I don't quite follow this.

I'm inclined to believe we are experiencing scarcity. Sure, I can buy just about anything I desire and can afford. Any food item, cheap clothing, cheap travel. But I think that's an illusion.

Let's say I'm prepared to pay £50-£100 for an item of clothing. Shoes, jacket, whatever. It's likely to be made by impoverished people on the other side of the world who are paid peanuts.

I could even pay £5 for a pair of jeans if I wanted. God knows how that's even possible.

But it's a sliding tile puzzle. If I experience cheap apparently-plentiful goods, it's only because someone else is suffering.

I'm not prepared to pay £300 for a long-lasting item of clothing. The thought barely crosses my mind because I never see that stuff in the windows of high-street shops. Instead, I typically buy "cheap", "plentiful" goods that fall apart after a year or two -- or go out of fashion -- then replace them.

Ethically I dislike this, and try to shop "ethically" and donate old clothing to charity. This requires high levels of vigilance, and is not convenient.

All the above apply to food. I can buy apparently any item I want. Or can I? In actuality, I can buy whatever trendy item the supermarkets can buy in bulk for best profit. Great, I'll have some kale and coconut water and acai berries. Is that "plenty"? What about locally produced fruit and veg? Why do I have to invest in a comparatively-expensive box delivery scheme if I want apples that were grown in my country?

If I want to eat locally reared meat I have to pay a premium, because provenance has become a valuable attribute. Instead I could buy mechanically recovered pressed meat, which is unbelievably cheap and widely available. Even if I believe it's healthy to eat that stuff, and even though both products are undeniably "meat", they're not the same.

Perhaps meat being expensive is actually normal. That's certainly been the case for most of history. In which case, the cheapness of the lower quality meat products is the illusory factor.

So I think "plenty" is an illusion, and scarcity is far, far closer than we conspire to believe.

Edit: I forgot the most obvious and familiar example. Ad-funded content/services vs paid-for content/services.

You say were experiencing scarcity then you start listing off luxuries! A mechanically constructed, mechanically harvested cotton blanket and mechanically harvested diet of beans and potatoes sounds more feasible. Maybe even too basic.

An efficient entry-level post-scarcity world is not going to overproduce pairs of jeans or transport coconut water across the world. That world would make just enough clothing to cover the populace and provide a cup of water on request. That world would want to stay just above scarcity, no want to waste, no need to introduce artificial market driven scarcities.

> You say were experiencing scarcity then you start listing off luxuries!

Yup, I'm pointing out that my well-shod, well-fed, well-clothed society is an illusion, and that scarcity is just under the surface.

> An efficient entry-level post-scarcity world is not going to overproduce pairs of jeans

I don't disagree.

While pretty hideous sweashops do exist, there is still good chance that the person who sowed your jeans chose to do it. Because the alternative was even worse.

And to what extent are we responsible for those alternatives? How much are the companies we patronize invested in making sure their employees have no choice?

Well given that large parts of south Asia and Africa are still medieval poor, I'm not going to assume much responsibility. You don't need to beat people into desperation in many places of the world.

My great-great-great-great-great grandfather might have had something to do with colonialism. But if we start judging sons by their fathers, we get nowhere. And at the same time people remain poor in Africa.

Buying only domestic goods would help to ensure that they remain poor.

The one instance that really has incentive to keep people poor are the foreign development organizations. They don't need people "poor enough to be willing to work" they need people "starving, so we get good footage".

We're close to post industrial, at least in the 1st world.

We're close.

We certainly don't need to live in a world where millions die for lack of will, or failing that, where trillions of dollars of value are siphoned off of the working class in an upwards waterfall.

Post-industrial is here, or near, in much of the developed world, sure, but that just means that the economy has shifted from producing tangible goods to services and intangible goods, and importing tangible goods from elsewhere. That's just a shift in comparative advantage in an economy with scarcity, not a shift to or toward post-scarcity.

I would say that the part of post-scarcity that's actually cogent to my orginal comment is that we are already, via largely and increasingly automated means, cheaply producing vast quantities of consumer goods with decreasing amounts of human intervention.

I didn't mean to credulously insinuate that we are approaching the utopian ideal of a post-scarcity world, as any cursory glance at reality would readily indicate that we are not living in a utopia. But my comment was lazy as it says exactly that, without further qualification, so i deserve the pedantry.

Thats not post-scarcity, just high productivity relative to the past. Which is something people could point to as being true relative to the (comparative) past at many points in history (conservatively, pretty much most since he agricultural revolutions of the middle ages in the West.)

Because misery is empirically shown to be driven largely by relative, not absolute, deprivation -- both compared to one's own past and one's visible surroundings -- greater productively doesn't even approximate post-scarcity (indeed when it was involves greater or more visible inequality, it makes the impact of scarcity more palpable.)

>Post-scarcity is a theoretical economy in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

As to how relatively miserable we are as a function of how miserable we were... I'm really much more concerned with the idea that as a socioeconomic entity, the global economy generates enough capital that we could solve hunger, base poverty, eradicate solved diseases and even wage slavery. Today. That we haven't and won't is all the indictment I require.