Entwined
The 'Post-Scarcity' Lie, Romantic Deficits, & Equilibrium Accounting
“Complexity” comes from the Latin complexus. This can be translated as entwined. Interwoven. Intricate.
A complex adaptive system is one where components cannot be usefully isolated, interactions refuse deterministic outcomes, and the manipulation of one variable spawns emergent behaviors in others. Interdependence is a defining feature.
You cannot untangle one thread without pulling many. These systems resist reductionism because their components dance together in ways that generate novel information and inherently thwart predictability. The interconnectedness among constituent elements all cascade into the reactions of each other, generating a gestalt that arithmetic or logic cannot fully grasp or encapsulate. Each engagement partially, and variably, informs the current state of the system such that you cannot get to a certain state without taking each discrete step.
A complex system’s parts are by definition inseparable. Because if you separate them, you fundamentally alter the parts themselves.
This essay deconstructs countervailing internal forces within an economic complex adaptive system and how attempts to assess and manage variables in isolation can lead to dangerous conclusions and false promises.
Post-scarcity economics imagines a future where material abundance has vanquished the ancient specter of resource limitations for life essentials. Proponents argue that technological advancements — namely automation, AI, and productivity gains — will eventually produce goods and services so efficiently and cheaply that traditional economic constraints become irrelevant.
Some advocates don't claim all scarcity vanishes, but rather that technology eliminates deficiencies for accessing basic necessities. However even this more modest aspiration wishfully misconstrues how demand, complexity, and the human condition intersect. The map is not the territory.
A particularly pernicious assumption within this framework is that society becomes so abundant that price becomes an inferior means to facilitate distribution. This sounds innocuous enough on its surface, however it warrants extreme caution, as it implicitly requires alternative allocation methods that carry substantial political implications.
We’ll examine economic paradoxes that reveal why scarcity never retreats, only evolves, and how perma-abundance beliefs severely misunderstand the fluid and disparate nature of demand, bits, atoms and human nature. We’ll discuss other interesting tidbits too, per the outline of this essay:
I. Equilibrium Accounting & Economic Paradoxes
II. Jevons’ Paradox & Commoditizing the Complement
III. Smuggling Political Beliefs with False Promises
IV. Material Account Surplus, Romantic Account Deficit
V. Romance Hydra & The ‘Post-Everything’ Delusion
VI. Concluding: Seasons
The first part details economic paradoxes and counterintuitive concepts that help frame the naivete of ‘post-scarcity’ and its corrosive political ramifications. The second part both concretely and philosophically applies this to the digital, physical, material, and romantic realms to illustrate the anti-human fallacy of it all.
While writing, I mostly listened to this song on loop.
Equilibrium Accounting
Scarcity is an axiom of nature and resources. Price emerges where supply and demand converge; whether the currency is energy, time, or capital, there is one component in this entangled equation that’s always scarce in relation to another. Nothing is consumed in a vacuum, everything is a tradeoff.
Scarcity is not a static value, it arises contextually through the lens of demand. An absence of supply with no demand or high demand with infinite supply both meet a similar pricing fate. This relationship is a correlation that’s constitutive: each element defines the other through mutual tension and healthy opposition.
The 'post-scarcity' fantasy exemplifies a category error. It commits the same naive intellectual sin as someone alleging to have solved one side of a canonical duality: here is reward without risk, you may exploit without exploration, predator without prey, masculine without feminine. The qualities and character of each side is informed and molded by its dyadic counterpart; they are inseparable. These are all synergistic, countervailing agents where the presence of one is required for the existence of the other. A kind of equilibrium accounting within an Entwined system.
Equilibrium Accounting: I’ve coined this term to speak to the accounting of inherently balance-seeking complementary forces (a dyad) within complex adaptive systems. I use equilibrium accounting to convey how gains or deficits on one side of a dyad generate compensating pressures elsewhere. Similar to double-entry bookkeeping but at the level of systemic feedback, with romantic undertones. I’ll explain the romance component towards the end.
Scarcity is one side of this cosmic ledger, and its dyadic parallel is demand. These foundational pairs are not problems with solutions, but essential elements of the architecture of reality: with homeostasis encoded into the nature of how they operate. Attempting to escape them is like trying to flee your own shadow.
Ideologies proclaiming infinite abundance are where political motivations reside and reality departs. Tantamount to proposing a physics model that ignores conservation of energy or a biological theory that forgets natural selection. They observe only part of a balance sheet.
Paradoxes
Context is useful to understand when you’re being sold a “free lunch” with different scaffolding. These economic paradoxes reveal how a form of homeostasis is embedded within components of complex systems:
The Paradox of Thrift: Higher savings rates lead to reduced economic output. If my spending is your income, my prudence is also your poverty. If everyone saves more, everyone earns less. Too much of an individual virtue turns into collective vice.
The Paradox of Costs and Profits: Higher real wages, which nominally seem to threaten profits, actually support them by creating customers with enough discretionary income to spend. Henry Ford understood this when he paid workers enough to buy his cars. Conversely, wage suppression inevitably slows growth, as diminished spending directly undermines sales.
A good capitalist knows labor is deeply important and should not be abused, as they’re the ones that consume what you’re selling. You cannot sell to a sick, poor society. Chronic trade-surplus countries will eventually have to confront this reality and how their structural undermining of domestic wages creates a myopic competitive advantage that’s not without consequences.
The Paradox of Public Deficits: Government deficits counterintuitively burnish nominal private profits. When a currency-issuing government runs a deficit, it is, by definition, putting more net financial assets (Treasury securities, bank reserves, deposits) into non-government hands than it takes out in taxes. By accounting identity, the state’s deficit equals the private sector’s net savings.
One entity's liability is another's asset: a natural law of accounting
The Paradox of Risk: Availability of individual risk coverage paradoxically increases systemic risk, as protection encourages recklessness. If you’re on a tightrope with a safety net, you’re not as cautious; but if too many do this and fall at the same time, the safety net buckles under the weight of everyone. The presence of insurance lubricates behaviors it's meant to protect against by making you feel immune to repercussions. Moral hazard incarnate.
The Paradox of Tranquility: Stability breeds traits that destabilize. When volatility disappears for too long, actors forget its taste and gorge themselves on leverage and risk, cultivating the very instability they thought extinct.
Hyman Minsky understood this well: humans calibrate their decisions around perceived safety in the rearview mirror, not actual safety on the road ahead.
The Paradox of Deleveraging: Attempts to deleverage can lead to higher leverage ratios, as en masse selling crashes asset prices, exacerbating near-term loan burdens. If everyone tries to pay down debt simultaneously, incomes fall faster than debt levels, leaving greater leverage despite reducing total debt.
The Paradox of Liquidity: Innovations in liquidity can transform previously liquid assets into illiquid ones, as ease of liquidity invites riskier behaviors in greater size. Financial engineering that initially acts as a net market good (e.g. mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, etc.) can transform an entire liquid market and unrelated assets into frozen wastelands when risk-seeking activity collapses.
As discussed in a previous essay, these emergent contradictory forces can be understood as the accounting of equilibrium. Any organism, be it a human body, nation, or complex adaptive system, has mechanics for homeostasis woven into it.
An economic complex adaptive system is composed of multifaceted, harmoniously antagonistic variables that form a capital web where every action incubates a series of third and fourth-order reactions. You cannot competently model, command, or predict it, and claims we make to the contrary are deeply misleading when you look methodically under the hood.
Jevons’ Paradox: The Shapeshifting Nature of Want
The previous paradoxes illustrated counterintuitive dynamics present in collective behaviors. This one cuts to the heart of the elusive, protean nature of demand.
Jevons' Paradox: when technological advancements increase the efficiency of resource use and reduce cost, it leads to greater total consumption of that resource. When more is created affordably, more is consumed. Sometimes disproportionately so.
This phenomenon, while not an iron law, underscores how efficiency gains that superficially suggest abundance produce asymmetric demand pressures, creating new scarcities as previous ones dissolve.
Examples:
Coal (19th century Britain): William Stanley Jevons initially observed this paradox during Britain's industrial revolution. He noted that improvements in steam-engine efficiency didn’t reduce coal use; instead, they dramatically increased it by expanding the engine’s overall applications, driving widespread industrialization.
Energy-Efficient Lighting (21st century): LED technology reduced lighting costs yet led to widespread and intensive lighting, resulting in an overall increase in electricity use rather than reduction.
Agricultural Yields (Industrial Era): Advances in farming technology like mechanization, synthetic fertilizers, and genetically modified crops tried to feed the world with less land. Instead, cheaper production costs incentivized massive agricultural expansion. Rather than less land being used more was brought under cultivation, capitalizing on higher productivity.
Water-Efficient Irrigation (Modern Era): Drip irrigation and precision sprinklers slashed water use per plant, and as a result farmers expanded irrigation to cover extra acreage as it became cheaper to do so.
What began as a conservation technology ended up consuming more water! In some regions, total water usage increased even as irrigation was optimized, paradoxically worsening aquifer depletion in the name of preserving resources.
Urban Transportation (Modern Era): Highways built to reduce congestion breed additional congestion! The desire to drive does not remain fixed as roads expand, it multiplies.
Data Storage and Computing (Digital Age): Moore's Law made compute and storage cheaper by making semiconductors increasingly powerful, so, naturally, as rational actors we maintained the same amount of compute and storage use. Ha! Kidding! As storage costs plummeted our appetite for data exploded.
The result: AI training that consumes a small city's worth of electricity, data centers that require dedicated power plants, and an info-surveillance landscape built on the premise that storage is too economical to ever delete anything. Jevons with server farms.
Jevons' Paradox reminds us that scarcity is never solved, because demand is never static. Every ‘post-scarcity’ mirage rests on a denial of the chameleonic quality of human want.
A wealth of one element merely shifts and reshapes where the scarcity manifests. The human urge to feast on efficiency gains is insatiable. Scarcity is forever a relative term that continuously breathes through the mutual lungs of consumption.
Risk/reward, explore/exploit, scarcity/demand: only observing one side of these dyads is as deluded as only assessing one side of a balance sheet. Is this ‘post-scarcity’ society also a ‘post-demand’ one? There’s an implicit premise that demand either remains basically stationary, or insidiously… under centralized command.
Try saying “post-demand society” or “centralized-distribution economy” and see how it feels; these are synonymous with ‘post-scarcity’ beliefs. We’ll break down political ramifications in the section after the next one. Keep reading.
Commoditizing the Complement
Another hidden dimension of how scarcity transmutes itself lies within a business strategy known as "commoditizing the complement". It’s particularly en vogue with technology companies; if you’re wondering why Google provides so many free products, just know it isn’t charity.
When two or more products complement each other, changes in the availability or cost of one invariably influences the pricing of the other(s). Profusion on one side amplifies insufficiencies on the other. Equilibrium accounting.
This strategy entails companies intentionally lowering or removing the cost of products or services that augment their primary offerings. By making one side of a product pairing cheap or free, they make the other side comparatively scarcer, and are able to extract higher margins and profits as a result. Sophisticated businesses elevate the demand for their core, profitable products by creating calculated abundance elsewhere.
Here are some examples of complementary products and how commoditizing one favors the other:
Printers and Ink Cartridges: Printers are sold at low prices or even a loss. If everyone has a printer, the demand for ink cartridges (which have higher profit margins) increases, and you sell more of the high-value product.
Video Game Consoles and Games: Companies sell consoles at a minimal profit or loss to boost sales of video games, where margins are higher. Increasing console availability begets greater demand for high-quality, high-margin games.
Streaming Services and Bandwidth: As Netflix, YouTube, and other streaming platforms became popular, demand surged for high-speed internet. The swell of cheap content fostered new shortages around bandwidth and broadband infrastructure, driving up prices and demand for internet service providers.
E-Commerce and Shipping Logistics: The proliferation of online shopping and e-commerce platforms make retail trivially accessible, and dramatically increases the value of fast, reliable shipping services. Companies like Amazon commoditized product selection and ease of purchase, thereby heightening demand for expedited shipping and logistics infrastructure.
Cheap Flights and Tourism Destinations: The availability of inexpensive air travel boosted global tourism and made attractive tourism destinations rare gems in contrast. Popular sites, once serene havens, became crowded, commercialized, and costly, as cheap transportation shifted the shortage to the experiences and locations travelers sought.
Free Software, Open Source: Google Drive, Dropbox, and other free software offerings commoditized digital tools, enhancing the amount of data generated and stored. This shifts value accrual towards secure cloud storage and data protection services, producing significant pricing power for premium cloud providers.
Whenever a business tells you how much it loves open-source software, it’s implicitly saying “I’d like it if these complements were commoditized because it helps my core profit drivers”.
The credit card industry refined this decades ago. They commoditized payment acceptance for merchants (here's a free terminal!) while extracting 2-3% of every transaction through interchange fees. Small businesses got "free" payment infrastructure (commoditizing it) while Visa and Mastercard transformed themselves into tollkeepers of global commerce. Even academic publishing partakes: scholars provide free content and peer review, then publishers charge universities $30k/year for journal access. The complement (PhD grunt work) is free, the bottleneck (distribution) is the scant resource where profits accumulate.
Complements don’t always come in pairs, the more interwoven a product’s ecosystem, the more adjacent goods it tends to have. A modern instance: previously, software was scarce relative to data, then LLMs arrived and created a deluge of both software and data. So, what became scarce? Hardware. Chips.
Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC), ASML, and Nvidia are rather inarguably the most-important trinity of companies in the world right now (listed in order of criticality). So indispensable for the maintenance and creation of our best modern machines that all three would be worth waging war over, especially ASML and TSMC. A war may very well be waged over TSMC; some 70% of all new semiconductors at some point touch the island of Taiwan. Imagine if almost all the oil in the 1960s was concentrated in just one Middle Eastern country…
What’s the complement if hardware grows plentiful? Energy. What about infinite compute? That’s not a real thing, recall Jevons’ Paradox and coal use, farmers and irrigation, data and storage: this scales. Greater compute capacity begets greater use, disproportionately so. Demand rises to match what’s ample. Give humans excess energy and they will inhale it. Consumption is forever a moving target of circumstances.
The notion of unlimited energy is about as serious as a credit card with no limit that also pays itself off and can find the end of a circle; however, if it could exist it would mean unlimited transformation capacity, which means accelerated consumption of everything energy can transform. The constraint would move from energy to rare earth elements, land, even heat dissipation. God knows what the Nth-order externalities would be. There is no escape. It is not real. Pay off your credit card.
These examples illuminate the oscillations of supply and value across intricate integrative markets. Shrewd management have an embodied understanding of this equilibrium accounting when they deploy tactics that foster commoditization in one domain to cultivate scarcity in another.
Scarcity is never eliminated, only redirected, because demand is a fluid force.
Smuggling Political Beliefs with False Promises
Entertain a ‘post-scarcity’ argument and you’ll find a thinly veiled political motivation staring back at you. When price signals allegedly fail (a decentralized mechanism), the alternatives invariably involve centralizing resource allocation. Don’t place your focus on ‘post-scarcity’ postulates for supply, the nefarious part of this equation resides with their intentions surrounding distribution. Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics: let’s look at the logistics of these beliefs.
Implementation of such a system will be accompanied by policy conclusions that include expansion of state power and legitimizing redistribution, as you’ll find "We've solved scarcity…" is the intellectual veneer that launders in "…therefore, give us control of distribution." Why? Because to own distribution is to own demand, they are synonymous. Remember, abundance is forever a reflection cast by the gaze of consumption. Whether or not something is scarce is a product of its demand: control distribution, control scarcity.
Only through orchestrating consumption can you manufacture ‘post-scarcity’. We have a term for the sort of state that determines how much of something you should get. Nearly everyone who promotes this dream unknowingly advocates for a government that decides “…to each according to his needs”. Utopians completely ignore the demand side of this dyadic balance sheet and smuggle in communist presuppositions in their support.
A promise of abundance is merely the spoonful of sugar that helps the centralization go down. "We've transcended market economics" is newspeak for "we've transcended your right to choose".
Some post-scarcity proponents remain grounded in reality, they don’t universally assert that all shortcomings vanish: recognizing elements like attention, luxury goods, or the nature of raw materials. However many believe material scarcity itself is a political decision, a matter of social engineering; this is an alarming lens into intentions. Remember, at the core of this is a belief that pricing mechanisms stop working. This is an apolitical-seeming way to say “the free market is inapplicable”.
The notion of “marginal costs approaching zero” for physical, atoms-based goods is science fiction and I typically would ignore it as Star Wars for economists if not for the uniquely toxic takeaway: “The price will be a wrong price. Who will set the price and determine allocations then? The experts will.” Who decides and imposes what constitutes 'enough’? Whether it’s algorithm or human, its enforcement stems from political authority, consolidating state power and oversight in the process.
Innocent post-scarcity advocates that don’t understand the political repercussions commit a venial sin of conflating digital abundance with the physical realm. Some point to bits-based intellectual property, open-source software, crypto, or streaming media and extrapolate this to atoms, as if building a home were like sending an email. Physical goods require work and assembly for each new item and its maintenance; they’re subject to vastly higher resource constraints and physical requirements that do not equally apply to the digital.
Physical impositions that can't be eliminated:
Raw materials (lithium for batteries, rare earth elements for electronics, etc.)
Energy for manufacturing and transportation. Assembling and moving heavy objects is in no way comparable to taking a screenshot.
Physical space for factories and distribution. Land.
Human labor for quality control, maintenance, and coordination.
You can reduce this through automation, but you cannot eliminate it. The notion of fully eliminating it is dystopian and misanthropic in its own right, let alone not feasible.
Waste disposal and environmental costs
A real-life example, even something as automated as semiconductors still requires:
Silicon wafers (raw material costs)
Extreme precision manufacturing (energy intensive)
Quality testing/packaging for each chip
Physical transportation to assembly facilities and consumers
The fabs themselves cost $20+ billion and wear out
Subject to economies of scale with highly concentrated supply chains and substantial geopolitical implications. Best of luck modeling this.
You cannot just copy/paste a chip.
The marginal cost of producing one more iPhone, house, or car can’t approach zero because each requires things like rare-earth metals, factories, and energy that scale with production. Marginal costs can only somewhat approach zero in the digital realm:
Once Netflix produces a show, streaming it to additional viewers costs almost nothing
Software: Copying code is essentially free
Information products: Publishing another digital book costs pennies
The most-generous reading of this gargantuan category error is that this school of economic hopes and dreams dramatically underestimates how rapidly human desires reshape themselves around new abundances. And I’m too skeptical of the Expert Class to give the benefit of the doubt here. I’ve been sold a bill of goods too many times; this class of rationalism has little capacity to differentiate between linear and complex systems.
This is why I particularly hate this term and the way it’s so cavalierly thrown around. Ingrained within it is a lie about the human condition and nature’s supplies. Rather than argue about its theorycel assertions on nominal grounds, emphasize the implications of what they’re promoting, the logistics of it all. “If this is true, tell me what exactly you’d like to have happen as a result?”. Much can be revealed this way.
The Paradox of Plenty
I’d personally like to offer a new inclusion to the list: the Paradox of Plenty. A derivative of commoditizing the complement.
No resource consumption exists in a vacuum. The more abundant a resource or service becomes, the more acutely the scarcity of its complements are felt. This paradox yields a contradiction in that the greater abundance is had in one arena, the more scarcity manifests in another.
Abundance is a constantly evolving target, because the rate at which anything is plentiful depends entirely on its intake. As a cornucopia overflows, it reshapes the silhouette of want; scarcity and demand are gravitational twins that ebb and flow to the caprice of human impulse. Just like masculine and feminine, a claim for one is a claim for both. These are dyadic pairs within an Entwined system.
Material Account Surplus, Romantic Account Deficit
Scarcity operates with the rules of a Hydra: sever one head and two appear. Remove two heads and four mouths gape back at you. Elevated throughput intensifies consumption’s teeth. Victories frequently contain seeds of their eventual defeat, and decadence lays the groundwork for a famine somewhere else. Complex systems retaliate when you think you’ve placed them in a box.
The Paradox of Plenty doesn’t only apply to the material domain; it surfaces in the social, interpersonal, creative, and romantic with equal vengeance. Social media has produced a surfeit of connection, yet there seems to be a paucity of genuine intimacy. We've achieved unprecedented access to information, entertainment, pleasure, and global interconnectivity, yet simultaneously find ourselves drowning in epidemics of loneliness, anxiety, nihilism, and ennui. Material surplus, romantic deficit.
A digital ocean of choice has made selectivity a cherished skill; the ability to distill is more valuable than ever. A glut of data has created a poverty of insight. Too much comfort and too little friction and you’ll soon starve of purpose. All of these are connected by invisible threads that tie together the human condition; a cosmic balance of payments where a material-account surplus is matched by a romantic-account deficit. Entwined.
A decadent society oriented only by the church of GDP loses its instinctive capacity to sense gathering storms and culturally stagnates when inert indulgence is its default expectation... “Peace has cost you your strength, victory has defeated you.”
This has been observed before, in a different way:
“Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick.
He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself — as though that were so necessary — that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.”
"Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering: that is a fact."
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
Dostoyevsky comprehended what Spreadsheet Mind refuses to internalize: humans are not optimization functions. We are perverse, emotional creatures who will dynamite our own paradise out of sheer existential boredom. Equilibrium accounting knows an excess of predictability is matched by a dearth of excitement, and man tends to break things to feel alive and even it all out. The volatility tax must be paid. I think Fyodor would agree.
Objects of value and their comparative scarcity apply to the romantic balance sheet of the social, creative, intimate, and perhaps even the spiritual. We have a wellspring of enlightenment Science Trusters, and a desert of romantic reverence; this looks to be in the early stages of a correction. The pendulum doesn’t ricochet sideways, it swings back.
This has been observed before, in a different way:
Romance Hydra
When digital content is unlimited, curation grows precious. When information is free, wisdom turns scarce. Has universal internet access made everyone smarter, or has it exposed that data without synthesis is only white noise? Solve labor through automation? Meaning becomes the rarest commodity of them all. And time is the resource that’s permanently capped, unforgivingly finite as it relates to man; you will only ever have 24 hours in a day. Time is the ultimate complement for anything we do, and it can’t be commoditized.
Material prosperity often coincides with spiritual indigence; you’ll find the highest rates of depression, suicide, and anxiety within the wealthiest societies. As survival pressures abate, existential ones intensify. The psyche, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Remove one form of struggle and another fills the void. There is an equilibrium accountant inside your head, please send him my regards.
We are a collective Hydra of human desire where a victory over one scarcity births two new hungers. Equilibrium accounting is a cosmic ledger that’s never actually balanced in the specifics or at any given point in time, but it always reconciles in the aggregate over a long-enough timeline. Tracking deficits until nature forecloses on them.
The more extreme a dislocation between the romantic and material realms, the more it invites an incongruent correction and asymmetric blowback. An unpaid liability accumulates interest and compounds, eventually making your debt larger than the principal you owed.
Like energy, scarcity cannot be destroyed, only transformed. It is always a function of different scarcity. The Paradox of Plenty gets the last word. The system’s layers are Entwined in ways a human mind cannot manage.
The “Post-Everything” Delusion
There’s a modern delusion and quasi-religious conviction that we've transcended cardinal categories defining existence and society. “Post gender binary", "Post-political", "Post-industrial society", all variations of a similar theme of myopic conceit.
Each sells a one-sided balance sheet: progress without friction, rights without duties, man without biology, consumption without cost. Each represents an attempt to declare victory over core foundations of nature. They see temporary dislocations and mistake them for permanent transformations. It’s a debt of delusion and the interest keeps compounding. Energy, attention, hedonism, eudaimonism, time, trust, meaning: the currencies may change, but the books must balance.
These "post-" declarations share a common ancestry in rationalist arrogance: man has finally defeated nature. But reality has a way of reasserting its primacy. A romantic era follows an enlightened one to remind us of ancient truths we thought were suggestions.
When you encounter an advocate of post-scarcity economics, hear it as clearly as “post-entropy physics” or “post-mortality medicine”; while we inhabit these meat-bound earthly forms, there is no such thing.
It is transparently a fiction, and rather than waste time debating Sci-Fi it should immediately raise your antennas for ulterior motives. Like watching someone share a spreadsheet demonstrating the Second Law of thermodynamics optional, they are false promises against a complex system they do not, and cannot, govern; one saturated with manifold paradoxes and romantic Hydras that defy predictability. A model is useful as a compression of reality; it’s either intellectual vanity or political cudgel when leveraged otherwise.
Without demand, scarcity is undefined. Without risk, reward is hollow. Without feminine, masculine has no orientation. These are load-bearing walls of the universe.
Trust your instincts when they whisper "bullshit" at such assertions. Don’t get beguiled by appeals to authority and florid scholarly subterfuge that assure you the lunch is actually free this time. Instinctively discern they’re at best magnificently naive, and at worst dishonestly in service of a political agenda. Your intuitions were forged in a thousand-generation Darwinian crucible, millennia of nature’s wisdom crystallized into them. Gut reactions persist because they mutter primal truths your words can’t quite articulate.
Why is Nassim Taleb famous? Tail risk? Moral hazard?? Statistics can be deceptive?!? This guy’s brilliant how does he come up with this stuff! Ah well, see, none of that’s new, you simply forgot, and needed a firm reminder that you didn’t “solve” risk, rather held the beachball underwater for too long. A brilliant 3std Monte Carlo VaR model predicated on one fatal assumption… “See this all works, the risk is contained, assuming housing prices never go down…”: you’ll find similar chimeras and starry-eyed guesses in any utopian vision.
“We stand unique in history, no one has ever been as delightful, clever, and wonderful as us. It’s different this time, everything is computer.” Sure.
Concluding: Seasons
The evergreen wisdom of a grandparent is right there for the child to absorb, yet is ignored. The cycles of history and the patterns of national upheaval and rebirth are well-known, yet overlooked. Some lessons must be experienced. Even with the canonical answers in front of us, we still must endure them to internalize them. Then enough time passes, generations die, we forget, and must learn all over again.
Nothing is new in a literal sense, but everything becomes new again in a forgotten one.
Seasons of life and nations mirror seasons of nature this way; even if you know winter is coming, the only way out is through. You can either prepare for it, or pretend that you solved bounded summertime and now live in a “post-seasonal” paradigm.
A post-scarcity world is an ancient lie in that it purports to escape the root-level equations that govern existence. It peddles a perpetual motion machine for the economy, like a physicist promising free energy. It’s a strain of complex-adaptive-system denialism: it claims to control the uncontrollable, manage the multifaceted, and predict the emergent. A God complex with a spreadsheet. Don’t focus on the intellectualized justifications for the claims, ask them about the logistics of it; that’s where the rubber meets the road.
More than a lie, it is dangerous. It encourages us to abandon the very price mechanisms and feedback loops that make advanced civilization possible. It's a decadent theory only those insulated from real scarcity can afford to hold. Luxury conditions beget luxury beliefs.
There is only the choice of which scarcities we'll embrace and which abundances we'll pursue. Scarcity remains a teacher, motivator, and liberator. It forces prioritization, galvanizes creativity, and imposes the very constraints that make choice meaningful. It imbues purpose in that it compels you to act for yourself and for others.
Life isn’t about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself; and a large part of that journey is found through struggle, guided by friction, and outlined by scarcity. A world without scarcity would be one without value: not because things cost nothing, but because nothing matters enough to cost anything at all.
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One of the best writers on the internet, there is too much to engage with. I fight all of these every day in financial writing, mostly because they're also so dumb and so apparent ... and so alluring.
One example which can help illustrate this is Flint's water system. These similar people say water is a human right and should be free. Okay, Detroit, 1810. The Detroit River is right there, it's free, clean, and infinite. What's the problem?
Well, a man with a bucket must go down to the water and get it. The "water" may be free. The bucket, time, man, path, is not. __That's why we built the water system, you fools.__ Having that SYSTEM was cheaper. To get the "free" water, to your sink, still clean. Understand?
Essentially Detroit still has unlimited free, clean water today. As the upper great lakes you can essentially drink it off the rocks at shore. So they're saying they want free water as a human right. You got it! ...Except that YOU, and you alone, would have to do the work to take your bike down 6 miles to the shoreline. So? Do it. Nobody's stopping you, literally.
That's why it's such an illuminating example.
Oh no, you want it piped to your house for free, with all those worker's work for free. Yeah, that's called slavery: no.
I really enjoyed this. Thank you. It took me 3 times through the Hans Zimmer song. What I found the most interesting was humans and their equilibrium. Most humans seek stasis whether they know it or not.