can automatically manufacture any specified goods
given the correct instructions and the necessary raw materials and
energy, and many nanotechnology enthusiasts have suggested it will
usher in a post-scarcity world.

In the more near-term future, the increasing automation of physical
labor using robots is often discussed as means of creating a
post-scarcity economy.

Increasingly versatile forms of rapid prototyping machines, and a
hypothetical self-replicating version of such a machine known as a
RepRap, have also been predicted to help create the abundance of goods
needed for a post-scarcity economy. Advocates of self-replicating
machines such as Adrian Bowyer, the creator of the RepRap project,
argue that once a self-replicating machine is designed, then since
anyone who owns one can make more copies to sell (and would also be
free to ask for a lower price than other sellers), market competition
will naturally drive the cost of such machines down to the bare
minimum needed to make a profit, in this case just above the cost of
the physical materials and energy that must be fed into the machine as
input, and the same should go for any other goods that the machine can
build.

Even with fully automated production, limitations on the number of
goods produced would arise from the availability of raw materials and
energy, as well as ecological damage associated with manufacturing
technologies. Advocates of technological abundance often argue for
more extensive use of renewable energy and greater recycling in order
to prevent future drops in availability of energy and raw materials,
and reduce ecological damage. Solar energy in particular is often
emphasized, as the cost of solar panels continues to drop (and could
drop far more with automated production by self-replicating machines),
and advocates point out the total solar power striking the Earth's
surface annually exceeds our civilization's current annual power usage
by a factor of thousands.

Advocates also argue that the energy and raw materials available could
be greatly expanded by looking to resources beyond the Earth. For
example, asteroid mining is sometimes discussed as a way of greatly
reducing scarcity for many useful metals such as nickel. While early
asteroid mining might involve crewed missions, advocates hope that
eventually humanity could have automated mining done by
self-replicating machines. If this were done, then the only capital
expenditure would be a single self-replicating unit (whether robotic
or nanotechnological). The unit could then replicate at no further
cost, limited only by the available raw materials needed to build
more.


Social
========
A World Future Society report looked at how historically capitalism
takes advantage of scarcity. Increased resource scarcity leads to
increase and fluctuation of prices, which drives advances in
technology for more efficient use of resources such that costs will be
considerably reduced, almost to zero. They thus claim that following
an increase in scarcity from now, the world will enter a post-scarcity
age between 2050 and 2075.

Murray Bookchin's 1971 essay collection 'Post-Scarcity Anarchism'
outlines an economy based on social ecology, libertarian municipalism,
and an abundance of fundamental resources, arguing that
post-industrial societies have the potential to be developed into
post-scarcity societies. Such development would enable "the
fulfillment of the social and cultural potentialities latent in a
technology of abundance".

Bookchin claims that the expanded production made possible by the
technological advances of the twentieth century were in the pursuit of
market profit and at the expense of the needs of humans and of
ecological sustainability. The accumulation of capital can no longer
be considered a prerequisite for liberation, and the notion that
obstructions such as the state, social hierarchy, and vanguard
political parties are necessary in the struggle for freedom of the
working classes can be dispelled as a myth.


Marxism
=========
Karl Marx, in a section of his 'Grundrisse' that came to be known as
the "Fragment on Machines", argued that the transition to a
post-capitalist society combined with advances in automation would
allow for significant reductions in labor needed to produce necessary
goods, eventually reaching a point where all people would have
significant amounts of leisure time to pursue science, the arts, and
creative activities; a state some commentators later labeled as
"post-scarcity". Marx argued that capitalism--the dynamic of economic
growth based on capital accumulation--depends on exploiting the
surplus labor of workers, but a post-capitalist society would allow
for:

The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction
of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the
general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum,
which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of
the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for
all of them.

Marx's concept of a post-capitalist communist society involves the
free distribution of goods made possible by the abundance provided by
automation. The fully developed communist economic system is
postulated to develop from a preceding socialist system. Marx held the
view that socialism--a system based on social ownership of the means
of production--would enable progress toward the development of fully
developed communism by further advancing productive technology. Under
socialism, with its increasing levels of automation, an increasing
proportion of goods would be distributed freely.

Marx did not believe in the elimination of most physical labor through
technological advancements alone in a capitalist society, because he
believed capitalism contained within it certain tendencies which
countered increasing automation and prevented it from developing
beyond a limited point, so that manual industrial labor could not be
eliminated until the overthrow of capitalism. Some commentators on
Marx have argued that at the time he wrote the 'Grundrisse', he
thought that the collapse of capitalism due to advancing automation
was inevitable despite these counter-tendencies, but that by the time
of his major work 'Capital: Critique of Political Economy' he had
abandoned this view, and came to believe that capitalism could
continually renew itself unless overthrown.


Surplus economics
===================
Surplus economics is a heterodox economic theory that centres on the
implications of economic surplus--production beyond essential
needs--and its role in shaping modern exchange economies. Contrary to
the orthodox economic focus on scarcity, surplus economics argues that
the real economic challenge is managing the consequences of abundance,
including inequality, consumption, and motivation. The theory proposes
that modern capitalism functions not to allocate scarce resources
efficiently, but to absorb and destroy surplus through patterns of
production and exchange.


Literature
============
* The novella 'The Midas Plague' by Frederik Pohl describes a world of
cheap energy, in which robots are overproducing the commodities
enjoyed by humankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in
frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant
production, while the upper-class "rich" can live lives of simplicity.
* The 'Mars' trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson charts the terraforming
of Mars as a human colony and the establishment of a post-scarcity
society.
* 'Beyond This Horizon'
* The 'Culture' novels by Iain M. Banks are centered on a
post-scarcity economy where technology is advanced to such a degree
that all production is automated, and there is no use for money or
property (aside from personal possessions with sentimental value).
People in the Culture are free to pursue their own interests in an
open and socially-permissive society.
** The society depicted in the 'Culture' novels has been described by
some commentators as "communist-bloc" or "anarcho-communist". Banks'
close friend and fellow science fiction writer Ken MacLeod has said
that The Culture can be seen as a realization of Marx's communism, but
adds that "however friendly he was to the radical left, Iain had
little interest in relating the long-range possibility of utopia to
radical politics in the here and now. As he saw it, what mattered was
to keep the utopian possibility open by continuing technological
progress, especially space development, and in the meantime to support
whatever policies and politics in the real world were rational and
humane."
* 'The Rapture of the Nerds' by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross takes
place in a post-scarcity society and involves "disruptive" technology.
The title is a derogatory term for the technological singularity
coined by SF author Ken MacLeod.
* Con Blomberg's 1959 short story 'Sales Talk' depicts a post-scarcity
society in which society incentivizes consumption to reduce the burden
of overproduction. To further reduce production, virtual reality is
used to fulfill peoples' needs to create.
* Cory Doctorow's novel 'Walkaway' presents a modern take on the idea
of post-scarcity. With the advent of 3D printing - and especially the
ability to use these to fabricate even better fabricators - and with
machines that can search for and reprocess waste or discarded
materials, the protagonists no longer have need of regular society for
the basic essentials of life, such as food, clothing and shelter.


Television and film
=====================
* The 24th-century human society depicted in the television series
'Star Trek: The Original Series',  'Star Trek: The Next Generation',
'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine', 'Star Trek: Voyager ' and 'Star Trek:
Enterprise',  is a post-scarcity society brought about by the
invention of the "replicator", a machine that converts energy to
matter instantaneously. In the film 'Star Trek: First Contact',
Captain Jean-Luc Picard asserts: "The acquisition of wealth is no
longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and
the rest of humanity." In this galaxy (at least the United Federation
of Planets), money had been rendered obsolete on Earth by the 22nd
century (although it still existed with reference to other species in
the Star Trek universe, most notably the Ferengi).


                              See also
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* Affluent society
* Bright green environmentalism
* Commons-based peer production
* Communist society
* Economic problem
* Futures studies
* Jacque Fresco
* Imagination Age
* Information society
* Knowledge economy
* New Frontier
* Post-capitalism
* Post-work society
* Progress
* Scarcity
* Scientism
* Surplus economics
* Technocentrism
* Technological utopianism
* Techno-progressivism
* Universal basic income


                             References
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*
*  See also 'Engines of Creation'.
*
*
*


                          Further reading
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* 'Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis'
* 'Bright Future: Abundance and Progress in the 21st Century' by David
McMullen
* Books by Martin Ford (author)
* 'The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End
Oppression' by Peter Joseph
* 'Peoples' Capitalism: The Economics of the Robot Revolution' by
James Albus
* 'Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin'
* 'Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek' by Manu Saadia
* 'The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought'
by Peter Joseph and TZM members
* 'Zero Marginal Cost Society' by Jeremy Rifkin
* 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism' by Aaron Bastani
* 'The Best That Money Can't Buy' by Jacque Fresco


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