There are two sides to this coin. Usually coins have two sides, and in cases like pos-scarcity one side is quite visible, the other not so much. The visible side is "enough of everything for everyone". Without going into details, it means enough water, food, power... One difficulty is of course the exact definition of the word "enough". In theory there is only so much cheesecake one can eat before getting sick (even I have this limit), so robot cheesecake factory needs to produce only certain amount - but then... some industrious little gnome will find alternative usage for cheesecake, like spreading ten thousand tonnes of it on a mountain slope and put his skis on. It is simply what happens to unlimited resources - they won't stay unlimited. Available resources will be used. That's the law of nature. That's why we need money really, to limit resource usage. Money in today's primitive form was a start, now we can have blockchain comprehensive solution/extension. But yes, accounting. Must have, or else even Sahara could run out of sand. And just to explain, money is just a tool misused by current economic/social system. We can't get rid of the system by getting rid of money.
Second side of the post-scarcity coin is work needing to be done. As long as there is garbage to dispose of, plumbing to be unclogged, proverbial burgers to be flipped - by human hands - we will not have gone beyond scarcity.
Those two sides condition existence of one another. There must be scarcity of goods, so there can be "rewards" for taking out trash, so someone actually does it. But then we have someone whose existence depends on the reward (water. food), and thus we have the fear of joblessness, so in some cases work is artificially created just to ensure the status quo. Like coal mining in Poland - instead of thinking about greener sources, we have a very strong representation of miners, who won't have anything less than the current state of things to continue. They want to mine coal and get paid well for doing so, and to hell with reason.
That's why Universal Basic Income is just a bandaid on otherwise lethal wound. The only hope is that it could enable that jump to true post-scarcity.. When no work needs to be done... Not that there will be no work left - there will be plenty left improving the system, making it better, fixing problems - but it would be voluntary. Similar to open source type of thing. Not everyone will be happy to just sit there and contemplate life free from effort and creativity...
But we're talking not only about unpleasant low-skill jobs that need to go away... Digression: plumbing is by no means "low-skill" job, but it can only be truly appreciated when one had a chance to witness what an unskilled plumber can do (and how much skill it takes to fix plumbing after). So... we're talking about everything that "needs" doing, even if it's somehow considered "noble" or "high-profile". Like banking. We need banking, but we do not need bankers. Similarly we need laws, but we do not need lawyers. We need rules, but we do not rulers. And we need neither advertisement nor advertisers, they can go together into oblivion and scary fairytales for children.
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Interesting. What would you say of the psychological need to "create" scarcity as a way of instilling meaning, and giving people something to compete over?
I speak as somebody who just found my favourite PS1 game on ebay, for $500. Apparently, its a cult classic and a collectors item.
To me, this implies that some degree of scarcity will always re-establish itself, through our own capacity for boredom. I'm curious what you think.
Thank you :) Today my son found, somewhere in depths of my old toolboxes, a small metal plate with an eagle and "born to ride" inscription - something I took from my first serious motorcycle. It's objective value is about zero, but it is unique and valuable in non-monetary terms. Valuable only to me.
Cult classics are similar in that sense - items that have meaning to only some people, but those chosen few will gladly give $500 for the item that many other people would consider, well, rubbish. Soo... the scarcity I had in mind was simple matter of stuff that is necessary to live (water, food, shelter), but has no special meaning on its own. Oh, it can, of course:
https://www.mostluxuriouslist.com/top-10-expensive-bottled-waters-world/
but that water is not expensive because o scarcity - it is expensive because of uniqueness. To me it's not quite the same thing, uniqueness is scarcity in some respect, but it has slightly different tone - scarcity is about things you need, and uniqueness about the things you want. I preemptively agree that the boundary there can be blurred sometimes :) And I also think you are totally right, people will inevitably find something to give value to... because psychology. Maybe because in our culture we're taught to never be satisfied, it would be counterproductive to our economic system... :) And even if/when we have molecular duplicators, and we can copy Mona Lisa atom by atom, and we had exact copies of the painting, they will be worth $100. The original will remain exactly as expensive as it is now.
Interesting about the Mona Lisa and duplicators. I'd never run that thought experiment but I suspect you are right: the original might even increase in value, after suddenly being the "one and true original" among a sea of replicas.
I think in both of our cases, (PS1 game and motorcycle memorabilia) what people are ultimately paying for is the nostalgia. It's basically placebo: you are willing to pay whatever price is necessary to convince yourself to experience a nostalgic rush. In such cases, both originality, and high resource sacrifice/unobtainability, work positively to make this all believable.
How weird?