Great series! I broadly agree with it and the approach. However, this post has given me a vagueish "no matter how many things are abundant, the economic rat-race is inescapable" vibe which I disagree with.

Towards the end, a grocer explains the new status quo eloquently:

"... not very many people will buy beans and chuck roast, when they can eat wild rice and smoked pheasant breast. So, you know what I've been thinking? I think what we'll have to have, instead of a supermarket, is a sort of super-delicatessen. Just one item each of every fancy food from all over the world, thousands and thousands, all different"

I see the idea here but I disagree with it. I'm a human for goodness sake! I eat food to stay alive and to stay healthy and for the pure pleasure of eating it! Neither my time nor my money is a worthy trade-off for special unique food if it's not going to do any of those things significantly better. I grant that there might be a niche market for this kind of thing but, the way I see it, being free of the need for material goods will free people from the rat-race: It will let them completely abandon their existing financial strategies insofar as those strategies were previously necessary to keep them alive.

This is what the FIRE community does. They save up enough money so that they only participate in the economy as much as it actually improves their lives.

Why? Because material goods are not the only economic constraints. If a medieval book-maker has an unlimited pile of parchment, then he’ll be limited by the constraint on transcriptionists. As material goods constraints are relaxed, other constraints become taut.

Broadly speaking, I agree with the description here of economic supply chains as a sequence of steps (ie potential bottle-necks. But, in general, I perceive these sequences of steps as finite. For example, the book-maker has unlimited parchment and is then limited by transcriptionists, so the book-maker automated transcription and is limited by books, so the book-maker automates writing (or it turns out the number of writers wasn't a real bottleneck) so what then? Bookstores are shuttering. I have the internet and the last time I handed money to anyone in the book-making supply chain was because I wanted something to read on the plane.

Again, maybe there's a niche market for more unique books or more elegantly bound collectible books but that's a market I can opt out of. It's superfluous to me having a good life.

Here’s one good you can’t just throw on a duplicator: a college degree.

A college degree is more than just words on paper. It’s a badge, a mark of achievement. You can duplicate the badge, but that won’t duplicate the achievement.

I didn't get my college degree to signal social status. I got it because I wanted to get a nice job. I wanted to get a nice job so I could get money. I wanted to get money so that I could use it towards the aim of having a fulfilling life. Give me all the material goods and I would've probably just learned botany instead.

So, to me, college degrees (and other intangible badges of achievement) haven't become the things they are because of abundance, they've become the things they are because social status will be instrumental to gaining important life-enhancing things for as long as those things are not abundant.

Social status might be vaguely zero-sum but, beyond a couple friends, it's not critical for living a good life. Given the tools to live a good life, I imagine many people just opting out of the economy. I'm not going to work for eight hours a day to zero-sum compete for more social status alone.

But given that things have in fact become way more abundant, why haven't we seen more of this opting out happening? Two answers:

1.

We have. Besides the FIRE community, we see it in retirees. I've personally seen it in a number of middle-aged adults who realize that trying to find another job in this tech'd up world just isn't worth the hassle when they have enough to get by on.

2.

With all this talk of zero-sum games, the last piece of the post-scarcity puzzle should come as no surprise: political rent-seeking.

Once we accept that economics does not disappear in the absence of material scarcity, that there will always be something scarce, we immediately need to worry about people creating artificial scarcity to claim more wealth.

Yep. I'd generalize rent-seeking beyond just politics and into the realm of moral maze rent-seeking but yep. I'd actually view the college-corporate complex as a subtrope of this. Colleges as a whole (for reasons of inadequate equilibria) collectively own the keys long-term social stability (excluding people who want to go into trades, and who are confident that those trades won't go away). They do this and charge a heckuva lot of money for it despite not actually providing much intrinsic value beyond fitting well into the existing incentive structure.

Remove material goods as a taut economic constraint, and what do you get? The same old rat race. Material goods no longer scarce? Sell intangible value. Sell status signals. There will always be a taut constraint somewhere.

Status symbol competition doesn't scare me in a post-material-scarcity world; I can do just fine without it. What terrifies me is the possibility of rent-seekers (or complex incentive structures) systematically inducing artificial scarcity into material that I care about despite it not literally being scarce.

(crossposted from a recent facebook post)

Social orders function on the back of unfakeably costly signals. Proof of Work social orders encourage people to compete to burn more resources, Proof of Stake social orders encourage people to invest more into the common pool. PoS requires reliable reputation tracking and capital formation. They aren't mutually exclusive, as both kinds of orders are operating all the time. People heavily invested in one will tend to view those heavily invested in the other as defectors. There is a market for narratives that help villainize the other strategy.

A duplicator world is much more strongly positive sum than our current one. If I have any kind of nice material good, I can let you benefit from it at no cost to me. I would also expect the shear shock to collapse many bureaucracies. A society where say 50% of people make something, in the sense of someone who likes gardening and makes some fresh veg, or someone who likes making cloths. These people will not work very hard, and everyone else won't work at all. (These people are doing it for much the same reason people have hobbies today. Putting a duplicator, a strawberry and a sign saying "help yourself" on the porch takes next to no effort, and is a friendly thing to do. ) The economy will thrive mostly on a take a copy, pass it on model. Over time, a more complex economy will reappear, and the name of the currency will be customization. If you want a painting of your self, or a coat tailored to your unique taste in fashion, you have to pay serious money for it. Large complex companies could be sustained that made say, motorcars. There would be a team of people who knew how every part went together, and had the tools to do complex custom jobs. If you just want a car that works, it costs you nothing or next to nothing. If you want a black and yellow striped car with extra large wheels, they are going to charge you for that, and they have the advantage in expertise that means they can do a better job with less effort than a garage mechanic. This would support an economy that has some sort of R&D chain. Some sort of copyright law might or might not exist, but there will be enough people prepared to let you copy their stuff for free that this will be a limit on some luxury or specific goods. Like modern software, not all of it is open source, but unless you have some unusual and specific requirement, you can probably do it with open source software.

Fun thing I thought about while reading this post: it applies pretty well for predicting the recent explosion of NFTs, which are basically a huge number of badges attached to things that can be copied or manufactured easily.

One of the things related to food that I noticed reading the story was that you still need primary food production even in the world of the duplicator, since it duplicates the food exactly as it is, food will still go bad.  The duplicate is just as old as the original.  Sure, canned beans will last a while so you can keep duplicating them for years, probably, without concern, but if you buy a loaf of bread you will only be able to duplicate it and eat the product for the same length of time that it would usually take your bread to get moldy.

You don't need much fresh food, but you still need it.  I guess you'd get communities of people sharing a single loaf (or slice) of bread to be duplicated, a single apple, etc.  Or just a grocer who buys a small amount of produce and sells the right to duplicate it to everyone in town.  A baker who makes one loaf of bread.  This is similar to the idea of the grocer in the story except the point isn't the diversity of offerings but just the fact that they are fresh.

The same will be true of goods as well, which wear out over time.  You can mitigate this by for instance keeping one copyable version of your shirt in you closet and wearing a duplicate which you replace when it gets worn and threadbare.  But even the protected original will decay eventually.  At some point, you need a new shirt, not a duplicate of an old one, which will also be old, but a new shirt that's newly manufactured.  The manufacturing process can certainly be made much more efficient with the duplicator, or course (you don't need to grow fields of cotton, you just need on cotton plant and then duplicate that, etc.)

Which makes me imagine a scenario where this society goes on for a while with everyone just making duplicates of the original stock of stuff and keeping things work pretty well for a while, until one day all that old stuff starts to wear out but at this point no one is alive who remembers how to make it, and civilization is lost.  Maybe that's the fate that the aliens at the beginning were predicting...

I think you are right to point to the underlying shift in incentives as various constraints are relaxed and others become binding. I also think you could probably increase the Public Choice/Political Economy insights here. What would/are the impacts to policy and politics and government structure/services/role under these types of changes.

Still, I don't think it really leads to as bad an outcome as seems implied here. In the duplicator case, a limit/extreme, it is clear even in most expected scenarios of "fabricated" scarcity in the collective sense we will be at a much higher production frontier and everyone having a much greater real income/consumption standard. I think the scenarios where that is not the case (think most of the dystopian ScFi worlds) are unlikely.

I think the rat races does change a bit here, but clearly the constraints will be on intellectual and innovation/design (and possible the coordination margins you've already identified). I do wonder if there is more scope for the old "tune in, turn on and drop out" with the emphasis on dropping out of the race and economy (autarky is possible).