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Comment by ball_of_lint | Hacker News Reader

Jobs are the simplest and most striking example of incentives. "Do this and you will get money, which you can spend on food and shelter".

Where a person living in abundance can choose to ignore monetary incentives, most people cannot. If you want to make behavior X be what a broad selection of people do, the only available way today is incentives. And a lot of problems we face today are exactly this sort of collective action problem - recycle, vote for good leaders, don't shit in the well.

Yes, it would be better that we lived in a world where most people were not "losers" (I.E. needs to work for money), but we're certainly not there yet.

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The exchange of labor for money will never outpace its own absurdity to become a natural law.

We literally live in that world

What does this mean

The real natural law is scarcity.

We will always need a system to decide who gets to live by the ocean better than the default one, violence.

> The real natural law is scarcity.

That's the biggest myth of economics. It wasn't even true the pre-modern world except occasionally (famines were a real thing, but they were still kinda infrequent), and it's pretty much never true in an industrial civilization, let alone in an era of growing automation capabilities.

Yeah, most modern scarcity is artificially induced by producers, who will limit their supply to ensure their margins stay healthy.

However, land is one case where they aren’t making more of it. So, you are both right?

     scarcity
     myth
     wasn't true in pre-modern

Got bad news for you bub...

That I spend too much time reading history books? I know, but old habits die hard.

If resources are not scarce in industrial civilisation, why do you suppose people pay for them? Why is there a spot oil market, if oil is not scarce? And the same for all other commodities...

> If resources are not scarce in industrial civilisation, why do you suppose people pay for them?

Like most people I used to pay for a Windows license key, do you think that I had to pay for it because license keys are scarce?

> Why is there a spot oil market, if oil is not scarce?

Because we designed the oil market this way. In Europe, we didn't have a spot electricity price decades ago, but we have now.

Oil is typically a good example as the Saudi could pump twice as much oil whenever they like (and still have oil when we phase out oil consumption as we move to EV).

Resources are obviously finite, but most of them can't be called scarce because the natural limits aren't the limiting factor for how much there are of them in the market.

I wouldn't normally call a license key a resource. But to the extent I entertain the hypothetical: illegal windows unlocks aren't scarce, only the legal keys are, because the scarcity is purely legal. People pay for the legal keys to stay on the right side of the law.

> Oil is typically a good example as the Saudi could pump twice as much oil whenever they like (and still have oil when we phase out oil consumption as we move to EV).

A brave take when Saudi production is currently massively curtailed due to events out of their control. Sure _pumping_ is cheap, but that's only helpful if you want to consume the oil at the well head. Otherwise the true scarcity is in the whole supply chain. Resources are scarce because even if the reserves exist, extracting and distributing them is hard.

The key point is that scarcity isn't where price comes from. Price always comes from the fact that the producer seeks to recoup their upfront costs. If additional demand is there at the same price, suppliers of pretty much any good can always increase their output. When output is driven by demand instead of natural limits it's by definition the very opposite of scarcity.

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