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This concept has a name. Artificial Scarcity.
Yeah, scarcity is created artificially by people who don’t want to give their stuff for free to complete strangers.
or maybe by not taxing people who have made much more than they can consume (and deserve) in 10 lifetimes?
Ah, so it’s not that people should willingly give up their belongings. It’s that people with guns don’t forcefully seize their belongings from them.
We operate under the depression-era assumption that per-capita GDP is some kinda gold-standard metric for evaluating how well a country is doing economically. In reality per-capita GDP is just tracking the trash changing hands. We also overemphasize transactionality because of this. It’s somehow much better from an “economic perspective” to have everyone buying new shirts every week even if it’s the same people buying and then tossing the same fast fashion junk in the trash.
When you consider other metrics we could be judged by such as the OP is kinda pointing at here, our country looks way fucking worse on the leaderboard.
We ought to use the measures of the material conditions of our population to drive policy rather than how much currency has changed hands and how many worthless transactions have occurred.
Yeah that’s how Canada is pretending it’s not been in a recession for years. Out of control housing market has inflated the GDP on paper, when everyone else can basically go fuck themselves I guess according to the government
We don’t have a resource problem, we have a distribution problem.
Resources are constantly being wasted to accelerate the wealth transfer up the chain.
The first thing you say is absolutely correct but I have no idea what you mean by the second
Food being wasted instead of given out. Clothing slashed and tossed away. Housing boarded up and left vacant in the name of investing.
All in the name of maximizing sales and profit. Resources hoarded and wasted.
30% of the worlds resources would be sufficient to meet everyone’s needs if properly distributed.
But it’s not because corporations see a homeless man taking a sandwich out of the trash as a lost sale.
The problem is even if you do give away excess food, next growing cycle, you’ll still adjust to grow less. And there won’t be excess. So donating food is good, but it’s not a long term solution to the distribution problem. Same with houses and clothes and whatnot
Or in a resource based economy, production would be decided by the needs of the community at various scales and not driven by sales or profits.
I think the ideal is a system that provides UBI, Nutritious food distribution, needs based housing, universal healthcare, and job services that provide aptitude testing, training and placement.
If 30% can meet our needs, the other 70% should be sufficient to provide the system and framework and enough left over for consumption, luxury and still have room for meritocracy advancement.
What’s the current wealth distribution? 10% holding 85% leaving the rest of us 15% only half of the 30 we need.
I think that UBI and capitalism can be combined, in a specific way: UBI gives everything a person ever needs for survival and general wellbeing, but is boring. Money isn’t used for survival, but instead to purchase goods that are more suited to an individual’s interests. Instead of the Generic Dress #2 that everyone may order for free, you can spend money on getting a dress with polka dots, made of silk, and so forth.
Capitalism is really good at producing entertaining items, such as music, branded foods with a twist, or Pokemon cards. However, it utterly sucks at ensuring the wellbeing of people. Thus, we should separate the concepts of survival and luxury.
And people think it’s the fault of the poor that they don’t have enough :)
Nooo, how could that be. It’s the fault of the successful wealthy people who refuse to share their stuff for free with complete strangers.
That’s capitalism baybe. The expectation of infinite growth in a finite system based around the infinite sales of infinite products that have a price because they say they are finite.
That’s why people want to go to mars btw. Some people are economists/adventurers and can’t stand still. Doing business on Earth however starts to be more and more damaging as we’re exhausting the possibilities of healthy growth. That’s why it’s better to cease economic growth on earth and instead focus the “line must go up (at any cost)” people on Mars. Just my two cents from the ecological perspective.
except making mars even somewhat habitable is a centuries long undertaking, decades after decades of cost without even a glimmer returns on the horizon. The Line Go Up folks only talk about it because they’re delusional, not because it actually gives them what they want.
The point that stuck with me: making Mars habitable is so much more complicated than making Antarctica habitable
Yeah sure, it’s much more easy to colonize Mars than to do something about the Earth.
First, I agree with the general sentiment. However, there are some devilish details.
Take a look at some pictures of Gary, Indiana. It’s an entire city that’s been mostly abandoned since the collapse of the industry that built it. There are entire boarded up neighborhoods, and some quite fine large, brick houses where wealthy people used to live. It’s all just sitting there. I’m sure that Gary would love to have people start moving back in, and revive the city.
So, say Gary just eminent-domained all those properties, and said to America: you want a house? All you have to do is come, pick one, and move in. You live in it for 5 years, it’s your’s.
The problem is that it costs money to keep up a home. Home maintenance is stupid expensive, and most of these abandoned homes need repairs: new windows, new roofs, new water heaters, plumbing repairs, electrical repairs. Do you have any idea what a new window costs? And even if it’s sweat equity, and you’re able to repair a roof yourself, you still need materials. Where does this money come from?
Are the homeless in California going to move to Gary, IN? Are the homeless in Alabama? There are homeless employed folks, but they’re tied to their locations by their jobs. They’re not moving to Gary.
Finally, it’s a truism that it’s often less expensive to tear down a house in poor condition and build a new one than it is to renovate. If these people don’t have the money to build a new house, how are they going to afford to renovate a vacant one.
The problem is that people need jobs to live in a house (unless someone else is paying for taxes, insurance, and maintenance). And the places with jobs aren’t the places like Gary, that have a abundance of empty homes. All of those empty homes are in inconvenient places, where the industry and jobs they created dried up.
It may be that a well-funded organization could artificially construct a self-sustaining community built on the bones of a dead one. But I think it’s oversimplifying to suggest that you can just take an empty home away from the owner (let’s assume you can) and just stick homeless people in it and assume it’ll work - that, even given a house, they’ll be able to afford to keep it heated, maintained, powered, insured. Shit, even if you given them a complete tax exemption, just keeping a house is expensive.
I’m sure there are some minority of homeless for whom giving an abandoned home in the area they live would solve their problems. And I’m sure that, for a while at least, having a bigger box to live in would be an improvement for many, even if the box is slowly falling apart around them. But I think it’s naive to be angry about the number of empty homes, and that homelessness could be solved by relocating the homeless to where these places are and assigning them a house - whatever state it’s in.
The problem is that people need jobs to live
QFT
Don’t get me started on that one.
To compound matters, the US is currently moving all the new manufacturing jobs into southern red states, which will be interesting. Red staters are pissed because they are experiencing major cost of living adjustments, particularly in housing prices. Which is partly why they voted maga.
Brings to mind the barbecue speech
How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what’s intended for 9/10ths of the people to eat. The only way you’ll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub he ain’t got no business with.
I can’t believe this is my first time reading this. Thanks for sharing
american rhetoric: okay, imagine you have 10 steaks right?
man this man that. If I lived in the time people were all referred to as men I would probably go crazy and blow up the world.
We also dont have enough water, living on a enormous water planet. :)
Why so salty.
I dont think salt is an unsolvable problem. Its just that as usual, it needs to be profitable to solve it. Currently its just being used as a fake resource limitation. That problem would quickly be solved if humanity had to.
That problem would quickly be solved if humanity had to.
…and if humanity existed
People put electrolytes in their water and nobody batts an eye, but when I drink seawater everybody loses their mind
Shout-out to too good to go - an app that aims to minimize food waste by letting restaurants and grocery stores sell “surprise bags” of food at 1/3 to 1/2 off!
Good mythical morning has a few episodes featuring these!
My colleague brought us doughnuts from here today. She got them last night but they were still plenty fresh.
There’s a house on my way to work that’s vacant. I saw an ambulance there about two years ago; I’m betting that the owner died, because it’s now entirely overgrown, with weeds and grass completely overtaking the yard and driveway.
How many of the ‘empty houses’ are places that were abandoned and are in such disrepair that they’re not safe for habitation, and how many of them are places that are second houses and/or bank-owned rentals?
For reference, the house I live in right now was repo’d around 2010, and my partner and I bought it in 2018; it had been vacant for almost a decade, and required a lot of work, almost as much as it cost, to get it safe. And it still needs work; I need to shore up the floor that’s sagging, and the exterior walls need to be opened up from the inside and be fully sealed b/c I can feel breezes inside when it’s windy outside.
There’s no reason to believe that a formerly homeless person wouldn’t put in the effort on a house restoration project if given the chance to live in it permanently.
It is true that there will never be enough to satisfy the greediest among us. Unless there’s some kind of global revolution this will continue until the end
Wow, I didn’t like billionaires very much, but if the alternative is a global revolution, then I guess I can put up with billionaires.
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I keep wondering if we have reached or are on the cusp of a post-scarcity society.
Scarcity isn’t just about how much stuff there is, it’s also about how much access people have to stuff. So no, we sadly haven’t got there yet in my opinion
No I agree with the logistics of it. I meant to say the manufacturing and agricultural capacity we already have seems like more than enough.
Oh yeah, almost certainly. Apparently 1/3rd of food produced globally is wasted.
Title
I volunteer with a food suplus redistribution organisation and that’s the figure we use so although I don’t have a specific source, I’m inclined to believe it
An amount we cant even comprehend.
CONSOOOOOOOM
OBEY CONFORM SUBMIT
REDUSTRIBUUUUTE
We all lie to ourselves in various ways - like thinking we need a supercomputer in our pocket so we can see what’s trending while we sit on the toilet.
“The problem with the American economy is too many pocket computers”, I say while sitting on the toilet in the Bigger Bombs factory at Raytheon.
Yeah if somebody actually said that it would be dumb, and so is pretending they did.
I agree.
Economic growth on Earth is coming to an end, and it’s important to recognize it and deal with it properly. It doesn’t make sense to scare people into work by telling them “otherwise we don’t produce enough”. We do. Whether people work 60 hours a week or 20 hours. We should just recognize what we really need. Which is the right to self-determination.
