https://luma.com/pzexof4b

I suspect this conversation will remain cheerier than the future of work one. But at the very least, let’s start on a cheery note.

What is abundant today that everyone would have thought you crazy to say we had 100 years ago?

What would we generally consider to be scarce? Has this always been the case.

What truly are scarce resources at present? Are there obvious solutions to change this?

We’re running several experiments in post-scarcity. Open Source Software, UBI, genetic modification - what have we learnt?

Economics is the study of resources under scarcity. Can we have a world without economics?

(Is scarcity nature or accounting?)

Most of what we value is scarce: luxury, privacy, intimacy, respect… Whilst it is obvious that we could engineer abundance in certain domains, will we always find something new to treasure the scarcity of.

Reading List

https://aleximas.substack.com/p/what-will-be-scarce https://juliawillemyns.substack.com/p/at-least-youre-likable https://x.com/DouGPT5/status/2066211447827238993 https://lorenzopieri.com/post_scarcity/

Plan

1. The cheery opener — abundance we forgot to notice

• What's abundant today that would've sounded insane in 1926? Light (Nordhaus: an hour of reading light cost a day's wages in 1800, now ~free), recorded music, photographs, calories, antibiotics, computation — and lately, competent prose on demand.
• Hidden sting for later: each became so abundant we stopped valuing it.

2. What we call scarce — and whether it's nature or accounting

• Steeds (Constellations, 2024): scarcity isn't a discovered fact, it's a chosen axiom. Locke and Smith saw labour as the source of wealth — abundance achievable. Ricardo inverted this in 1817: barren nature, fundamental scarcity, and economics was built on it.
• Provocation: scarcity was invented in 1817 — are we now debating whether to uninvent it?

3. What's truly scarce right now