08S7B trailblazers

A Shift in the Paragdim of Economics?

A short but interesting article here talks about the possibility that scarcity might, in the future, be rendered redundant.

Although a post-scarcity situation has been, thus far, the main premise for many science-fiction novels, the article points out that such a situation will be far from impossible in our future. Especially with the advent of solid freeform fabrication technologies, there is a possibility that labour and material constraints and costs no longer becomes an issue.

Of course, in these situations, there is still scarcity in the sense that only one person will be able, for example, to be the leader of a certain country, or occupy a certain position in a company. Such intangible forms of scarcity will still exist.

While I personally do not believe that such a situation will arise in our lifetimes, it is still interesting to speculate how abundance (instead of scarcity) becomes the key economic issue surrounding our lives, and how new economic principles might arise to deal with the new problem of abundance.

There is a high possibility that in such a situation, humans might no longer be motivated to further their material wealths (i.e. firms are no longer motivated by proft), and by extension, no longer be competitive. Artificial scarcity might also be imposed on large sectors of the economy, similar to digital media rights today (since the cost of software is not due to the labour and materials used to produce them, but due to the innovations involved in producing them).

Currently, only few are concerned with dealing with a new situation of abundance, though this number will undoubtedly increase as technologies advance.

posted by Yang Zi @ 3:46 PM