Is it true post-scarcity like everyone has their own mostly automated Starship Enterprise / Battlestar / Star Destroyer?
I always get kind of agitated at the notion of post resource scarcity because if you took someone from 1000 years ago and dropped them into today they'd be amazed at how much everyone has. If everyone had 11th century desires but 21st century technology we'd be there. But we're definitely not. I sincerely doubt we ever will be.
The Culture is true post-scarcity in that basically unlimited matter and energy can be manufactured along with the objects made from matter and energy. By clever authorial fiat this doesn't lead to mega-terrorism from rare unhinged individuals, though. The real decision makers and guardians of the Culture are Minds, super-advanced AIs that can keep watch over millions of biological passengers and react to any problem a million times faster than biological entities can act. All manufactured objects in the Culture beyond a certain level of complexity have their own lesser AIs embedded in them. A space suit can advise or even argue with its user; a powerful handgun will refuse to fire if it thinks its user is misbehaving. (This is a minor plot point in one of the stories where somebody destroys a ship with a very old Culture gun from before the AI safeguards were built into objects.)
As for the real world you can observe demand satiation right now among different ranks of the rich. Look at billionaires. They consume much more than the man who has only a few million in the bank, but sub-linearly more. From millionaires to billionaires you don't see a thousand-fold increase in consumption as measured by house size, food, beverages, clothing, medical care... Billionaires are three orders of magnitude separated from millionaires on the basis of control, not consumption; the richest will feel ill long before they consume all the champagne or caviar they could afford to buy.
"As for the real world you can observe demand satiation right now among different ranks of the rich. Look at billionaires. They consume much more than the man who has only a few million in the bank, but sub-linearly more."
Which is why the growing wealth inequalities are bad for the overall economy. The rich can't spend their money with enough scale or velocity.
In a sandbox game like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress, once I have met all the objectives built into the game, I can invent new and ridiculous objectives, such as "build a fortress entirely out of obsidian 200 z-levels high".
Once you're rich, and can no longer spend all your income on everything you can think to consume yourself, you can buy a megaproject.
Run a political campaign for PotUS. Build a working town, like Disney's Celebration, Florida. Develop a self-driving electric car. Build a city that floats on the ocean. Start a Mars colony. Build a single Dyson heliostat. Breed elephants down to the size of Great Dane dogs. Develop sono-videophones so that dolphins in zoos can talk to each other. Cure one or more types of cancer. Breed a horse that wins the triple crown. Found a religion that out-grosses Scientology and Mormons, combined. Repave all the highways in your state, and do a structural integrity assessment of all the bridges and overpasses, too. There are countless ways to spend a colossal pile of money.
How does one get control of so many resources with a finite and exhaustible amount of imagination?
It doesn't matter how they got rich; what matters is what they need to do going forward.
As they say, "past performance is not indicative of future results".
If the ultra-rich do not spend enough, they might begin to undermine the foundations of the economy. Then, if enough people can trace the apparent cause of their suffering to the wealth inequalities, they will start killing and/or looting rich people, possibly without regard to their individual conduct.
So by all means, if you think you're strong enough, go ahead and hoard ever increasing amounts of wealth, without limit. There's a distinct likelihood that your estates will never be besieged by hordes of starving peasants, and that you or your heirs will never be kidnapped for ransom (or revenge) if you ever attempt to travel beyond your own holdings, and that you will never be shaken down by corrupt officials. The less people perceive the systems of civilization to be fair, the less apt they are to respect its rules of conduct. It only takes one pissed-off person to make your life Hell, and there are 7 billion candidates out there just waiting for you to give them a good reason.
We got from the beginning of the industrial age to now by burning coal and oil. But if we continue to do so now, it is likely to eventually make the surface of the entire planet uninhabitable, rather than just Beijing. Responsible people have therefore been shifting to more technically advanced sources--such as wind, solar, hydro, and fission--to meet their power needs. In the same way, people who have grown so rich that they could buy anything they might possibly want must alter their habits to avoid poisoning their own environment.
1) Rich people not frivolously wasting enough of their wealth doesn't undermine economies;
2) The unwashed masses will never rise up against their uhpressors;
3) Rich people don't have some magical collective which solves the collective action problem; they act in their own interests on an individual basis, just like everybody else;
4) In the current regime, wealth is not power;
5) "Less" money, "fewer" dollars; one is continuous, the other discrete;
6) Nuclear is way cool, but coal isn't going to kill the planet;
7) The rich didn't get rich by frivolously buying everything they could possibly want, they got rich by saving and investing the vast majority of dollars that ever passed through their possession.
1. Megaprojects are not necessarily frivolous. Eradicating malaria, for instance, is not frivolous; it improves the lives of every human living on this planet. Bill Gates has my gratitude for even making the attempt possible.
2. History disagrees with you. Countries occasionally experience revolutions wherein the lower class murders a significant portion of the upper class (only to promote their own into the same social positions, whereupon they adopt similar behaviors). The unwashed masses may never exist long without a perfumed and shaved upper class, but they can certainly put a lot of bodies in the ground when they get the itch. For instance, look at the French Terror, or the Russian revolution, or the Khmer Rouge killing fields, or the Iranian revolution, or the Cuban revolution. Eating the rich tends to set back economic development by a decade or more, but that doesn't stop the lower classes from doing it.
3. Which is why there will be a lot of free riders on the coattails of those public figures that choose to pursue philanthropic projects. I'm sure that many of them lie about anonymously donating to charities.
4. Wealth and power are not equal, but they do have an exchange rate.
5. Thank you for the grammar reminder. Were you correcting someone upthread, or just mentioning it in case someone might get it wrong later?
6. Coal-burning won't kill the planet--it will just kill some of the humans on it, and maybe some unfortunate plants and animals that happen to live downwind or downstream from industrial zones. I still haven't forgotten the TVA Kingston ash slurry spill. I'm also inclined to believe that excessive burning of hydrocarbons for energy could trigger outgassing of polar methane clathrates, which would be an ecological disaster. It won't cause human extinction, but it will crater the global economy.
7. Is wealth a means to an end, or an end in itself? Of what use to the rest of humanity is the man who hoards without end, who fills warehouses to the brim and locks them away, never to be emptied? I don't care how the rich got rich. It doesn't matter to me whether they pulled themselves up out of the gutter by their own bootstraps, or whether they were lucky enough to be born rich. I only care about what you do with what you have.
For example assume that a new billionaire is minted by a lottery with 100 million people buying a $10 dollar ticket. Long term it's neutral but in the short term it effectively removes $1B in near term consumption from the economy and spreads it out over 100+ years.
On the other side a million people will likely better invest and sound a thousand dollars than one person will invest one billion.
But the new billionaire doesn't stuff her mattress with ten million hundreds. She buys investments, which go back into the economy. Or she puts cash in the bank, which goes back into the economy....
The money she collected from the lottery ultimately represent a call option on someone's future labor. After the lottery that call option has been handed to a single individual who may never make that call in her lifetime. The effect is similar to the coal mining town's company store where you can only buy what they sell at the price they set.
The effect is to concentrate economic activity in specific sectors where banks are willing to lend which means the economy is less flexible overall.
An economy with $1B of debt and $1B in savings spread over 10,000 people is going to be more diverse and resilient than 9,999 people who have $1B in debt and one person with $1B in savings invested in housing and car loans.
The best outcome would be if she invested in new equity in a company that created a positive ROI in excess of what the lottery ticket buyers would have produced. Anything else is a net negative.
At one point, something like 70% of GDP was consumption. It's less now.
This is fine so long as investments move. We have such a high degree of aggregation of capital now that it sort of doesn't. It's sort of ... pinned down in the light cast by the public markets.
Even mutual finds are just now coming of age, much less the things that were innovations on them.
I started to type out about how those investments need to eventually end up as a product on the shelf (metaphorically, B2B counts) to keep the supply/demand cycle going, but I don't think that's necessarily true. The money should end up as either all salary, or some salary and some product, but the salary gets spent so the supply/demand wheel keeps spinning.
If too much goes to salary than the investment stops making sense and the rich will hoard cash instead, but I don't think we're in that situation. Could that be why QE was pumping so much money into the economy with inflation staying low? I bet there are statistics about the amount of cash people and companies are hoarding now vs 50 years ago, but there's too many confounding variables for me to figure it out.
Most of the processes and governance on assets held by billionaires is on rails. They may have control at a very high level, but they then have to become public figures to increase that. Most billion dollar things are really 100 10,000,000 things aggregated - the way to a billion ( outside the option lottery ) is to do M&A to grow.
I've found the series to be incredibly uplifting as in it makes me feel positive. Sort of like ST:TNG, though with less holes (ST never really explains why so much stuff is so limited, beyond hand-wavy "energy" concerns).
It's a lovely picture of the future, assuming we have a really friendly AI explosion.
Same here. It's a nice notion to think about, but even if we could produce everything at the moment it's demanded, there is still spatial scarcity for goods and services - i.e. there are only so many ocean front homes near where my extended family lives.
Not true, think about a place where we are capable of building proper Dyson Spheres... Most "Culture series" humanoids (they're genetically modified for health reasons) live on very large artificial planets called Orbitals:
Positional goods scarcity exists in the Culture for e.g. a live concert featuring a famous composer. But there is no scarcity of anything desired for functional reasons. Nobody ever has to involuntarily go without clothing, companionship, food, shelter, medical services, beverages, life-saving or recreational drugs, games, recorded media, communications, information, or life. (People can be "backed up" as recorded information and molecularly re-manufactured later even if they were vaporized in an explosion.) The Culture is the much better society that the imaginary technology of Star Trek could enable if Trek's tech were unchained from stupidity and bioconservatism.
(I'm sure you know all this; I'm just elaborating for those who haven't sampled the delights of Banks' novels.)
So I have to move my entire extended family to an orbital? What if their demands aren't met there? You're missing the point about spatial scarcity and demand.
I'm guessing you've not read the series, because the context is seemingly entirely lost on you. Culture citizens are free to go anywhere they want and do literally whatever they want. Small orbitals are ~20x the size of earth whereas large ones are 200x the size of earth. Also, you can live on planets if you wish, but the idea is seen as very quaint and generally not a very "culture" thing to do.
When you can move literally anywhere in the galaxy, amongst virtually any galaxy that hyperspace ships can take you to, there isn't a scarcity of space and machines can create literally anything in this world on demand, so demand is also never a problem.
I think somehow we are misunderstanding eachother, but it makes it much harder to explain this VAST ecosystem when it does appear you might not have even read the series we're all discussing.
It's not dwelt on much, but to make this work requires restricting production of humans. The fictional mechanism seems to be a universal sense in the Culture that reproducing at more than mildly above the replacement rate is gauche and atavistic. Presumably it's nudges from the Minds keeping us collectively in bounds.
The 20 richest countries[1] in the world are already below replacement total fertility rate. Most of the top 50 are. And even now, in a rich country like the US, about half of pregnancies are unplanned. Birth rates would drop a lot if pregnancies were only possible when both partners consciously opt in.
Obviously the replacement fertility rate is going to be a lot lower in a society where people can live as long as they please and most choose centuries of life. But the Culture is also vastly wealthier than any real-life low-fertility nation. There's perfect birth control for both sexes and a general absence of destructive impulses among biological Culture citizens (due either to selection pressures or editing). I'd guess that the Minds don't need to nudge much if at all.
Having advanced that argument, I wonder if there is any consistent relationship between material prosperity and fertility. Would a weakly post-scarcity society[2] have higher or lower fertility rates than rich nations do today? There'd be none of the security-in-old-age pressures that drive high fertility in poor nations, but also none of the economic penalties to child rearing that discourage high fertility among the educated middle class in current developed economies.
[1] Ranked by nominal GDP per capita.
[2] A fully robotized productive economy, but we can't just gin up atoms and energy like in the fictional Culture. Also no FTL or teleportation. Real physics only. It's the Silver Plan of post-scarcity, as compared to the Culture's Unobtainium Plan.
There are sects in rich countries with fertility many times replacement. They're easy to overlook because they started tiny and it's only a few generations after the demographic transition. Lower birthrates in the general population only shorten the time to the new growth mode.
The Culture is not limited to biological rates of reproduction. That nobody ever sets off a human forkbomb is a collective choice, somehow.
Tyler Cowen's "The Complacent Class" seems to paint a picture of satiety. I haven't gotten my copy yet so perhaps I missed something. We may get stuck at 1990s desires, except for experience ( and consumption and experience don't share a lot of Venn diagram ).
If you go to places at high altitude, they literally sell compressed O2 in cans, at oxygen bars, etc.
It is not a requirement per se for you to survive in those environments, but boy does it feel good to get some O2 if you don't have enough red blood cells in your veins to get the oxygen your body needs to feel comfortable.
The same is true, IIRC, in Beijing, where clean air can be hard to come by.
I could not possibly think of a more poorly contrived "counterexample" than that. But perhaps it's sarcasm and the joke flew over my head - in which case have my apologies.
Why is it a poor counter-example? I thought it was a pretty good observation.
I suppose the only reason we don't usually experience air scarcity is because the ecosystem services of earth do a really good job providing it.
It's easy to imagine this not being the case. There is clean air scarcity in polluted cities, and of course in some space environments, air might be considered quite valuable and "hoarded".
Water scarcity and water use rights are totally a thing though.
I always get kind of agitated at the notion of post resource scarcity because if you took someone from 1000 years ago and dropped them into today they'd be amazed at how much everyone has. If everyone had 11th century desires but 21st century technology we'd be there. But we're definitely not. I sincerely doubt we ever will be.