The “work” expands to fill the available time. Just as it was almost unfathomable for most to consider that the entire financial sector was a naked emperor, it is very difficult for people to realize that what 99% of humanity does for “work” contributes nothing to the physical life support systems we all enjoy. There is, and never has been an incentive or motivation problem. You don’t incentivize human creativity, you merely enable it. Try ordering someone to produce a scientific breakthrough or an artistic masterpiece. Try raising pay and be amazed as an equivalent rise in output does not follow. All that is needed is the basic prosperity and freedom to pursue what is intrinsically worth doing. The process and the outcome is its own award–recognition is nice, but an after-affect of a job well done. People often think that paying teacher’s higher salaries will help education–you could never compensate them enough for having to work in our broken school system. The solution is not paying teachers more or reforming schools, but demolishing the institution of “school” in favor of life-long peer learning webs. F/OSS has just emerged as a baby example of a new mode of production vs the system we’ve been stuck with for a couple hundred years. There may be ultimate limits on creativity/time/attention/cognitive bandwidth. With brain-computer interfaces and other forms of intelligence amplification, perhaps we can roll these back. If the F/OSS model can coordinate Linux, with 30 million lines of code, it can certainly spread to the application layer and be generalized for many sorts of products. In fact, this is happening with an explosion of user-driven innovation communities pioneering open manufacturing practices. There is no reason these products must be of low quality–in many ways it is a return to the past of cottage industries before Fordism became ascendant. We don’t use 90% of the planet’s human capabilities because 2/3rds of the population lives in poverty. Creativity and ability is abundant and widely distributed on this planet. We suffer from a US-centric, Harvard mentality, as if there could be a monopoly on talent. The sooner this myth is exposed and we empower the untold masses of problem solvers waiting in the wings by building a technological architecture of participation–the sooner you can quit your day job.

The goal of abundance studies is to figure out 1) How to technologically obsolesce scarcity where physically possible. 2) How to solve allocation problems where they persist. Solving allocation problems does not require a govt coordinating mechanism–on the contrary; super cheap technologies will allow owner/users to “prosume,” contract, and coordinate together to an unprecedented degree to solve problems via mutual aid–just how a supposedly free market should work. In this sense, its not a total rejection of classical economics, but an implementation of a really free free market for the first time in history (see Carson, free market/anti-capitalism).

If you need to allocate something, then there is scarcity somewhere.

Economics will change the models they use, but it will just be what gets optimized on.

Healthcare will probably be one of these situations, because it will keep improving for a long time. As now, in the future the development of new developments will be funded by the cost of current ones. ( So we will optimize on time-for-good-developments).

I disagree; much as the field of physics is in the process of adapting to the recent theoretical alterations demended by the work of Mills, et al at Blacklight Power, the field of economics will have to re-emphasise certain aspects of theory over currently more prevalent concepts, but not be replaced outright. There will always be local examples of scarcity to contend with and remediate, hopefully they will be fewer and of decreased duration in future but they’ll still need to be contended with.

The other dilemma is social. Economists and others social scientists have demonstrated that for many individuals the bigger motivator is not gain or possession- but differential gain or differential possession. Yes I want food and shelter and a flying car. But more importantly, I want more food, more shelter and a faster flying car than you.

We also have to realize that with an underlying paradigm like scarcity, it affects almost every aspect of how we organize our lives and society, in ways we are not even consciously aware of. We tend to visualize a change in one dimension taking place against a backdrop with everything else being held relatively constant, which makes the path look impossible. (I think this is a problem with much future forecasting in general–we have trouble seeing how all the components are going to interact, though it can be obvious in hindsight.) Moving to a paradigm of abundance will have to come incrementally as people see the changes happen and feel more secure about what they need to own or compete for.

The entire field of economics has to do with allocating scarce resources, so we probably need a completely new field to address abundance (“abundomics” anyone?). I think that Joseph’s work will be important to help identify frameworks, trends and concepts, to make us more conscious of how the scarcity paradigm affects our thinking on a wide range of issues, and to give us something to aim for as we make incremental decisions along the way. I wish him luck and look forward to hearing more from him in the future!

Executive summary; it’s hard to talk specifics without examples to measure and test, and Mr. Jackson is in impressive company as to a lack of suggestion(s) regarding implimentation strategies.