3. This is a self-published thing by a blogger. It's doesn't even seem to be available as a book.
The author argues that there is a sufficiency of capital. He's a VC in San Francisco. From that perspective, there is more than enough capital, in that there's more money available than there are profitable investments to fund. This is an aspect of the webcrap/appcrap ecosystem - even the marginal niches have been filled.
The other side is the lack of a capability to do some obvious things and make money doing them. Such as building affordable houses. That's not about attention.
This comment is top rated yet misconstrues – in order to advance the author's values – both the argument and the context. Topically, Wenger is a partner at USV (Manhattan) and _The World After Capital_ was published as a Gitbook in order to be open source.
It is not intended to describe nor comment, politically, on the day to day of capital flows. Attacking it as such is a straw man argument at best and intellectually lazy at worst.
(If I have an economic position, it's perhaps close to Piketty. Although he draws on pre-industrial age statistics too much.)
My main criticism of this revolves around the question "what are we out of that limits society?". The author argues that capital is not scarce, which seems to be true for the US. He argues that attention is scarce, which is reasonable.
He then takes the big jump. He argues that attention is the primary limiting factor on, in some sense, "progress". That's where his argument goes bad. That limiting factor applies to a small part of the economy, but it's the part that gets much VC attention.
So what are we out of? This is a crucial question. I'm not going to try to propose an answer. But it's the right question to ask.
When something other than capital limits output, capital markets don't send the right signals to direct effort in useful directions. This leads to somewhat strange investments chewing up large amounts of capital. HN readers don't need examples of this.
I'd like to repeat someone's HN comment: what limits the (Western) civilization is the power of the collective intellect, the amount of effective thinking per day.
Attention is a proxy to it, rather imprecise but easy to measure.
A lot of our problems stem from the fact that we don't know how to tackle them. We have the money and the resources money can buy, but we don't have a clear idea. We keep thinking and trying stuff, but apparently not very efficiently, because practical results are few; often we don't even seriously do that. This applies to everything, from curing common cold to solving global warming. Profitable investment of any kind is among these problems.
I'd argue that for most of the "Big" problems (world peace, nuclear proliferation, pollution, climate change and providing food/education/healthcare to all) the problem can be summarized as "lack of collective will to make the changes required". It is pretty clear what we would need to do to drastically reduce carbon emissions for example, but almost nobody is willing to make the economic sacrifices required.
I would also argue that ideological entrenchment because of stifling debate (or vice versa) is a big problem. Lots of problems have solutions but are ideologically entrenched.
I think "collective will" is a red herring. Humans are what they have always been - gradient descent optimizers on a good day. Understanding of morality, a culture, the law - those are tricks we've developed over time to, sometimes, break us out of situations in which our natural behavior threatens our communities (and so is self-destructive on aggregate).
No, I think the common aspect of all Big Problems is that available solutions don't create equilibria. They're not stable. And we know they're not stable - most people do, if only on an instinctive level (our "social sense" is good at navigating these things).
That encompasses all the "lack of collective will" cases: people are aware that they're being asked to make an immediate and concrete sacrifice, in exchange for uncertain and abstract long-term gains - gains that won't accrue unless almost everyone makes that same sacrifice. Our gradient-descending minds rightfully figure there's no point. See [0] for a much longer discussion of this topic.
The point I'm making is that we should stop thinking about this as a moral failure, in the sense of "if only we had the collective will", as if almost everyone was lazy or heartless or stupid. On the contrary - the Big Problems persist because we know of no solution for them that can be implemented in context of our civilization - societies, cultures and laws[1].
The way I see it, we have following ways forward:
- Figure out different solutions, ones that form stable equilibria within our current social framework. This is the part where technology plays critical role - new technologies are a way to create new options.
- Transform our social framework into a one in which existing unstable solutions are stable. This is slow and hard work, involving changing laws and ultimately cultural norms. It ultimately means fighting our biology - not all social frameworks can be implemented on top of humans, and even for those that can be, there may not be a possible path from "here" to "there".
[1] - A good thought exercise to get a feel for it: imagine that we somehow found the "collective will" to solve one of the Big Problems. What mechanisms are there that protect people from being exploited at scale using the same collective-will-generating circumstances?
I mean sure, the root cause of "lack of collective will" is human nature. I was pointing out the cause, not bringing up a solution. I also don't blame people for being the way they are so I don't think a judgment about "moral failure" is in order.
I didn't mean to pass judgement on you, I apologize if it came across like this.
I just keep seeing laments about "lack of collective will" in many discussions about important problems, and those mentions tend to be thought-terminating in the sense they feel like discharging responsibility. And my point is - we'll never have "collective will". The big problems, the persisting problems, are such because their very nature prevents spontaneous coordination. If we could just find the will to tackle them, we would have already. So there's no point in even talking about "collective will" - we need to focus on solutions that don't need it.
(Or, we can just give up, enjoy what little time we have, and then watch the fireworks. They'll at least be interesting. I'm pretty sure many people think like that[0]. I myself thought like that in a darker period of my life, when I was deprogramming myself from the thought patterns instilled in me by an apocalyptic religion I grew up in - so I'm familiar both with how to blame the world's problems on "those masses of imperfect people" and how to protect your mind from going haywire over the belief that the world is in deep shit and you likely won't make it to the other end.)
--
[0] - If we only had the collective will to work on solutions not requiring collective will...
I tend to categorize this as a combination of three problems:
1. We don't have a single defining policy platform for our society. If the CCP puts out a detailed timeline to a zero-carbon China, they have all the economic and political levers they need to pull in one place. No person or group in the US has any comparable authority.
2. Because of this, western countries tend to be limited to piecemeal solutions that can fit into smaller scale budgets and timelines. We can sell one power plant at a time, rather than a clearly strategized 50 year rundown to zero emissions. That means a lot of either-or decisions (Solar or traditional nuclear or Thorium, not funding all three) and a lot of people who are fundamentally on the same side get caught in infighting and bikeshedding trying to compete for limited opportunities.
3. You're often dealing with a problem where the solution is "yeet the entrenched counterinterest."
The counter-interest group in 3) really just has to prevent you from doing anything to win, so it tends to encourage 2) as a cheap way to keep the opposition fractured.
Cures for diseases and cancers, people being not-poor, cities being clean and beautiful, a sustainable climate, equal opportunity for everyone, justice, kindness, not-having-war, not needing to work, etc...
Why can we only be "out of" toasters and toilets and not "everyone having an easily imaginable higher quality life"?
I get it that the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates is unlikely to give everyone a better life. That takes hard work and progress, something which cannot simply be bought by changing numbers on a spreadsheet.
But these could things could - theoretically - be financed! Most, probably not with VC.
I know very little about economics particularly the academic / theoretical side of it. You and Wenger here both seem to agree there is an abundance of capital (money?) and that's not the "limiting factor" at least in the US.
He writes
> When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce.
I don't really see how they are equivalent. Or actually I do they how they are equivalent but not in the way he writes.
For tribal chiefs, food probably wasn't scarce. For kings and lords, land was not scarce. For industrialists, capital was not scarce.
Wealthy people haven't just started doing strange things with capital as though they hadn't in the past with capital or land or food. Food wastage was a point of pride in elite society of the past, locking away vast amounts of productive land for private game parks, and investing wealth in all sorts of foolish ventures has been pretty common throughout history.
Yet all of those things were (and many still are) scarce for many people including in the US. So why do you say it's not, and what do you mean by "limits" of society exactly?
If a person can't buy a car or an education or a computer or tools or time to practice a new skill, then they can't work (or have less opportunity to) or they can't increase their productivity as much. Or they can't afford to have or put as much time and money into their children, which further limits society in the longer term.
I'm no collectivist, anti-capitalist, or social justice activist, I think inequality will always be here and it's our curse and our blessing. But surely we can't say capital is not scarce or doesn't matter so long as a significant number of people are limited by their own lack of it. Limited not just in entertainment and frivolous things but constructive wealth creating activities. Have I completely misunderstood the whole thing?
> For tribal chiefs, food probably wasn't scarce. For kings and lords, land was not scarce. For industrialists, capital was not scarce.
On the contrary, kings and lords were acutely aware of how much land they had and devoted much of their energy to amassing more. Likewise for tribal chiefs and food, and presumably likewise for industrial. They had more of it than others, sure, but it was scarce for them: it was the limiting factor on what they were doing.
> If a person can't buy a car or an education or a computer or tools or time to practice a new skill, then they can't work (or have less opportunity to) or they can't increase their productivity as much. Or they can't afford to have or put as much time and money into their children, which further limits society in the longer term.
Right, but at that individual level too, capital isn't really the issue these days. You can get a loan for anything, anyone can get a credit card. If someone wants to improve themselves, it's rarely capital that's the limiting factor - it's more likely to either be time, or something a bit more complicated.
lmm 1 hour ago | parent [–] | on: The World After Capital (2018)
>> For tribal chiefs, food probably wasn't scarce. For kings and lords, land was not scarce. For industrialists, capital was not scarce.
>On the contrary, kings and lords were acutely aware of how much land they had and devoted much of their energy to amassing more. Likewise for tribal chiefs and food, and presumably likewise for industrial. They had more of it than others, sure, but it was scarce for them: it was the limiting factor on what they were doing.
I'm sure that Bezos or Musk are also acutely aware of their capital, that does not mean that they have any scarcity.
>Right, but at that individual level too, capital isn't really the issue these days. You can get a loan for anything, anyone can get a credit card. If someone wants to improve themselves, it's rarely capital that's the limiting factor - it's more likely to either be time, or something a bit more complicated.
I think you seriously underestimate the difficulties that come with being poor. There are lots of studies that show that the primary problem with poverty is actually lack of funds. There have been many projects that showed that giving poor people money with no strings attached has higher success rates than anything else. Also your advice of getting loans or credit cards is quite unrealistic and shows you the cost of being poor. The loans that a poor person will get are essentially so expensive that the only thing they do is making them poorer.
> The loans that a poor person will get are essentially so expensive that the only thing they do is making them poorer.
One thing I haven't understood is the idea of charging high interest on poor debtors.
Conceptually the problem is simple. The debtor must repay the entire sum. What if the debtor is unable to do so? It would imply that the debtor is only able to repay the sum partially. But here is the problem. How does charging high interest help the debtor repay the loan? It doesn't. The only difference is that the bank gets the money sooner rather than later. You borrow $1000 and repay $800 and then default. -20% interest for one year. Clearly a bad loan.
The bank charges 30% interest on your credit card. You still only repay $800. The bank got your money sooner. So the only explanation for this is that the high interest rate discourages bad debtors (it clearly doesn't otherwise people would have stopped borrowing at a much lower rate like 10%) or there are people who can repay the debt even at excessive interest rates. They ask family or friends to chip in and a lower interest rate would not put enough pressure on people to take money from someone else.
Debtors aren't just divided into "can pay" and "can't pay", there's a huge category in there of "can meet the minimum payment required to avoid default (and potential legal problems) for a very long time".
There's other categories, but high interest debt (e.g payday loans) is targeted at that one: it locks them into a situation where they will nearly perpetually have to pay a small amount to the debt issuer, while their total debt rises.
The high rate is there to increase the probability that the debt will "lock on", even for small sums. This way, even if they manage to land a windfall someday, it often won't pay back the full interest owed, so they remain in debt and, crucially, making regular small payments upon which the debt issuer relies -- it's basically a SaaS model.
In this way, a person who just needed $200 once can end up paying $2500 over a multi-year period before somehow escaping or defaulting -- and that's why the bank does it, to maximize return.
The person who borrows $1000 but can only get back $800 ever is rare -- the person who can only get $1000 back over the course of 16 weekly payments of ~$60, and can somehow then go on to keep paying $60/week for another full year, is common.
They're not making money from the person who defaults (well, maybe if they default after a long series of payments). They're making money on average by lending to a lot of people, of which only a subset default. If you look like a bad risk, you pay more to subsidize all the people who also look like bad risks and will actually default.
> I'm sure that Bezos or Musk are also acutely aware of their capital
I'm not. I suspect they're paying a lot more attention to who they have working for them, their regulatory situation, particular projects....
Put it this way: when Rockefeller decided to build a new factory, his first question would've been "where's the capital coming from". When Bezos or Musk decide to build a new factory, what do you think is the first question they ask?
> There have been many projects that showed that giving poor people money with no strings attached has higher success rates than anything else. Also your advice of getting loans or credit cards is quite unrealistic and shows you the cost of being poor. The loans that a poor person will get are essentially so expensive that the only thing they do is making them poorer.
I wasn't giving advice. But I think your studies are taking a naïve approach - that kind of program inherently selects for the kind of person who gets access to that kind of program, which is immensely class-loaded.
> On the contrary, kings and lords were acutely aware of how much land they had and devoted much of their energy to amassing more. Likewise for tribal chiefs and food, and presumably likewise for industrial. They had more of it than others, sure, but it was scarce for them: it was the limiting factor on what they were doing.
So it's exactly the same as today's capitalists who have more than enough capital but keep amassing it.
> Right, but at that individual level too, capital isn't really the issue these days. You can get a loan for anything, anyone can get a credit card. If someone wants to improve themselves, it's rarely capital that's the limiting factor - it's more likely to either be time, or something a bit more complicated.
I find this could be a bit more credible than the "bay area venture capitalists blowing money on idiotic things therefore capital is post-scarcity" line of argument. Is it really true though? The median net worth of a person under 35 in USA the internet says is $14,000. How much of a loan is that kind of collateral going to get me if I'm clearly already living pretty much hand to mouth? Can I reduce my working hours, take the loan, and go to school? Or to start my own small business? What is the risk I'm taking on?
> So it's exactly the same as today's capitalists who have more than enough capital but keep amassing it.
Today's capitalists aren't focused so much on capital though. Stock buybacks are bigger than ever. Founders are happy to sell off huge portions of their ownership as long as they can keep control with super-voting shares, where the previous generation of industrialists would be happy to accept outside board members but wanted to make sure they kept all the profits. A decade ago the goal was to be a "serial entrepreneur" who would use their huge exit from one company (as it matured) to fund another, even more profitable one; now keeping control of a big company is a much bigger deal.
> Is it really true though? The median net worth of a person under 35 in USA the internet says is $14,000. How big of a loan is that kind of collateral going to get me if I'm clearly already living pretty much hand to mouth? Can I reduce my working hours, take the loan, and go to school? Or to start my own small business?
My sense (and I don't have evidence) is that getting a loan for study or business is easier than ever before (though reducing your working hours might not be).
> What is the risk I'm taking on?
Being trapped in debt you can't repay is always possible, but it feels to me like the biggest risk would be derailing your career and not being able to get back into it. A side effect of the disappearance of middle class jobs is that there's no way to work your way up from the mailroom any more, so if you do have a stable career-track job then there's a strong argument for clinging onto it as hard as you can. For those who are already on the wrong side of the line that's a much weaker argument though.
> Today's capitalists aren't focused so much on capital though. Stock buybacks are bigger than ever. Founders are happy to sell off huge portions of their ownership as long as they can keep control with super-voting shares, where the previous generation of industrialists would be happy to accept outside board members but wanted to make sure they kept all the profits. A decade ago the goal was to be a "serial entrepreneur" who would use their huge exit from one company (as it matured) to fund another, even more profitable one; now keeping control of a big company is a much bigger deal.
Seems like a lot of handwaving and arbitrarily picking parameters to fine tune your proposition. Let's step back and look at the big scheme of things.
Food has always been scarce for some and plentiful for others. Same as land. Same as capital. And there have always been some people who have enough or more than they need who have a drive to amass even more, but that does not mean they have a shortage of it. And inversely if they don't try to horde more of a particular resource or asset that doesn't mean that asset is post-scarce for society as a whole.
I'll put it a different way, are you just trying to create such a specific definition that you can manage to fit it into? Then what's the point? it doesn't usefully say anything as far as I can see.
If you can support an argument which says practically everyone has plentiful cheap and easy access to capital via loans then that would be saying something. And if you can do that then you don't need these flimsy examples of food in prehistoric times or the behavior of wealthy elites to prop up your argument at all, do you?
> My sense (and I don't have evidence) is that getting a loan for study or business is easier than ever before (though reducing your working hours might not be).
Quite a journey remaining to get from there to "capital is not scarce or limiting for society", though.
Less than 20 years ago we had the credit markets almost cease functioning, major banks collapsed almost taking the banking sector with them, hundreds of thousands of home owners being unable to service their loans and were foreclosed. In my layman's understanding a major cause of this was undervaluing the cost of loans. Things have changed since then of course, but these industries and environments are very cyclical. Similarly, just because you kill a woolly mammoth or have a bumper harvest does not mean your society has been liberated from food scarcity problems.
But even ignoring recent massive failures of capital markets and just looking at the situation now, I'm still pretty skeptical of the assertion that anybody can get easy plentiful access to bank loans. People without much collateral or high incomes or steady work history get hit with extreme costs and harsh terms on loans if they can get them.
> Food has always been scarce for some and plentiful for others. Same as land. Same as capital. And there have always been some people who have enough or more than they need who have a drive to amass even more, but that does not mean they have a shortage of it. And inversely if they don't try to horde more of a particular resource or asset that doesn't mean that asset is post-scarce for society as a whole.
Sure, so you can say that everything is scarce - because for any given thing there will surely be one person for whom that thing is scarce. But that has no explanatory power. If we want to talk about what's scarce for society as a whole, looking at what most elites and most everyday people focus most of their attention on takes sense.
> Less than 20 years ago we had the credit markets almost cease functioning, major banks collapsed almost taking the banking sector with them, hundreds of thousands of home owners being unable to service their loans and were foreclosed. In my layman's understanding a major cause of this was undervaluing the cost of loans. Things have changed since then of course, but these industries and environments are very cyclical.
I completely agree with this, but it's worse (or better) than cyclical - the 2008 financial crisis was a small bump in the road that we've kept travelling down. Mortgages, subprime mortgages, subprime debt, indebtedness... take any measure you like, there's now more of it than in 2008. There's just so much capital sloshing around the system looking for anywhere to go.
> On the contrary, kings and lords were acutely aware of how much land they had and devoted much of their energy to amassing more.
Just because I want more of something, it doesn't mean that something is scarce, human desire is infinite.
There was this crazy Elon Musk of dark projects of the Cold War, can't remember his name, that collected his piss in jars, it doesn't mean piss is scarce.
"Land" means different things to peasants or lords, just like capital does today.
Land for common folks was scarce -- and it meant that thing that can produce food for you -- the lord did not have any problems with food.
The lord did not want more land because he was hungry, but because it meant more wealth and people, making him more likely to be able to defend himself against other lords.
The same with capital today.
Capital might be plentiful for some people who are closer to the printing press, but not for others.
> ...say people who are on the blessing side of inequality.
This isn't an argument I'm afraid.
> Note: I am on the blessing side as well. I have no experience whatsoever about what it means to suffer from inequality.
Yes you do.
Not everybody who is less well off than you live a life of misery and unhappiness and desperation. There would even be many very poor people who have happier and more fulfilling lives than you do I would wager.
There are always fields with too much money. Moneyed interests decide they will spend N Billions on area X, N is decoupled from any technical assessment of X’s ability to absorb N. In such a case the productive assets will become exceptionally valuable, but an on the ground observer might notice that the money isn’t going to come back.
Thanks for the summary. I think it's a bizarre position to be in yet recall around 2018 there were a numerous people waxing post-scarcity optimism, such as James Burke (of the tv series Connections): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09jvfc4 .
Affordable housing is a jobs problem. If you could take your job anywhere then the idea of "unaffordable" housing wouldn't even make sense. Location is a monopoly and it derives its powers from many things, for most people it is simply the availability of jobs.
Affordable housing is a jobs problem when there is enough land or enough movement in the market of existing housing. In the Netherlands it a space issue (build on farmland or build in Nature?) and an environmental issue (we need to reduce nitrogen emissions and it's blocking new developments).
I was thinking of urbanization. Everyone is moving where the jobs are. If there are good jobs in your home town you wouldn't have to move in the first place. What we get is huge mega cities and empty towns.
Here we see prices shooting up for rural towns as well. Covid re-introduced people to their homes, and some liked more space. Combine that with only having to be in the office 1-2 days a week and the commute is much less important.
Rural in the Netherlands means a commute of 1+ hr. by car instead of 20 min by bike, perhaps important for the perspective.
I read the first few sections, and I'm not a fan. In the author's defense however, he defines capital to mean only physical capital. It doesn't make sense why he'd pick that definition, but there it is.
I'm not an economics expert, but I suspect this is because "existence of capital" and "access to capital" are quite different.
Put another way, abundant capital exists, but sadly it is disproportionately concentrated and not that readily available to the masses, so demand-pull inflation inevitably kicks in.
I haven’t read the whole thing but the premise and how its summarized by you is something Marx predicted and observed thoroughly hundreds of years ago.
I'm certain nowhere in Marx is the term "post scarcity". If that's what he really meant, then it should be easy to demonstrate that with a paragraph or so. Otherwise one could take any good outcome and insist that Marx already predicted it.
It’s honestly really hard to tell if you’re engaging in good faith here. If you really are, I’d direct you to the Grundrisse. Marx specifically explains that as industrialization continues more and more parts of the economy become automated which (should) free up labor to pursue other things like art and science.
Yes it is true that he didn’t literally use the phrase “post-scarcity” but there has been 200 years of academic development on these works since then and I don’t regard this simpler way of discussing the concept as controversial, especially since this is a social media thread and not an academic paper.
> We need to figure out how to live in The World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention.
This is fundamentally confused. If there were no scarcity of any kind other than attention, it wouldn't matter what we paid attention to. In reality, there are many things that remain scarce, and this is precisely why directing our attention and effort matters. Same as it's always been, really.
The mindset that the modern world is all about competing for scarce attention is what you get when you've been breathing the indoor air in the adtech or other promotional industry for too long. Some people don't have food, others don't have access to education, and most don't have access to the best of the things they need or want.
The other fundamental flaw is that post-scarcity is impossible, in that scarcity itself is paradoxically in huge demand. And human nature will create scarcity out of thin air where none naturally exists.
NFTs, original art, first editions, exclusive neighborhoods, trendy fashion.
Even judgmental aspects of society and things like activism & wokeness are basically examples of post-scarcity markets: social acceptance and personal status becomes a market of artificial scarcity in supporting the trendy causes, of which there's no limits on supply, since it's basically the abstract support of an idea. Once everyone's on board with the old-new cause, a new-new cause becomes unique and trendy, and early "possession" of the new cause is the new status symbol, as long as the artificial scarcity holds.
These cycles endlessly repeat precisely because there's no scarcity in trendy ideas, just a lag time. But there are always people who want to judge and be judged based on the trendy possessions, even if those possessions are intangible ideas and values/virtues.
Post-scarcity is generally understood with regard to material necessities, not everything. A future where coolness is the only scarcity would be a massive success.
I'm not so sure- look at how important social connections, status symbols, and power become in places that are already universally wealthy.
Value starts to be put in things that by definition require scarcity: exclusive neighborhoods, fancy restaurants with hard to get reservations, concierge doctors, private vacation spots, vip type shopping where the store is only open for you, private club memberships, social-political connections
Even most nimby-ism is a form of this.
Plus anywhere people are willing to pay higher prices specifically because of who can't afford them. From fancy grocery stores to 1st class airplane seats to golf courses to "VIP status" of clubs to fast-passes/extended-hours at theme parks.
> We need to figure out how to live in The World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention.
There's a sense in which this statement embodies the fulcrum of the liberal/conservative divide. The liberal outlook is that scarcity is a largely solved problem, a historical artifact if only we had the political will to distribute resources intelligently. The conservative outlook is that scarcity is real, immediate, inherent in the structure of the world, and at best separated from us by a few days of disaster or revolution.
If you believe the former, you can start preparing for a world after capital, because capital has little point without scarcity. If you believe the later, the former program sounds like a formula for the manufacture of scarcity.
There's another perspective that takes parts of both: we're a lot less likely to have a few days of disaster and revolution, and get through it faster and better if it happens, if the maximum number of people have what they need to survive. Think of how many people die because they can't afford to evacuate ahead of a hurricane (if there's enough warning to begin with), or suffer greater loss because they can't afford a home built to a sufficient standard. Guillotines look a lot less friendly under a less precarious lens.
So who are these people that take the "both" perspective because that does not represent the conservative ideology at all -- which is based upon "personal responsibility" aka you get what you deserve. There is no call from conservatives for government intervention to make the poor less vulnerable.
Personal responsibility is just a convenient excuse for selfish behavior. It's about constructing an elaborate story about why you shouldn't or don't have to help other people.
When you just throw out "personal responsibility" people stop thinking about the topic from a problem solving perspective and instead think about it from a moral perspective.
It's especially true when people call each other lazy. Most of the time they are the ones who are too lazy to figure out the real problem. For example. Just assume everyone has a credit card. Then you can blame people for taking pay day loans. The real problem is that they don't have a credit card meanwhile everyone will tell you an elaborate story how stupid you are e.g. for not having friends that lend you money.
> people stop thinking about the topic from a problem solving perspective
Individual rando citizens shouldn't be the ones "thinking about" infrastructural problems. That's what government and experts are for.
> Just assume everyone has a credit card
Not everyone who has a poor credit score/rating is stupid/irresponsible/to-blame, but I'm sure the majority are. But the majority will probably also claim to be blameless.
The problem is there are two problems - the major one is the irresponsible. The minor one is the unfortunate. But protecting yourself from the irresponsible usually distancing yourself from the unfortunate as well. That said, most of the unfortunate you are likely to meet are at least a little irresponsible too, confounding the issue.
Most people are irresponsible in some way, but the consequences scale exponentially with misfortune in countries without a functional social safety net. The vast underclass this creates is what leads to the revolutions feared upthread.
Someone who spends $10 on a lottery ticket because he doesn't understand what $10 can become or believe he can do better is no more irresponsible than the rich person who tips the $500 change in his pocket because he doesn't understand money anymore, but the latter is not likely to face any consequences for long enough that it probably won't matter.
It's arguable that those who live with high risk (no safety net) need to therefore be less irresponsible.
I'd argue revolution in these environment happen less due to the irresponsible poor, but rather the irresponsible bureaucrats whose corruption allows them this behaviour.
> Someone who spends $10 on a lottery ticket..
I don't think measures of "irresponsible" are independent of consequences. If the consequences are low, is it no longer (personally) irresponsible since that take into account the results. On the contrary, the most irresponsible acts are those that are small or easy, but of great consequences - such as agreeing to a high-interest loan.
AFAIC someone wasting money they can afford to waste is not irresponsible, they are just wasteful.
I wasn't talking in terms of some vague "conservative," whatever that means in this age of failed coups led by, participated in, and defended by self-described conservatives in positions of power and influence.
There are things that lead to disasters and revolutions. There are differing circumstances that lead to better or worse outcomes in these situations. Whatever ideological lens goes in front of that is not my concern or business as long as its aims are pro-social and inclusive. I care about good outcomes, who experiences them, and who doesn't.
It doesn't matter if scarcity is "real" or not, because human's always create it where it doesn't already exist.
Which is why any post-scarcity argument will eventually boil down to either "You don't really want that" or "here's a separate but equal replacement" or "nobody can have it".
You're absolutely correct but how much scarcity impacts you depends on how high the scarce thing is up the hierarchy of needs. There is not an infinite amount of monopolies that ruin your day. There are maybe three important ones. The monopoly of money, land and patents. There are probably a thousand others but they just don't matter that much.
The cost of making goods is extremely cheap and will only go down as the cost of energy decreases. This is not an ideological statement.
ETA: HN says I am replying too quickly.
here is my reply to the replies: argue against what I wrote. I said the cost of making goods is going down. Not that rare things will no longer exist. And I certainly did not speak to arbitrarily valued things like baseball cards (lol?) and "numbered art".
Who even cares? That's not remotely in the realm of discussion. No one said lowered energy costs will increase the existence of Kanye West signatures.
The point is the price of goods is going down. It means higher per capita production output. That is the only thing I said. That means cheaper houses. It means cheaper consumer goods. Not "nothing rare will ever exist again" or even "nothing will ever be scarce" -- it means the things we need to survive are no longer resource or labor gated, they are closed off as an act of political will.
If you want, make two different currencies. Some basic gov't scrip for necessities - housing, food, shelter, closing, and you can use BTC or whatever for your rich people shit and pay as much as you want for collectible shoes or whatever catches your fancy.
People will largely not care because they won't be literally starving and dying from lack of access to physiological necessities.
>If you want, make two different currencies. Some basic gov't scrip for necessities - housing, food, shelter, closing, and you can use BTC or whatever for your rich people shit and pay as much as you want for collectible shoes or whatever catches your fancy.
If everyone has equal or unlimited rent money, then the apartment goes to who ever pays asking price (or rent controlled price) plus gifts the cosplaying landlord the "collectable shoes".
That "rich people shit" becomes the differentiating factor in otherwise equal cash prices/offers. It's inseparable.
How does the "two forms of currencies" currently work out for things like EBT/SNAP benefits or section 8 housing? Scarcity doesn't disappear, it just gets shifted to other mechanisms besides cash.
>People will largely not care because they won't be literally starving and dying from lack of access to physiological necessities.
We've been beyond that in the US for a while now, to the point of obesity epidemic.
Free education, free school meals, free home and weekend meals, free SNSP/EBT on top of free school meals, free health insurance, free housing vouchers, free phones/data,
Any necessities not being met in the US today is due to neglegent parenting, not lack of resources.
> Any necessities not being met in the US today is due to neglegent parenting, not lack of resources.
The data doesn't lie: there is still childhood hunger and homelessness in the US.
You can play the blame game and say the parents should do a better job of navigating a clunky and hostile bureaucracy, but while we're doing that, children are going without food and shelter. Is that an outcome we're willing to accept so we can point our fingers and say the parents were wrong?
Unique items. Real estate. Numbered artwork. Baseball cards. Antique cars. Transferable automatic weapons. Anything anyone ever bought because of who the previous owner was.
How's the supply of beach-front houses doing, relative to the demand? If the cost of energy decreases, are we going to have more of them?
Some kinds of scarcity can be solved by cheap energy. Not all can. (I suppose that the kinds that are needs instead of wants are more likely to be solvable with cheap energy.)
The SEC public disclosures are hilariously blunt on how just one of a handful autonomous rulers could have a spontaneous change of heart that would effectively tank the company.
This ignores another resource - power. Power is built in to all resources, to the degree that you can deny resources to others.
If resources are distributed they won't stay that way. Hence you can really "distribute" them freely, but rather "allocate" whereby some authority maintains the distribution, and hence has control over the resource in some capacity.
From that perspective, lack of scarcity is never guaranteed to exist because equal distribution is not guaranteed to persist, without intervention at least.
It's also a (conservative?) idea that control of resources is what binds society in terms of motivation. that co-dependence is actually a good thing. At the very least, even though I don't agree that society couldn't exist without scarcity, I do agree that:
- current society is built on scarcity, and won't seamlessly transition to a viable post-scarcity just because you remove scarcity.
- American society is dependant of tribal power-struggles more than most, and hence will fare even worse.
- Many nations are not so abundant that they are too far from scarcity. Without long-term planned fail-safes, small disasters can bring it right back. Governance is mostly hands off - citizens are left to themselves, which is why most think in terms of self-preservations.
> The root premise of free market (with transparency and regulation) is [...]
I'm not aware of the existence of such a free market, properly regulated, outside of liberal economics textbooks. The claim that free markets are intrinsically efficient is based on unsupportable assumptions about the behaviour of "economic agents" (i.e. individuals).
Incidentally, this notion of a "free market (with transparency and regulation)" appears to be a contradiction in terms. If the market is subject to rules, then in what sense is it free? What kinds of regulation are consistent with the market's freedom? There must be some kinds of regulation that would render a market non-free; for example, rules on who can own a business. Can you regulate press ownership in a free market? Is there such a thing as a person that is "unfit" to be a company director?
Most of the modern world's scarcity comes from norms both legal and social. The idea that someone can own a warehouse full of goods or large sections of land and be able to leverage the power of state violence to prevent others from utilizing those resources even if they never do is the central problem that plagues our civilization. We're great at producing stuff but we're terrible at assigning it or allocating it because someone has to 'own' the things in question.
>If you believe the former, you can start preparing for a world after capital, because capital has little point without scarcity. If you believe the later, the former program sounds like a formula for the manufacture of scarcity.
Where is the middle ground? The capital is the source of abundance. You need to maintain and take care of it. Neither side is willing to do that. The liberals will neglect it resulting in scarcity. The conservatives will destroy it because they can't handle abundance.
Zimbabwe had liberal land reforms that neglected doing actual farm work.
The conservatives will abolish farm subsidies to prevent overproduction of grains because they believe the extra labor can be used on something more productive. Then a drought hits and you don't have enough food.
Where is the middle ground? Build and create capital but also let it stay idle if its not needed rather than dismantling it.
The author needs to spend some time in one of the many economic wastelands of the world. Many forms of material scarcity are just around the corner as the consequences of global warming start become apparent. Add to that stupid exercises such as Brexit and you now have additional, real economic scarcity due to an exodus of European skilled labour. Scarcity of attention doesn't come into it.
Ford paid his workers decent wages so that they could afford to buy his cars. Low pay leads to economic ruin in the long run - a fact the UK is now waking up to.
The author narrowly defines "capital" as the context of the argument:
"... industrialization shifted scarcity from land to capital (which throughout The World After Capital refers to physical capital, such as machines and buildings, unless otherwise noted)."
Seems a lot of comments here assumes the broader definition of "capital", just want to point out...
>When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce.
as a result we have people who are hungry, don't have land nor capital.
>With digital technologies scarcity is shifting once more.
definitely. In addition to concentrating material wealth, real estate and capital, the elite is also getting digital power over the rest of us. That digital power, i.e. lack of it, is that new scarcity. You're watched, tracked, predicted, scored, etc. while you're completely powerless over it.
Made it past the intro. His ideas are debatable; however, I'm gonna go a bit ad-hominem here: why do we tend to put rich and smart in the same box? Increasingly, I see guys who 'made it' (maybe sheer luck or timing) being cast as authorities on solving the world's problems. Is it because cash is king?
Braindead bourgeois horseshit from a venture capitalist without any social or philosophical foundation. It's not even a book, just a bunch of half-formed drivel.
Fundamentally, the problem is that he believes that capital is _real_, that it is a tangible "thing" which humanity has now produced enough of, and not a _measurement_ of how authority flows. The fact that people in Flint don't still don't have access to clean water is a perfect example of this, which he brings up, though bizarrely to support his moronic idea that there is enough capital already, so then maybe we can keep our social structures the same but feel good about it by giving some small pittance to the trampled masses at the bottom.
Gave this a brief skim, and it's paradoxically both highfalutin and often times plain wrong at the same time.
> Computers are universal machines. I use this term in a precise sense: anything that can be computed in the universe can in principle be computed by the kind of machine that we already have, given enough memory and time
Yeah, this precise sense is precisely wrong. There are plenty of things computers can't do (and will never be able to do), including (probably) be conscious (see Searle), but maybe even more difficult to swallow, generally compute entropy[1], or compute the spectral gap[2].
I haven’t looked at the book, but I don’t interpret that quote to mean computers “can do anything” which seems to be your interpretation. Your second link, for example, seems to be about the undecidability of some problem. The author’s quote clearly refers to computable problems so this undecidable problem is not under discussion here.
And I’m sure the author could be both highfalutin and plain wrong a lot, but you just picked a poor exemplar.
I don't know why people cite Searle. The "Chinese Room Metaphor" is the only real reason people cite him, and it has such clear and obvious flaws that I suspect the only reason it got any attention at all is that it's fun to poke holes in.
His point is probably along the lines of "any machine emulating a Turing machine can compute all computable functions." Which of course doesn't mean that there aren't uncomputable functions.
I would argue the opposite, that the limiting factor of progress actually IS capital at the moment - but not capital in a total-floating-around-sense, but rather how much capital the average person has access to.
Literally everyone is talking about the pandemic-induced economic crisis all the time now, about how businesses are going under, minimum wage workers are walking off and looking for better pay, people are losing their homes because they can't make rent/mortgage. The $15/hr argument is still ongoing, the student debt crisis is mentioned often, and most of all the housing affordability crisis, specifically the growing awareness in the media and homeowning public that minimum wage is not enough to pay for a median 1-bedroom rental in almost 100% of counties in the USA.
All of these stories of the current moment have a common theme: the people in question don't have enough capital.
So maybe the author of this article was living in a bubble back in 2018 - many of the things I mentioned were just as true 3 years ago as they are today, but since the mainstream of boomer homeowning voters was doing ok we never heard about the millions of Americans who were working two 8/hr jobs and barely making it. Hopefully the present reality has relieved the author of their delusions.
The author has clearly never been to or is unfamiliar with the many developing nations currently being over-exploited by Wall Street and global finance capitalists.
Or even post-industrial America, where they've come and gone with their big bag of plunder.
2. Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788996
3. This is a self-published thing by a blogger. It's doesn't even seem to be available as a book.
The author argues that there is a sufficiency of capital. He's a VC in San Francisco. From that perspective, there is more than enough capital, in that there's more money available than there are profitable investments to fund. This is an aspect of the webcrap/appcrap ecosystem - even the marginal niches have been filled.
The other side is the lack of a capability to do some obvious things and make money doing them. Such as building affordable houses. That's not about attention.
This guy may be in a bubble.