| rdfs:comment
| - Post scarcity or post-scarcity describes a hypothetical form of economy or society, often explored in science fiction, in which things such as goods, services and information are free, or practically free. This would be due to an abundance of fundamental resources (matter, energy and intelligence), in conjunction with sophisticated automated systems capable of converting raw materials into finished goods, allowing manufacturing to be as easy as duplicating software.
- Population growth, if it continues long enough, may also lead to unvoidable scarcity. As pointed out by Paul Ehrlich, Albert Bartlett, and others, exponential growth in human population has the capacity to overwhelm any finite supply of resources, even the entire known universe, in a remarkably short time. For example, if the human population could continue to grow indefinitely at its 1994 rate, in 1,900 years the mass of the human population would equal the mass of Earth, and in 6000 years the mass of the human population would equal the estimated mass of the observable universe.
|
| abstract
| - Population growth, if it continues long enough, may also lead to unvoidable scarcity. As pointed out by Paul Ehrlich, Albert Bartlett, and others, exponential growth in human population has the capacity to overwhelm any finite supply of resources, even the entire known universe, in a remarkably short time. For example, if the human population could continue to grow indefinitely at its 1994 rate, in 1,900 years the mass of the human population would equal the mass of Earth, and in 6000 years the mass of the human population would equal the estimated mass of the observable universe. Although this would imply the invention of faster than light travel, necessary for humanity to spread throughout the universe as fast as population growth, even at lower growth rates these levels would still be reached in readily imaginable times. It is therefore difficult to conceive of a credible post scarcity scenario which does not also imply zero population growth or very low population growth.
- Post scarcity or post-scarcity describes a hypothetical form of economy or society, often explored in science fiction, in which things such as goods, services and information are free, or practically free. This would be due to an abundance of fundamental resources (matter, energy and intelligence), in conjunction with sophisticated automated systems capable of converting raw materials into finished goods, allowing manufacturing to be as easy as duplicating software. Even without postulating new technologies, it is conceivable that already there exists enough energy, raw materials and biological resources to provide a comfortable lifestyle for every person on Earth. However even a hypothetical political or economic system able to achieve an egalitarian distribution of goods would generally not be termed a "post-scarcity society" unless the production of goods was sufficiently automated that virtually no labour was required by anyone. (It is usually assumed there would still be plenty of voluntary creative labour, such as a writer creating a novel or a software engineer working on open-source software.) There are some exceptions to this usage of the term. Anthony Giddens, for instance, uses "post-scarcity" to refer to a set of trends he sees in modern industrialized nations, such as an increased focus on "life politics" and a decreased focus on productivity and economic growth. Giddens acknowledges that the term has also been used historically to mean a literal end of scarcity. The term post-scarcity economics is somewhat of a misnomer because scarcity is a defining feature of modern economics. Quoting a 1932 essay written by Lionel Robbins, economics is: "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)