/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>6835298
This is bullshit.

The reason why we will go into a post-scarcity economy is BECAUSE of greed. Not despite of it.

When the rich will make more profit in a post-scarcity economy compared to a scarcity economy you'll know it'll be inevitable that we'll transition into a post-scarcity economy.

This is already happening right now. Due to exponential growth of technological progress we are experiencing lower and lower production costs for all commodities this includes energy resources such as coal,natural gas,oil but also all types of metals and minerals and even the amount of food production per square kilometre.

And yes before you are going to say "growing population". ALL the global commodities are growing exponentially PER CAPITA. Every year we find more and more oil deposits, mineral ore and we produce exponentially more at simultaniously lower costs while humanity is not even growing exponentially in population anymore.

If we look at for example 2050 and we maintain that USD will inflate 4% each year. And will have the same global population growth as now (In reality population growth is shrinking but for sake of simplicity let's assume we keep growing at current rate). And the production of commodities will also keep growing at current rates than the prices of all goods should be 1000x cheaper in 2050 than they are in 2018.

Yes that is in 2050 (super inflated) dollar prices. Compared to 2018 dollars it would be close to 6000x cheaper.

Can you imagine the impact that will have on humanity? Food cost would be negligible. Metal cost would become so low that production costs of machines would reach an absurdly low amount and most of the price would be pure profit.

THIS is why we are transitioning towards a post-scarcity society. Because companies will have a massively higher profit-margin when the cost of production is negligible.

However post-scarcity does not mean free. Just so cheap that it could as well be considered free.

>>6581337
>Do you really believe that we in the foreseeable future are going to produce gold at a large scale in labs?

No because the moment we have the ability to do so is the moment gold loses it's value. It's not genuinely used in our society so there will be no need for us to produce it but the ability to do so makes gold lose all its value

>Do you really believe that physical things won't be scarce in a world with ever growing population?

Yes. Why? Because the rate of production is growing at a far higher pace than the population is growing. Hell we are even in a period of UNDERpopulation right now. Yes you are hearing that right. Too little people are being born globally to fill all vacant job opportunities in the future so we'll have to shift to automation.

This graph shows how much food per capita is produced. As you can see the amount of food grown is outpacing population growth. Lot of people think this is because we are using more and more farmland. But the amount of food yielded per hectare is growing exponentially faster than population growth as well.

This is not only a trend with food production. But with all commodites. Oil,Coal,Natural gas. Every mineral/metal. Our technology and methods to extract and refine them is growing exponentially while our population growth is largely linear nowadays. This will result in extremely low priced material and food cost in the future. It will probably come to a point somewhere this century where the cost of materials become negligible and that is when we will become a true post-scarcity economy.