FastForward Radio — The End of Scarcity

By | February 4, 2009
8 Comments

Tonight Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon talk live with futurist Joseph Jackson. How do we prepare for a world in which scarcity has been eliminated?

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About our guest:

Joseph.jpeg Joseph Jackson is a philosopher and social entrepreneur. A graduate of Harvard College AB (Government 2004) and the London School of Economics Msc (Philosophy of Science 2005), he has been studying Open Source and user innovation as a subset of the emerging political and economic phenomenon of Peer Production (P2P), since the “Napster Revolution” of 2000. Working at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, he analyzed these themes in the context of Digital Media, before moving to Australia as a visiting academic to observe the workings of a non-profit research institute attempting to pioneer Open Source principles in bio-agriculture. He now leads the Network for Open Scientific Innovation, a 501(c)3 organization and distributed think tank with partners in Brazil and Australia, coordinating a variety of research seeking to promote the emergence of Open Source models in the life sciences.

  • Edward

    First comment!

    I haven’t heard the program yet, obviously…. but Joseph is right!

    that is all.

  • MDArling

    AND it would appear we are chat-less tonight

    post here- or at Facebook in the Speculist group

  • http://heybryan.org/ Bryan

    Could you guys please let me off the queue? :-)

  • https://blog.speculist.com Phil Bowermaster

    Whoa, sorry about that Bryan. We were flying blind last night!

  • Mark Plus

    Buckminster Fuller discredited himself with his doomsday warnings 40 years ago that we had only a decade from the 1960′s to fix things “or else.” (He even gave one of his books the apocalyptic title, Utopia or Oblivion.) He way underestimated man’s ability just to muddle through. His inventions leave a lot to desire as well. I don’t understand why he still has a cult following.

  • dantealiegri

    I think this look at post-scarcity is pretty off, and I feel like you were feeling that way too Phil.

    Here is my explanation: We are not reaching the end of scarcity. We are reaching the end of scarcity of physical goods (At best).

    Creativity, Engineering ability, ( and if the market remains, Marketing ability ) – just general human mental power, will still be a scarce good, and thus will remain as a driver of the economy.

    To wit: say you do have a stipend. Would you rather buy a poorly designed item, or a well designed item? At a given price point, you would rather take the well designed one, thus those that are good at that will still remain valueable. People will still pay for that. This will then still drive people to do things they don’t particularly want to do. Although, it may be the case that people that don’t love design and engineering won’t do it.

    The other major issue I had was with Joseph’s notion that people today are not doing, for the major part, work that is required. ( I think that was his word?).

    His example of the airbase, I believe was part of this. That is a bad example because he was just making an example of what happens when you take things out of the economy, not that things are just wastes of time.

  • http://www.scribd.com/doc/11799713/A-Message-to-Proponents-of-the-Abundant-Society Sally Morem

    I was extremely annoyed with Joseph Jackson. So annoyed that I wrote an essay in response and posted it on Scribd. Below is an outtake from the essay. I posted the URL to the full essay on your comment form. It’s several days later and I’m still annoyed.

    Grrrrrr!

    “It makes no sense whatsoever to blame ‘evil capitalism’ for scarcity. That would be like blaming the Roman Empire for scarcity. You are blaming the effect, not the cause. Scarcity is an artifact of the proclivity of human reach to exceed its grasp. If you only are able to produce enough so that a small elite can enjoy abundance, while the rest work hard for a pittance, that’s the kind of society you will live in. This is not an expression of technological fatalism; it’s an expression of the effect of historical technological limitations on societies based on the threat of the use of lethal force–every single society that has ever existed.

    Modern capitalism (ironically, apparently) broke the underlying assumption of endless scarcity as expressed by Jesus, “For the poor ye shall always have with you.” By the 19th century, as the advancement of industrial technology accelerated, thinkers of every political persuasion began envisioning a future without poverty, an unthinkable dream for previous generations. The fact that they couldn’t achieve the dream in the 19th or 20th centuries was a source of bitter contention between those who thought the productive technologies in use were not up to snuff and those who thought the economic system and those who benefited most from it were blocking what would have been inevitable progress towards the dream.

    Obviously, I agree with the former. I also don’t agree with Jackson’s contention that we have plenty now– that the plenty we have is not well distributed because of the greed and incompetence fostered by capitalism. We clearly aren’t yet capable of producing nearly enough so that every human need and desire of every single one of 300 million Americans can be satisfied, and certainly not for six billion humans world wide. If we were capable, none of the systems of capitalism, socialism, Communism, feudalism and fascism extent in the world would matter a bit. Actually, none of them would exist. We would simply produce. Unfortunately, the past and present existence of those economies of scarcity is proof positive that our current levels of productivity are very limited and unsatisfactory while our very human needs and desires remain endless and deep.”

  • http://www.pdfernhout.net/ Paul Fernhout

    Seeing this in a larger historical context might help.

    Marshall Sahlins suggests in “The Original Affluent Society” that “poverty” is a social construction about power arrangements between people, influenced in part by what people think they need. Back when there were few people and a much more abundant biosphere than now, there was a lot of abundance to take from per capita as a gift from nature, and the tropics were fairly easy places to live. As Raffi sings, “All I really need is a song in my heart, food in my belly, and love in my family.” Such Pre-Scarcity societies were exactly as Sally in the previous comment implies Post-Scarcity societies might be, with local production, and in modern terms, often highly socialist gift economies. Columbus’s diaries show happy people like that when he arrived in the Americas in Haiti, and they were generous to him before he and his men wiped them out with “Guns, Germs, and Steel” as well as death through forced slavery mining for gold. Howard Zinn talks about this in “A People’s History of the United States”.

    The best things in life are free or cheap and always have been — even good health from a diverse diet, fresh air, clean water, exercise, good sleep, love, community, and sunlight. Often, we turn to medicines and devices when those basics are lacking (granted, sometimes the basics are not enough, and without advanced technology the result of that is sad).

    Rising human populations and the emergence of militaristic bureaucracies (like in Egypt and Rome) created a pressure to turn to agriculture to get more calories from the land, but at the cost of a lot more labor and overall poorer nutrition, and also the development of plagues like malaria from plant agriculture and smallpox from animal agriculture. It is only in the last century or so that human skeletons in Europe are as tall as those from 10,000 years ago.

    Also, throughout history there have been many examples such as the Native Americans or many African tribes where the people lived in affluence by their local standards (in a Marshall Sahlins sense), but other people came in and took the source of the abundance — their land and their culture — away from the people there who were mostly just minding their own subsistence business.

    So, history is long and complex, though sometimes we focus narrowly on one location like Europe and one transition, like over the last two hundred years in Europe (or US America after the systematic destruction of most of the mainly socialistic commons-oriented natives, many who lived much better than billions of people do even today, those who suffer from being poor in a supply region for global capitalism).

    This general process of bringing back more abundance per capita through advanced technology in Europe and elsewhere that Europe dominated around the globe for centuries continues and accelerates, even as sometimes we lose sight of the basics or lose them as a negative externality of the market.

    (Naturally, China and India and other places had roles to play in all this that I skip over, and their actions affect all this historically and in present times too.)

    The market is great at producing wealth, but the market is also great at centralizing wealth. The market does not account for negative externalities like pollution or systematic risk, nor does the market account for positive externalities like happy communities. The market does not hear the demand of people without money, so people starve around the globe even with plenty of food globally. So, even as the market succeeds in dealing with problems of scarcity in general, like agriculture it also brings more problems, like the economic equivalents of malaria (a growing rich-poor divide) and the economic equivalent of smallpox (a growing risk of war because arming for war is profitable to some). The “Triple Revolution” memorandum of 1964 went into these issues. Local production like through using 3D printers to print complex objects using free and open designs is one of many ways we will see in the future to “simply produce” locally as Sally suggests future systems will work that essentially transcend the market (assuming we don’t blow ourselves up first, fighting over perceived scarcity or various ideological and cultural issues).

    Sally is incredibly insightful in her point at the end that once we have general abundance the current economic “-isms” won’t matter at all anymore. Bob Black talks about a related issue in his essay called “The Abolition of Work”.

    The big irony today is that there would be a lot more abundance if scarcity-preoccupied people were not so busy using post-scarcity technologies that could create global abundance (like biotech, nanotech, robotics, AI, the internet, nuclear technology, and bureaucracy) to create artificial scarcities for local private gain (mainly by using each of these as weapons or to foster a police state). IMHO, that is the central problem of the 21st century, to help everybody see that irony of using abundance to create scarcity, out of fear there won’t be enough to go around if we share and help each other. We need to learn to laugh at that problem and to use the tools of abundance to create global abundance to bring about the world Sally implies in her comment is at least theoretically possible.