This seems pretty solidly wrong to me. Indeed we live in a society that produces outrageously huge amounts of stuff. But I don’t think scarcity is about how much more stuff we have than in the past. I think post-scarcity means that there is nothing in particular that you have to do, no essential-to-survival resource that you have to compete to attain.
I also agree that the political Overton window of what constitutes “basic life necessities” has gotten pretty far from literal survival, but most people still need to spend a huge fraction of their life working in order to pay for a place to live. (Arguably, someone could choose to work no job and therefore be homeless and they still probably wouldn’t literally die quickly, but they would still have to spend a large fraction of their time finding food, water, shelter etc, and their life expectancy would be far shorter.)
...Most people still need to spend a huge fraction of their life working in order to pay for a place to live.
(Arguably, someone could choose to work no job and therefore be homeless and they still probably wouldn’t literally die quickly, but they would still have to spend a large fraction of their time finding food, water, shelter etc, and their life expectancy would be far shorter.)
I’d argue that this is mostly exaggerated when taken literally. Jacob Lund Fisker, for example has written about how he spends less than $7,000 a year, and yet still has housing in the United States (which includes the cost of imputed rent), adequate nutrition, a car, internet access, and even healthcare. If we take the results of the RAND health insurance study seriously, as well as the very weak correlation between healthcare consumption and life expectancy in rich nations, then we should conclude that one’s life expectancy is not substantially diminished via deprivation from high spending on medical services.
There is a strong correlation between levels of income and life expectancy within nations, but most of this is likely explained by a number of confounders, including intelligence and conscientiousness. In practice, high quality evidence indicates that, for example, reducing smoking and reducing calorie intake increase lifespan, which are easier to do on a fundamental level without money (as you literally cannot purchase more of these goods).
Furthermore, there is a large system of government services available to extremely poor people in the United States (and Western Europe), especially if they are able to move to a different state. For example, in California, you can qualify for Medi-Cal if your income is less than 138% of the federal poverty level, or $17,775. And you would likely also qualify for housing assistance, SNAP Food Benefits and private charity at this level of income too.
On a literal, just stating facts level, the idea that very low income people (in the range of $2500-$5000 per year) in the United States or other rich nations are being fundamentally deprived of their right to life is false. Of course, one could (and indeed should) argue that we ought to aim higher, and ensure that everyone is entitled to a high standard of living. But that’s a separate argument.
There is really no incentive to take care of these problems, else we would have solved them a long time ago if it were ever aligned with the goals of human civilization to minimize the suffering of the masses. We dream of these utopia as new technologies come to light and improve our lives a little bit at a time, but we focus so much on everything else that run counter to this dream, climate change is a good example, well it’s just such an easy example to use. I’m rather convinced that we have been operating on the evolution paradigm all this time, and it really doesn’t seem like it’s going to change any time soon based on how rigid the current structures are.
These utopias pacify people into complacency, just like dreams of the afterlife. Humans are resources after all. Even those who benefit from the system are resources to the system itself as well. The social hierarchy system is the computation that sprung out of evolution. Once we have the mental capacity to question the efficacy of the evolution paradigm itself, then we no longer constrained by the hierarchy of computation as we become a callback function to the parent caller.
This seems pretty solidly wrong to me. Indeed we live in a society that produces outrageously huge amounts of stuff. But I don’t think scarcity is about how much more stuff we have than in the past. I think post-scarcity means that there is nothing in particular that you have to do, no essential-to-survival resource that you have to compete to attain.
I also agree that the political Overton window of what constitutes “basic life necessities” has gotten pretty far from literal survival, but most people still need to spend a huge fraction of their life working in order to pay for a place to live. (Arguably, someone could choose to work no job and therefore be homeless and they still probably wouldn’t literally die quickly, but they would still have to spend a large fraction of their time finding food, water, shelter etc, and their life expectancy would be far shorter.)
I’d argue that this is mostly exaggerated when taken literally. Jacob Lund Fisker, for example has written about how he spends less than $7,000 a year, and yet still has housing in the United States (which includes the cost of imputed rent), adequate nutrition, a car, internet access, and even healthcare. If we take the results of the RAND health insurance study seriously, as well as the very weak correlation between healthcare consumption and life expectancy in rich nations, then we should conclude that one’s life expectancy is not substantially diminished via deprivation from high spending on medical services.
There is a strong correlation between levels of income and life expectancy within nations, but most of this is likely explained by a number of confounders, including intelligence and conscientiousness. In practice, high quality evidence indicates that, for example, reducing smoking and reducing calorie intake increase lifespan, which are easier to do on a fundamental level without money (as you literally cannot purchase more of these goods).
Furthermore, there is a large system of government services available to extremely poor people in the United States (and Western Europe), especially if they are able to move to a different state. For example, in California, you can qualify for Medi-Cal if your income is less than 138% of the federal poverty level, or $17,775. And you would likely also qualify for housing assistance, SNAP Food Benefits and private charity at this level of income too.
On a literal, just stating facts level, the idea that very low income people (in the range of $2500-$5000 per year) in the United States or other rich nations are being fundamentally deprived of their right to life is false. Of course, one could (and indeed should) argue that we ought to aim higher, and ensure that everyone is entitled to a high standard of living. But that’s a separate argument.
There is really no incentive to take care of these problems, else we would have solved them a long time ago if it were ever aligned with the goals of human civilization to minimize the suffering of the masses. We dream of these utopia as new technologies come to light and improve our lives a little bit at a time, but we focus so much on everything else that run counter to this dream, climate change is a good example, well it’s just such an easy example to use. I’m rather convinced that we have been operating on the evolution paradigm all this time, and it really doesn’t seem like it’s going to change any time soon based on how rigid the current structures are.
These utopias pacify people into complacency, just like dreams of the afterlife. Humans are resources after all. Even those who benefit from the system are resources to the system itself as well. The social hierarchy system is the computation that sprung out of evolution. Once we have the mental capacity to question the efficacy of the evolution paradigm itself, then we no longer constrained by the hierarchy of computation as we become a callback function to the parent caller.