Draft:Post scarcity

"Microsoft is important for the open source movement in many ways. All software developers are moving towards the "gift economy" in a "post scarcity society". ... It is not very clear how "many programmers" can create a "wealth surplus" to live in a post-scarcity gift culture."^[1]

Def. "the condition of something being" uncommon, rare; difficult to find; insufficient to meet a demand, "or deficient" or "an inadequate amount of something; a shortage"^[2] is called a scarcity.

Scarcity is the limited availability of a commodity, which may be in demand in the market. Scarcity also includes an individual's lack of resources to buy commodities.^[3]

Scarcity refers to a gap between Non-renewable resource, limited resources and theoretically limitless wants^[4]. The notion of scarcity is that there is never enough (of something) to satisfy all conceivable human wants, even at advanced states of human technology. Scarcity involves making a sacrifice—giving something up, or making a tradeoff—in order to obtain more of the scarce resource that is wanted.^[5]

The condition of scarcity in the real world necessitates competition for scarce resources, and competition occurs "when people strive to meet the criteria that are being used to determine who gets what".^[5] The price system, or market prices, are one way to allocate scarce resources. "If a society coordinates economic plans on the basis of willingness to pay money, members of that society will [strive to compete] to make money"^[5] If other criteria are used, we would expect to see competition in terms of those other criteria.^[5]

Economics is "the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses".^[6]

Def. after "the elimination of scarcity; in a time when society has sufficient resources"^[7] is called a postscarcity.

"Key to this shifting and increasingly important concept is the proposition that the world has altered and new dangers are replacing the old stalwarts of class and economic privation as the West moves to a post-scarcity society."^[8]

"While it may be too early to identify specific winners and losers, we can venture some general observations about the impact of a post-scarcity regime."^[9]

1. When a society has sufficient resources, people will breed more people to increase the need for more resources.
2. Society has sufficient resources now, but a dominant group cannot become wealthy relative to everyone else until they control most of those resources to create a scarcity.

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