You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

nigerweiss comments on How should negative externalities be handled? (Warning: politics) - Less Wrong Discussion

-5 Post author: nigerweiss 08 May 2013 09:40PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (131)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: nigerweiss 08 May 2013 11:33:27PM 4 points [-]

I've heard this sort of thing before, and I've never been totally sold on the idea of post-scarcity economics. Mostly because I think that if you give me molecular nanotechnology, I, personally, can make good use of basically as much matter and energy (the only real resources) as I can get my hands on, with only moderately diminishing returns. If that's true for even a significant minority of the population, then there's no such thing as a post-scarcity economy, merely an extremely wealthy one.

In practice, I expect us all to be dead or under the watchful eye of some kind of Friendly power singlet by then, so the point is rather moot anyway.