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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

In many aspects we've entered a post-scarcity society, to the extent that scarcity has to be invented by things like NFTs. For these people, they might as well have found a game breaking bug in the thing we call existence.

Of course, it would be nice if we got more of humanity on board with this first, what with the vast majority of the population being in poverty, or worse.

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Why does everyone act like this is some massive cultural shift or new phenomenon instead of the latest representation of one of humanity’s favorite pastimes.

It’s gambling. People have done it for millennia. You invent some system and some arbitrary rules about what’s valuable (the right domino, an ace of hearts, a jpeg of a monkey, a beanie baby) and then some people win some money and some people lose.

It’s happened before and it’ll happen again it’s the least surprising thing our culture has ever done. It’s just the superficial details that change every generation or two.

How can we be in post scarcity if millions of people are in poverty?

Perhaps it depends on who the "we" is.

It's another case of the future not being evenly distributed[0], presumably.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/681-the-future-is-already-h...

Well we have two worlds running in parallel as we stand: Most of North America, Europe and certain parts of Asia and the rest of the world. A large portion of what I refereed to "the rest of the world" is as distant from us as the middle ages. Not even apples to oranges at this point. Sure, you could argue that billions are poured into bridging that gap but the simple truth is that never works. Even if there wasn't an insane amount of corruption involved, that still would not cut it or change much: I had a professor back in the day who summed it up perfectly in one sentence: "No one has gotten out of poverty through charity". Though I absolutely adore Hans Rosling's "Factfullness", somehow I cannot find a way to share his optimism. And in his function as a doctor, I recon even he would have dialed down his optimism if he were alive now and witnessed how COVID was being handled for example.

>A large portion of what I refereed to "the rest of the world" is as distant from us as the middle ages. Sure, you could argue that billions are poured into bridging that gap but the simple truth is that never works.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-in-ex...

> The share of individuals living below the 'International Poverty Line' of 1.90 international-$ per day.

1.90 is absurdly low. That totals to $57 for a 30 day month. That hardly covers just your food and water intake in most areas of the world. If you live in the temperate climate zones where fresh water isn't extremely limited and your menu consists solely of rice and potatoes... Maybe, just maybe. I live in a relatively cheap country with plenty of fresh water around and that would get you 500 grams of rice and 2 liters of mineral water. At 70kg I could hypothetically just survive off of that but only just. Anywhere else where food and water requires transport or significant amounts of processing, you are very much screwed.

Indeed, this is why it's called "extreme poverty".

Isn't it terrible that despite this situation being as awful as you describe, it still applies to around 10% of all humans?

Most (all?) people on incomes like that practice subsistence farming and/or natural economy.

Also, state pension for many Russians (and Russia usually isn't considered a very poor country) is in the range of $130, which is just about twice higher. Add the fact that private pensions are very rare there, and you can see how thinking that that's "absurdly low" is a pretty privileged position.

I live in a country which is similar standards to Russia in that regard(say hi to the origin of your alphabet), so it's definitely not from a privileged position. Yeah, I make magnitudes above the average but that hasn't always been the case - growing in the 90's in a family which was considered a state enemy until the end of the communist regime is anything but privileged, as you can probably imagine. I've been in positions where an additional expense of 25$ seemed as distant as 1 billion. 130 may not seem all that different to you from 57 but to those with 57 in their pockets, 130 look worlds apart. Farming and natural economy is only applicable in rural areas. With the ongoing global urbanization, this will likely become more and more rare in the following decades, granted we recover from the effects of covid eventually, which I kinda doubt at this point.

As I see it Roslings optimism stems from looking at changes over tens of years and the progress that’s visible on these timescales.

I'm pretty sure the events surrounding COVID has undone most of that progress(assuming there's any left at this point). Our survival as a species is incredibly fragile and even more so with social media facilitating propaganda and misinformation. Even in developed countries, the situation is nothing short of depressing.

I thought about this as well and I'm not sure.

COVID potentially kills older and more vulnerable people. This might have reduced the burden for some people.

Of course payed by death which is never good but perhaps from a statistics point of view in 10 years.

I thought about this also when thinking about climate change and I think that might have a much more general bad effect.

In a world with a lot of riches (tons of still existing infrastructure) strong weather scenarios can destroy old and critical infrastructure much faster than time.

USA only were able to get more budget for infrastructure with Biden and have a huge deficit.

COVID is very weird as human life feels very cheap. While lots of people don't want to wear a mask (low effort) to save a life and in parallel we pay so much money as a society when someone has cancer and needs very expensive medication.

Let's give that person x access to medical procedures which cost a million and let others die while it would cost us much less to help them.for me personally COVID tanked my general assumption that we would be much more reasonable.

Not sure how to determine the loose on trust.

The US has a very diversified economy, which certainly limits the damages. There are countries which rely almost entirely on tourism for instance - Spain, Italy, Portugal, Croatia, Greece, they were all severely affected.

I am more pointing towards the millions out there who genuinely believe that Bill Gates is behind covid, that covid doesn't exist, that the vaccines contain microchips or are chemicals that destroy your reproductive capabilities. That substantially lowered my survival expectations as species.

Have you tried to buy a new GPU recently? :P

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