[extropy-chat] economics of scarcity to economics of plenty

[Jack Parkinson]

Since there was a good deal of comment on this issue of the economics of 
plenty, I changed the subject line.

I don't think that *our* economics of scarcity generally has very much to do 
with availability (or lack thereof). There is for instance, a fairly broad 
agreement that there is enough food in the world to go around... Yet almost 
a quarter of all people are starving - and another quarter are obese. surely 
by any dispassionate measure this is a poor use of resources?

Scarcity is manipulated into being because it is good for business - the 
best business is surely an unchallenged monopoly - with control of 
availability and hence of price/profit etc.

This is what I was alluding to in mentioning the P2P networks, bit torrent 
etc - they turn this business model upside down and  represent a miniature 
economics of plenty - a model you might imagine as being extendable to the 
rest of society. For this very reason these technologies are subject to vast 
amounts of hostile propaganda, political/legal scrutiny - and plain old 
pressure to cease and desist...

Further examples might be the development of Linux, the Wiki, the Opensource 
movement, Copyleft, Creative Commons etc...

It was not so long ago that the promise of technology was abundance and 
leisure - 3 day working weeks, automated production releasing people from 
the monotonous grind for a life of richness. A generation later - that 
promise has never been realized. In reality of course, the automated 
production lines made their owners rich and their employees redundant. 
People are now working longer hours - harder than ever for more years of 
their lives  - certainly the 35 hour working weeks that once prevailed in 
Europe and Australia are now mostly a thing of the past. And whereas before 
it was only necessary for one person in a family to work - now it takes 
two...

I don't see why we must always have scarcity!

Because there is absolutely no doubt that it it is divisive, and it does 
create a double-tier society - EVEN when there is demonstrably enough for 
all. A story two days ago on Alternet remarked on a survey that claimed that 
more than half of Wal Marts quarter of a million employees cannot afford 
basic health care - the same story also mentions that the Walton family 
income earns in excess of 771,000 times the median US family income. This is 
not good economics...

Don't get me wrong - I am not against riches per se... Some tenson between 
rich and poor is motivating and helps drive healthy ambition. But an 
economic model *should* serve the needs of a society. If it does not - it is 
a failure in my book - no matter how spectacularly successful it is in 
enriching a niche of that society.

Lines of robots producing cars and trucks while the former employees watch 
daytime tv and worry about paying their power bills is also not economic 
success... Full employment is economic success.

My thesis here is - though perhaps I have not formulated it very well in 
this rush to get the words on paper - is that economics of scarcity is a bad 
model. Not necessarily because of the philosophical implications of the rich 
becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer - but from the pragmatic point 
of view that it is inefficient, fosters conflict, and represents a poor 
distribution model for any product/asset in society.

For minor examples of alternatives - look at how much better Firefox is than 
IE... and how frequently it is updated, how customizable... Look at 
Microsoft - a behemoth that takes 5 years to produce the next version of 
Windows - Linux developers run rings around them...

Look at how it is now possible to watch any tv program in any part of the 
world - and how the production studios fight this tooth and nail - even when 
this is free to air tv! Because they want to maintain their control of 
scarcity. The argument is often defined in terms of intellectual property... 
but this is not the real issue in most cases. And lastly, to show this is 
not the case, look at how authors like Cory Doctorow and musicians galore 
are now releasing their works into P2P alongside traditional distribution...

Maybe the times are a'changin?

Jack Parkinson


> From: David Lubkin <extropy at unreasonable.com>
Jack Parkinson wrote:
> >To my mind, a successful extropian future is partly dependent on making a
> >transition from economics of scarcity to economics of plenty - just
having a
> >more radical juxtaposition of haves and have-nots is never going to do
this.
>
> I see those expressions -- "economics of scarcity" and "economics of
> plenty" -- occasionally. They seem like a hand-waving fancy.
>
> First, I don't see how there's more than one economics.
>
> Second, it seems to me that there will always be scarcity.