When will Basic Post Scarcity Economy be achieved by a nation state?
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1kṀ391
2030
15%
2080
14%
Other
12%
2070
11%
AFTER widespread Bitcoin adoption
9%
2050
8%
Lmao
8%
2060
8%
2040
8%
2090
3%
2100
Let's define a Basic Post Scarcity Economy as an economic system in which all the basic necessities are provided for free, without requiring any kind of labour in exchange. In this economy working it's entirely optional during the entire lifetime. It is expected that such a lifestyle can be enabled by a widespread automation of the current productive activities. The adjective "basic" is added to discriminate this economy from the related post-scarcity economy in which also luxury goods are widely available. When will Basic Post Scarcity Economy be achieved by a nation state? For the sake of this forecast, these will be the requirements for a Basic Post Scarcity Economy: -The following basic services and goods should be provided for free to any citizen: Healthcare, Education, Housing, Food, Clothing, Transportation, Internet and Telecommunication, Utilities, Basic household appliances and furniture (e.g. bed, fridge, etc.), basic personal computing (e.g a phone and a computer). -Such services are available for free for an unlimited time period. -Such services should be abundant (e.g. a citizen can require an arbitrary amount of surgeries, a heterogeneous diet, transportation replacements in case of broken components, etc.), but they don't need to be unlimited. For instance requests for free housing in specific places or oversized requirements for food supplies may be refused as they are not considered basic. -The citizens should not be asked to perform any specific labour activity and should be free to decide how to spend their time, have free speech and be free to follow specific religions and ideologies. Minor duties (such as registering IDs, attending some meetings, education requirements, participation in voting) can be still present. Moreover citizens are still required to follow laws and safety regulations. -Such freedom should be granted to at least 99% of the citizens at any given time. That is a small part of the population can be still required to perform some work activities. If such working population is required, it should not be forced to work for more than 5 years in a lifetime. -Non basic services and goods should still be available for purchase by any citizen. The question resolves when a nation state with population greater than 500.000 approves a bill which (combined with previous laws) fulfils the requirements of a Basic Post Scarcity Economy. Please reply with the decade in which the first Basic Post Scarcity Economy be achieved by a nation state. For instance 2030s, 2040, etc.
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Relevant project to estimate what is missing to achieve basic post-scarcity: https://postscarcitymap.org/

> Let's define a Basic Post Scarcity Economy as an economic system in which all the basic necessities are provided for free, without requiring any kind of labour in exchange. I think post-scarcity will be achieved reasonably soon, but that most implementations (and certainly not the first implementation) will not meet this definition. Instead it will be implemented via a universal basic income, negative income tax or similar arrangement: things still cost money, but everyone is guaranteed a certain amount of money per year without needing to work. This messes up the resolution criteria of markets like this, since it's hard to look at a dollar amount and figure out whether it's enough to buy the listed set of things, if the dollar amount is at all close to borderline.
@JamesBabcock Yep, this market is about a stronger level of support than just UBI. It will likely require substantial advancements in robotics and AI. I do agree that UBI on top of the current system will be the first step towards that.
@LorenzoPieri I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. To make this concrete, consider two worlds. In world 1, the employment-population ratio is 10%, government gives everyone $200k/year (inflation adjusted), and things cost about the same as now, purchased from corporations that own highly automated factories which compete in the same way corporations do now. In world 2, the employment-population ratio is 10%, government gives everyone a house, food, clothes, etc, produced by corporations that own highly automated factories that have government contracts to be the providers. Both of these worlds are post-scarcity, but world 1 is more plausible and world 2 is dystopian.
@JamesBabcock How about option 3 (or really 1+2): free housing, food, etc. and a substantial UBI. More generally, there are hundreds of ways on how to do this, every nation will do it a bit differently. Also worth stressing that the corporations building these basics may do it at a loss (as today public transportation often do) and the old fashioned capitalism is full steam on industries such as entertainment, premium food, premium clothing, etc.
I disagree with the pessimistic comments about this being impossible. I don't even think meeting everyone's basic needs requires what people probably think of when one says "post-scarcity" - I believe it could even be done today in some countries with the same resources but different policy. The per capita cost of meeting everyone's basic needs can probably be seen as roughly the poverty line, since that's usually calculated based on the annual cost of all essential resources that a person consumes (the largest component typically being housing). Using the US as an example, the per capita GDP is $63k and the poverty line is around $7-10k per person (it's usually defined by household). This starting figure is already pretty solid evidence that we have the resources, and it's just a question of distribution and policy. But it's not like we have to "pay" an extra $10k for every person - most households are already above the poverty line, so the real cost is substantially less. https://prospect.org/power/much-money-take-eliminate-poverty-america/ calculates the cost to bring every person up to the poverty line, and it's only 1% of GDP! I don't think that the way to meet these basic needs is by directly providing all of them via housing vouchers, food stamps, etc - it can make sense for some of them, but I favor providing for many needs via a universal basic income, which I also argue is cheap enough that it could be implemented today essentially as a more efficient replacement for many existing social safety net programs - see https://manifold.markets/ManifoldMarkets/universal-basic-income-should-exist. So I think many countries could already do it today with existing resources, and it's mainly a question of policy. Of course, increased resources helps make it much easier.
@jack Excellent analysis. A caveat I would make is that today, even with the right policy and UBI, somebody is needed to flip burgers, clean toilets and pack goods. Who is going to that if anybody has access to unlimited basic resources and is not required to work? Nobody. Today we need to force people to work in some way, even if we have plenty of resources available (e.g. see Norway wealth fund https://www.nbim.no/). To overcome this situation, we need to provide automated solution for all those tasks, so that as a society people may work, but don't need to. I elaborated more on this constrain here: https://lorenzopieri.com/post_scarcity/
@LorenzoPieri If I have to clean my own toilet or cook my own burger, are my "basic needs" being unmet?
@MartinRandall There is a huge difference between having to work 40 hours a week + commute + bureaucracy + time for job search + etc. vs spending some time daily to do house chores. So no, "basic needs" are not being unmet.
@LorenzoPieri Ok, so in that case we don't need an automated solution to cleaning toilets, we can just have people clean their own toilets.
@MartinRandall Sure, but what about offices, stations or public places. Basically any scenario which today requires professional cleaners.
From each according to his laziness, to each according to his/her/them’s desire for “unlimited surgeries”
Say what you will about Marx (doesn’t understand a lick of economics), at least he made the vision sound a bit more reasonable than “your exact definition of 2020 era upperish middle class comfort, but deep in the future” Hint: wants expand over time. Welfare and public housing, even prison camps, are early twentieth century comfort. Whenever you think this will resolve, it won’t. Because people will have more wants or define “compUter and FridGE” to be vastly better technologies.
@Gigacasting Humans have basic biological needs, and those don't change too much, this question is focusing on those basic aspects. Feel free to change your answer (which to me read as "Never") if this clarifies.
Current welfare and public housing is still not free and universal. The resolution criteria should be pretty clear: all cititisens have access to a layer of free resources satisfying all the basic needs (indefinitely, not for a limited period). Again, the fact that people will want more than this (status, gadget, luxury, etc.) is out of scope here.
@LorenzoPieri You can definitely claim biological anchors to human needs, but then those needs can't reasonably include a bed, a fridge, a phone, and a computer, since we don't have a basic biological need for those things.
@MartinRandall Agree, those are somewhat extras, but they already don't matter much in the bigger picture, they are (rough estimate) less than 0.5% of what a person spend in its lifetime. The real deal are housing, healthcare, food, infrastructure, utilities, etc. I inserted those to avoid edge cases in which purchasing power becomes so low for non-working citisens that even those items become too expensive. Basically an in-principle post-scarce economy, but in which people are de facto still forced to work to access basic day-to-day goods.
@LorenzoPieri People have a basic biological need for shelter, but "basic housing" has meant very different things over time. In the US it is literally illegal to provide the level of housing that was considered basic a hundred years ago. So is "Basic Post-Scarcity" achieved when everyone has their own bedroom, as a hundred years ago, or when everyone has their own bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, as now, or when everyone has their own "basic" habitat dome, as perhaps in a hundred years? Very unclear how you'd resolve this market.
@MartinRandall I would resolve it when everyone has free housing that it's considered safe and healthy, but not necessarly confortable, to live in. The requirement is actually pretty low, even a shared beedroom for 2 people would count in my view. Remember that nobody is forced to accept the basic level, it is just a free option available.
Some background resources on post scarcity: https://github.com/lorepieri8/awesome-post-scarcity
@LorenzoPieri Never, due to patents and copyrights creating inherent cost of products even as automation reduces the real cost to virtually zero. Small communities using Open Source software and hardware, maybe 5 years for an emulation of post-scarcity, what I've been calling 'near post-scarcity'. Two reasons, at an Open Source, community level there are things that the community will need that they can't produce themselves, very large scale integrated circuits for one (although there is a YouTube content producer who is creating +1,000 transistor chips in his basement) and second because AI and automation at that level aren't able to handle the entire process yet so 'some assembly required'. A community like this would need to produce surpluses of the things they can produce to sell for what they can't. So rather than factors of poroduction in the hands of an investor class or the government, how about the factors of production in the hands of the individual, in cooperation with their immediate neighbors?
@MichaelDaniels patents and copyrights have an expiration date, so I don't see issues there, the may just delay the process. Also consider that the marginal cost of sustaining such a policy will get lower and lower, as the basic needs are fixed while automation gets better.

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