Post scarcity or post-scarcity describes a hypothetical form of economy or society, often explored in science fiction, in which things such as goods, services and information are free, or practically free. This would be due to an abundance of fundamental resources (matter, energy and intelligence), in conjunction with sophisticated automated systems capable of converting raw materials into finished goods, allowing manufacturing to be as easy as duplicating software.
Even without postulating new technologies, it is conceivable that already there exists enough energy, raw materials and biological resources to provide a comfortable lifestyle for every person on Earth. However even a hypothetical political or economic system able to achieve this lifestyle for everyone would generally not be termed a “post-scarcity society” unless the production of goods was sufficiently automated that virtually no labor was required by anyone. (It is usually assumed there would still be plenty of voluntary creative labor, such as a writer creating a novel or a software engineer working on open-source software.)
There are some exceptions to this usage of the term. Anthony Giddens, for instance, uses “post-scarcity” to refer to a set of trends he sees in modern industrialized nations, such as an increased focus on “life politics” and a decreased focus on productivity and economic growth. Giddens acknowledges that the term has also been used historically to mean a literal end of scarcity.
The term post-scarcity economics may be somewhat paradoxical according to mainstream economics. The reason being that scarcity values are a defining feature of contemporary economic applications. Quoting a 1932 essay written by Lionel Robbins, economics is: “the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses. However, the paradox is resolved by considering that some resources will always remain scarce, such as human attention and time.
