On calories housing and most everyday things we are post scarcity if we ignore distribution. In fact we over commission and under deliver all these things. We over produce food by a factor of around 1.5, housing is much less transferable but even there we’re unbelievably wastefull, energy is basically the only thing that isn’t outright overproduced but really only because when we have cheap energy we just tend to use it, often to produce more stuff.
So imo we are by bookkeeping standards post scarcity, delivery/distribution is just fucked and partially because of that we are creating tons of waste.
We could all live in comfort and those who want to could work less, and none of this would break. The real world economy(things, energy, housing , food, water, logistics capabilities…) is so large and secure it could support the world population. If not for the barriers and assumptions, the intrinsic I’ve got mine fuck you of the systems.
For me that is being there, and I hope that even if you can’t agree on that point, it at least illustrates that we are incredibly close to post scarcity.
I’m pretty sure most of this is is loosely from “Half earth socialism”, which might not consider us already in post scarcity, but is at least sympathetic to the position while trying to approach the arguably more important factors,- climate change and biodiversity decline- through such a lens.
Examining how our lives could be lived, in accordance with the natural world systems, with a socialist organization of the world economy.
It’s pretty readable as far as these books go, I think it might even be the first explicitly socialist book I read /listened to.