Juanjo Gasull for Vox
How we can turn a post-scarcity economy from a dream to a reality.
As the Allies advanced through German territories in the last year of World War II, they found millions of famine victims. They could free them from Nazi subjugation, but they didn’t know how best to walk them back from the brink of starvation. Would immediate feasts do the trick? Or would that shock their systems? Would a more controlled, gradual reintroduction of calories better ease their bodies back to health? To find out, scientists designed the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.
Thirty-six conscientious objectors, selected from more than 200 volunteers, lived in a dorm under observation for a year, 24 weeks of which they spent on a starvation diet. The researchers saw what you might expect: enough fat loss that even sitting became painful, slowed metabolisms, and fatigue. What they did not anticipate, however, was how their subjects’ minds also began to change.
As science writer Sharman Apt Russell recounts in her book, Hunger: An Unnatural History, obsessions emerged around cookbooks and local restaurant menus. Some subjects started spending hours comparing fruit and vegetable prices across newspapers. Others began reconsidering their professions, contemplating pivots into agriculture or restaurants. Their minds, ambitions, and attention began to focus obsessively on precisely that which they lacked.
But extreme hunger is only one form of lack. In their 2013 book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, behavioral scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir wondered if different types of scarcities — like those of money, time, and relationships — transformed the mind in similar ways.
“Just as the starving subjects had food on their mind, when we experience scarcity of any kind, we become absorbed by it,” they found. “The mind orients automatically, powerfully, toward unfulfilled needs.”
This scarcity mentality can offer benefits, like elevating focus on an urgent task at hand. But the costs are significant. In concrete terms, Mullainathan and Shafir found that scarcity reduces both fluid intelligence and executive control, two aspects of what they call mental bandwidth. “Because we are preoccupied by scarcity, we have less mind to give the rest of life,” they wrote. “It makes us less insightful, less forward-thinking, less controlled.”
For centuries, a lineage of thinkers ranging from Utopia author Thomas More in 1516 to economists like John Maynard Keynes in 1930 homed in on scarcity as both a force and a cultural logic that distorts not only mental bandwidth in the present, but also the potential futures of individuals and society at large. Sociologist Aaron Benanav, author of Automation and the Future of Work, sees these thinkers as part of the “post-scarcity tradition,” where they imagine what human development would be when liberated from the gravitational, detrimental pull of scarcity. If everyone’s basic needs were unconditionally met, people would be more free to choose how to spend their time and, as a result, new forms of post-scarcity mentalities could flourish.
In one sense, scarcity is a universal condition. If, like Shafir and Mullainathan, you define scarcity as “having less than you feel you need,” there will probably always be something humans want more of. Existentially, our mortality guarantees that, at a minimum, we all face a scarcity of time.
In a historical sense, however, scarcity is not a simple and universal fact, but a social and political construct that shapes the course of history as it changes. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, scarcity was widely understood as a temporary condition that new technologies and organized workers would soon overcome. But toward the end of the 20th century, a new economic framework recast scarcity as a permanent feature of the human condition. Visions of a world without work gave way to more modest utopias: 40-hour workweeks and rising wages for all.
Today, as economic frameworks are shifting once again, the idea of post-scarcity is traveling back from the fringes. Across academic papers, progressive movements, and even Silicon Valley titans like Sam Altman, we’re once again grappling with the real possibility of a post-scarcity society. Those thinkers differ over what the cause might be: revolutionary politics, perhaps, or all-knowing artificial intelligence. The decisive questions, however, are what “post-scarcity” actually means and how to get there.
For some technologists, post-scarcity means a world of full automation. Whatever your desire — a new car, a modernized beach hut, or a slice of maple-walnut baklava — advanced technologies could produce them so cheaply they’d basically be free. This is the future as Star Trek fanfiction, and sure, it would be nice to press a button on your replicator and get tea, Earl Grey, hot. But we’re nowhere near that kind of productive capacity, and the prophecies of AI proponents notwithstanding, there’s no guarantee we’ll get there.
In contrast, there’s another, more modest interpretation of post-scarcity that doesn’t require any new technologies, just a shift in politics and power. “A literal cornucopia is not required,” Benanav writes. “It is only necessary that scarcity and its accompanying mentality be overcome.”
The key to overcoming that scarcity mentality — which unites Thomas More’s vision 500 years ago with the flurry of new progressive visions today — is unconditionally meeting everyone’s basic needs: not just enough calories to survive and shelter from the heavens, but whatever is required to live a dignified life according to prevailing cultural norms. This understanding of post-scarcity grounds it as an option in the present, rather than a futuristic vision based on technological abilities we still don’t have.
If automation enthusiasts seize the idea of post-scarcity, it will remain pegged to the horizon, forever suspended just beyond the here and now. Returning to the post-scarcity tradition, though, with a focus on unconditionally meeting basic needs, could help turn the idea of post-scarcity into a powerful vision for present-day progress.
Where did scarcity come from?
Scarcity, particularly as most economics students know it today, is a relatively modern construction.
Most undergraduates still encounter a definition of economics based on Paul Samuelson’s 1948 textbook, which goes something like this: Economics is the study of how societies allocate scarce resources among competing ends. (I had a business economics professor who told us that definition was the most important thing he could teach us, and also we’d fail if we didn’t memorize it.)
“Ours is a world of scarcity,” Samuelson writes. “All your life — from cradle to grave and beyond — you will run up against the brutal truths of economics.”
This vision of inescapable scarcity comes from the body of theory known as neoclassical economics, But its matter-of-fact presentation conceals a long history of radically different views.
Before neoclassical scarcity rose to dominate the textbooks, what historians Carl Wennerlind and Fredrik Jonsson call the competing vision of “socialist scarcity” was widely held. It arose in the early 1800s as a response to the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution. Though it was brutal in its early days — with children pushing coal carts deep underground for 18-hour shifts and adults crowded into windowless textile mills, coughing up blood while breathing in fibrous dust — the Industrial Revolution also stimulated the hope that technology would one day make production so powerful that it could easily meet all human needs. In this view, scarcity was a temporary condition that enough progress would soon overcome.
Confusingly, socialist scarcity was not confined to socialists. Capitalists, communists, business owners, and even conservative politicians all saw scarcity as temporary. Keynes captured the optimistic view shared by many in a short, speculative piece written in 1930, titled Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. Workweeks would slope down to around 15 hours, less for need than to keep us occupied and engaged in our communities. What Keynes called the “economic problem,” the struggle for subsistence, would become a relic of history.
But shortly after Keynes’s prediction, the average workweek stopped declining. The remarkable growth and stability of post-World War II conditions across the US and Europe diminished the appeal of anything that smelled like socialism. In 1948, Samuelson consolidated neoclassical ideas into his textbook that quickly became the standard, paving the way for the free-market era that followed.
In the worldview conjured by neoclassical equations, the crucial change that crowded out the possibility for post-scarcity was getting rid of the distinction between needs and wants. It didn’t matter what we must have and what we felt we must have. Instead, the two were combined into a single category: desire. In the socialist schema of temporary scarcity, basic needs could be satisfied, while human wants or desires could extend infinitely.
Neoclassicals interpreted needs and wants as cut from the same cloth of desire, both representative of the rational individual’s decision-making process that seeks to maximize utility, which is the economists’ understanding of happiness. In doing away with the category of basic needs that could be satisfied, they built a new worldview where the idea of post-scarcity just didn’t fit (unless you have those Star Trek holodecks). Insatiable desire inevitably meant infinite scarcity.
The new post-scarcity debate
Settling the clash between socialist and neoclassical versions of scarcity fixed the social agenda for the decades that followed. Rather than focusing on meeting everyone’s basic needs and reducing the workweek, the American economy set course to free the markets with a laissez-faire approach to competition, privatizing public services in the name of efficiency, lowering taxes, avoiding deficits, and fastening work requirements to welfare programs.
While neoclassical became what the economics profession would treat as common sense, socialist scarcity stayed alive in critiques of capitalism, albeit at the fringes of economic discourse. Murray Bookchin, author of the 1971 book Post-Scarcity Anarchism, argued that capitalism, despite the astounding increases in human living standards, had been turned around to sustain the very scarcity it once hoped to overcome: “A century ago, scarcity had to be endured; today, it has to be enforced.”
Half a century later, forecasts of an abundant future with economic security for all are once again breaking through the politics of scarcity. But there’s no coherent vision for what the return of post-scarcity means. Instead, there’s a scattered landscape of competing interpretations, each offering a different vision for the future and political roadmaps for how to get there.
Broadly, there are two main versions of post-scarcity today. First, there’s technological post-scarcity. This view focuses on innovation and automation as critical for reaching any sort of utopian future. Even before the rapid AI progress of recent years revved up automation forecasts, technologists saw worlds of abundance quickly approaching — as soon as 2035, as one futurist foresaw, even the world’s poorest would be able to meet their desires.
Technological post-scarcity may be associated with the lords of Silicon Valley, but it runs across the political spectrum. On the anti-capitalist left, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ book Inventing the Future and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism position technology and automation as key catalysts — if steered by a resurgent leftist political movement — for post-scarcity futures.
But technological post-scarcity, like neoclassical economics, generally avoids defining a boundary between needs and wants. Instead, technology and automation will allow us to satisfy them both, making the distinction irrelevant.
While any form of post-scarcity’s return signals a welcome revival in utopian thinking, hitching it to technology has important consequences. First, it frames radical improvements in our economic lives as prospects for the future that rely on new technologies we may hope will come to be, rather than options for the present that can be won through social movements and different policy choices. That worsens the progressive left’s ongoing lack of inspiring visions for the future that have any semblance of feasibility in the present.
Progressive economists today like Mark Paul argue that wealthy economies such as the US have already amassed enough resources to achieve post-scarcity, echoing Bookchin (if all US household wealth were distributed evenly across the population, everyone would have about $450,000). The barrier isn’t new technologies or freer markets; it’s politics and power. “I would argue that since the ’60s, we’ve lived in this post-scarcity world, meaning that we can eradicate poverty and economic insecurity. They’re choices, and yet we choose to perpetuate them,” Paul told Vox.
The second consequence of pinning post-scarcity on technology is that it betrays the longstanding tradition of post-scarcity theorists. From Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516 through to Keynes, Bookchin, and Benanav today, post-scarcity has been more modestly focused on unconditionally meeting everyone’s basic needs, which excludes the more expansive, infinite range of human desires.
When the label of post-scarcity is invoked today, it’s usually in the context of technology. But this second flavor — a post-scarcity of needs — has been undergoing its own revival of interest, even if under different labels.
The 2008 financial crash shook confidence in the neoclassical logic that failed to predict or prevent it. In 2011, the Occupy movement pried the crack in its dominance open, galvanizing what had been a dormant progressive movement. In the years since, a reappraisal of the economy’s failure to provide for everyone’s basic needs has launched a series of movements that each, in their own ways, aims to provide economic security for all. Whether the growing support for universal basic services, the Green New Deal’s inclusion of economic rights, or the national experiment with unconditional cash transfers for poor children, elements of a post-scarcity agenda are increasingly in play.
“You already have these demands,” Benanav said. “Part of the issue is that these are often presented as piecemeal reforms on the way to a better world. There isn’t a clear sense of how they all fit together. Post-scarcity gives us a positive vision of the future and shows how it all fits together into a coherent program.”
But will we still need to work in a post-scarcity society?
A fully automated post-scarcity society would make most employment obsolete, since no one would be compelled by the force of economic necessity to take a job. It’s like the Star Trek universe, where essentially infinite energy — thanks, I guess, to dilithium crystals — can be transformed into whatever people need. But without that powerful technology or abundant energy to power it, it’s unclear to what degree the more attainable scenarios of post-scarcity of needs would still require that everyone have jobs.
By definition, a post-scarcity of needs implies that everyone should have access to the basics, no matter what. So long as we choose to work 40 hours (or more) a week primarily because we need those wages in order to live a dignified life, we aren’t living in any sort of post-scarcity. As Keynes envisioned back in 1930, the decisive shift occurs as the governing logic of daily life shifts away from making decisions or taking jobs based on necessity.
That said, even among experts I spoke to who hold the ideal of post-scarcity in high regard, no one thought that we’re currently in a position where we can just abolish employment altogether and still meet everyone’s basic needs. That sort of freedom, if it were to gather momentum, would still be a long-term political project.
But neither did they believe that today’s standard of the 40-hour workweek is the best compromise between freedom and necessity that we can muster. “I don’t think we can all be working 15-hour weeks right now,” Paul said. “But is the right number 25? 35? I’m not sure, but I would contend it’s somewhere in that realm.”
Benanav feels that one part of the equation is to “raise the minimum of benefits that people have access to just for being human,” which would make it easier for people to choose to work less. But another important aspect is a push to democratize work, too. That would make it easier to share “the work that remains to be done in a way that restores dignity, autonomy, and purpose to working life without making work the center of our shared, social existence,” he writes.
Free from the biblical command that “if any would not work, neither should he eat,” everyone would have more bandwidth to give toward what Thomas More saw way back in 1516 as the true wealth of a post-scarcity society: the mindset that arises from unconditionally meeting everyone’s basic needs, allowing them “to live with a joyful and tranquil frame of mind, with no worries about making a living.”
Wennerlind pointed out that this focus on enabling new mindsets is a common thread running through the post-scarcity tradition. He explained when socialist scarcity was the common understanding, the point of economic progress wasn’t just about improving material conditions. It was about how doing so would free the human mind from scarcity’s grip: “If you look at people like Keynes or Marx, they believe that technology can continue to expand the amount of material goods produced. But they also talked about a new mindset, a mindset that would help people to engage with life in a more artful, creative, and convivial way.”
If we successfully moved beyond the scarcity of basic needs, new expressions of scarcity would rise to fill the void. Whether status, desire, time, or our own mortality, there’s always some form of scarcity at hand. This strikes me as good news; there are more interesting scarcities to organize ourselves, our minds, and our aspirations around than lack of basic needs or the jobs we must work to meet them. “The idea that we should content ourselves with the struggle for survival is such a horrifying vision for our species,” Benanav told me.
With that age-old economic problem settled, we could orient around richer scarcities, like human connection or the ultimate scarcity: time. What kinds of utopias and political agendas would a society preoccupied with the finitude of life imagine?
As a long-term project, post-scarcity is more of a question than an answer, widening the scope of what sorts of human beings we might wish to become, and organizing our resources so that everyone can participate in the eternal work of figuring it out.