“We have enough excess in society”

How are you measuring this? Hopefully something better than stock prices.

The other commentor mentioned food and clothes to you. I'll add that I can get food for free locally (soup kitchen style, although I don't think they actually serve soup) if I really need it.

Around 10% of houses in the US are vacant, although I'm sure a fair amount are that for good reasons (shitty locations, old and worn to high hell). This to me sounds like a resource allocation problem and not a lack-of-resources problem.

Energy could be free close to free if we made the right choices. The sun's right there. Unfortunately, we've been stuck in a political rut for a long while, making long term projects like 'do something about global warming' and 'transition away from fossil fuels' uninteresting.

Many medicines are only expensive due to patents and making up for research costs. Actual production is usually cheap as hell.

I don't have all the answers. People smarter than me might have them. But I do know that we can do better.

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pj_mukh 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes to all of this, and want to double stress the Housing theory of everything [1]. Most of the "scarcity" people feel today in the North American context is driven by housing. And there simply isn't enough of it. And citing badly measured vacancy stats does a huge disservice to the effort to fix this.

I agree we can do a lot better. And I have no moral qualms about giving the excess away to everyone who needs it. But I need people to admit that it will require a lot of work till we can sufficiently claim we have a real realizable "excess".

And that work requires the current system to work more "efficiently" and with "higher productivity", in the economic definition of the word, not as a personal valuation as OP defines.

[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

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Telaneo 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Housing is clearly the biggest problem, yes, and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem. But it's a big problem for political reasons. If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes', I'm sure it could happen. It's just not in the short-term (and long-term?) interests of the economy as it is now. Maybe we should do something about that?

Or maybe, just maybe, we should do it because it's a thing that raises people's quality of life? I only care about the economy insofar as it helps actual people on the ground, so I'll be happy to ignore it for things like this, assuming that doesn't put us in an even worse rut than we are in now.

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pj_mukh 2 hours ago | parent [-]

>If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes

The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1]. So, I don't think this is true :(.

We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.

[1]: https://medium.com/@dtxtransitposts/how-much-does-it-actuall...

	▲	Telaneo 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1]. That sounds worth it to me. > We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today. Sounds like something we need to fix then.
	▲	inigyou 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What if we let people build their own homes and gave them courses on how to do that? Also 1 trillion dollars sounds like a single year of national debt interest, the total amount spent and destroyed by the Iran war, or the Pentagon's black budget. I'm sure we can give up one of those for a year to fix every economic problem plaguing the country.

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butlike 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

By the fact medicine has an expiration date on the bottle. You can have so much of it you don't have the chance to use it all before it expires.

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pharrington 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the US, it can be measured by the overstocked food that gets discarded everyday, and by the houses that are vacant nine months a year.

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pj_mukh 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Just a note those "vacancies" include dilapidated buildings and housing that is between leases (literally all the housing on craigslist is included in that number).

Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.

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Zababa 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This assumes production of food is the bottleneck rather than distribution. If distribution is actually the bottleneck, overstocked food is not a measure of excess in society.

	▲	AnimalMuppet 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But individual grocery stores throw out a lot of food each day. So the problem isn't distribution, it's that nobody bought it.

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XorNot 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The world produces so much excess food we pay farmers not to grow it and fast fashion brands burn unsold merchandise in the desert.

	▲	anovikov 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		...and the food part, it's been this way for almost a hundred years now - with agricultural productivity skyrocketing in between. But 100 years ago, chronic food overproduction bankrupting farmers, was already a persistent problem. Since then, lots of bright minds spent their lifetimes to invent new ways to bribe or coerce farmers into growing as little as possible for their own safety.