this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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It's not even a very hard argument to make.
Any honest examination of the economics of the very wealthy will reveal that there is a fundamental upper limit to the quantity of goods and services that any single individual will consume, on average.
Once you accept the idea that consumption is bounded, then the cost the post scarcity utopia becomes finite. It is not infinite. Once you accept that the cost is finite, then you're only arguing about orders of magnitude.
It is certainly true that the natural consumption limit of humans appears to exceed the per capita GDP of any country in 2024. But this is a show about the future, and about a society that has mastered energies far above our own
To be fair, its certainly possible to imagine some people still having desires that even the federation couldnt fulfill except for a small number of people. Like, if someone wanted to have their own private star system or something. Of course the answer for any (or almost any I suppose) hypothetical post scarcity civilization will be that they are only post-scarcity for those things needed to live a comfortable life and not literally beyond all scarcity (I mean I guess in star trek maybe the Q have something like that, but they're not the protagonists for a reason, its hard to write a compelling story with entities like that as the main cast)
It is beyond all scarcity, though. Even pre-holodeck matter replication is supposed to be cheap enough relative to the energy density that it's cheaper to replicate food than store supplies. I mean, think about it. They are coaxing energy together so hard it makes atoms, and arranging them so precisely they 3D print objects. In a matter of seconds. Either the Federation has the most disproportionately expensive space program in the universe or making stuff is entirely trivial. Keep in mind that if you live on Earth you aren't doing FTL travel at the same time as you replicate stuff, so all that energy production should be going straight to making things.
And post-holodeck you can have literally anything you want as long as you have access to one. Zero limits beyond your physical body staying inside the room. That seems to be the sole difference between Federation members and the Q. They just seem to put a big cultural premium on "real" stuff, which I guess makes sense in a world where everything is 3D printed and every civilian has the fashion sense of a 1970s lounge chair that exploded onto a person for some reason.
Sure. And you might even have people who become addicted to consumerism. (Replicator use disorder?). You can still cut those individuals off and credibly claim to have a post scarcity society.
The point of post-scarcity is that, on average, you're not making difficult choices about which goods and services to consume.