Creeping post-scarcity

It seems less sci-fi when it happens slowly

In an ancient episode of Star Trek, a cryogenically frozen man finds himself reanimated 300 years later aboard the starship.

He calculates that he must be rich by now because of compounding interest on his account, but is informed by bemused crew that money no longer exists as replicators can make anything you want.

He’s disappointed, even though materially he’s better off than he could have ever imagined.

The idea of post-scarcity is that mass production makes some goods so cheap that the old economics of scarcity makes less sense. More and more products become like salt water or air – you can have as much of it as you want.

It only seems like a whacky sci-fi idea if you focus on those items that are not yet post-scarcity.

In reality, we gradually began entering a post-scarcity world after WWII.

In 2025, across most of the world, many goods are so cheap that the main part of the price is the basic materials (much lower themselves), transport, retail costs and taxes.

For example, consider everyday items like buckets, mops, plates, mason jars, underwear, pillows and scissors.

Two hundred years ago, an average person might need to budget carefully in able to afford these items.

These days, unless you want something fancy, you don’t even think about it. They’re basically free.

When we budget, we mostly concentrate on items that still cost a lot of money. That is, which are pre-scarcity: housing, eggs, some electronics, air travel, legal advice, eating out, WiFi.

Within your own lifetime, you’ve probably seen some goods reach post-scarcity, or at least become less scarce.

I remember when my parents were weighing up buying a second-hand computer in about 1995. It was a huge expense for us, replacing the annual family holiday.

These days a laptop costs about the same in dollar terms despite inflation and is vastly more powerful and capable. That old 486 didn’t even have an internet connection.

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This trend is likely to continue. Even now, AI and robotics are giving birth to ‘dark factories‘ where they don’t even need to turn the lights on because there are no humans on the factory floor. Manufactured goods are going to become cheaper and cheaper as a proportion of our income, to the point that more and more of them will be things we don’t bother to budget for.

Even now, you can get an okay smartphone for $150.

As for services, did you read that article linked above? Looks like AI slop.

As AI gets better, it will hopefully be able to do more and more simple tasks that are currently very expensive. I’m hopeful that software will take care of a lot of accounting, medicine and so on.

At the moment your bank’s chatbot is useless and annoying, but they might get better.

I think people disbelieve in post-scarcity because the imagine an extreme version of it that might come in centuries, as in Star Trek.

For a more realistic vision of the foreseeable future, imagine instead that more and more things become very cheap.

The world in the 2040s will likely be one of expensive houses but very cheap things to put in them.

And given demographics, there’s hope even for house prices.

Let’s see.

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