Not in my back yard

I do not belive that more "goods and services" are always better for us, but societies, even in pre civilitation times, have shown that humans have a tendancy to have a desire to accumulate wealth, whether it be in the moden ages monetary terms, or in pre cilviliation terms it would be more sexual partners or more land to hunt from. Even in hunter gatherer societies their are "elites" (leaders) who get preferential treatment. Scarcity, in my economics studies, does not mean that there are extreem limits and required rationing, only that in order to have one thing one must give up something else.

Just for me to sit here and enjoy a healty debate means that I am sacrificing one scarce resource for another. I am giving up my time (definately a scare resource being a business owner), which could be used chasing women, working on bettering my business, watching TV, reading a novel, or just about anything else, in order to express my thoughts. In my mind this is a rational decision (which I call greed) because I see more benefit in doing this right now as it is too early to go out, I am tired of work after a hard day, and don't really feel like killing brain cells in front of the TV.

While pre-agricultural societies may not have had the rich and famous type of elites we have today, they did have an elite class, usually called tribal leaders or chiefs. As agriculture caught on and more people were able to be fed the chiefs became kings controlling more land giving rise to the need for another class of elites called the aristocricy (yes, I really moved through time fast). In the modern era we have even more classes, regardless of the society we live in (capitalist democracies or commuunist dictatorships, it really doesn't matter).

The real world is not as the novels you point me to describe. Even if you owned all of California, accessing its resources is NOT FREE. Someone must gather the sand, mine the gold, and harvest food. All of these have a cost in economic terms.

Economic theory doesn't only describe what happens in a caplitalistic society, and can even describe, relatively accuratly, what happens in a communist country with price controls. Price controls ultimately lead to more scarcity as their is less supply as people find more valuable things to do with their time when they don't get enough gain from producing a product any more. Then you end up with either a total lack of resources or huge jumps in prices. Look at cold war era Moscow for a prime example, people had to wait in lines for bread for longer than it takes to make a loaf of bread.

In my view of the world, any resource has a cost, even if it seems free. If I want clean air then I need to reduce polution, this means I must reduce my use of fossil fuels or develop a new technology to clean the pollution out of them. If I want more free time then I work less and give up money which means that I have less money to spend on hobbies I enjoy meaning that my free time becomes less valuable.

The traditional view that economics is about money, is wrong, it is about supply and demand in a world with scarce resources, NOT always rare resources. Yes, things can be cheap, wheat today costs much less today than back in the 1600's before any industrial equipment was used in agriculture. As you mentioned earlier, only 2% of the American workforce is employed producing food, this is because technology has allowed us to streamline production of this resource. The cost, in terms of man hours, has significantly decreased. The introduction of industrial methods created the need for other resources such as steel and energy in the form of fossil fuels. We started with steam power, moved on to internal combustion engines and electric power. Electricty allowed us to develop new tools to help maximize efficiency such as computers and robotics. All of these new resources have a cost in terms of polution, or even just the oppportunity cost of all of those worked puting their time into engineering, manufacturing, and marketing a new product. All of these inputs require vast resources, regardles of if the resource is easy to come by they all of costs associated with gathering and assembling them into something usefull.

The stone age man who went hunting had to sacrifce his time hunting to get food, which I am sure he would rather have used producing offspring or just enjoying the view of a nearby lake. His life may have been great, I am sure I would enjoy spending my days more in touch with nature, but the fact still remains that there is always a cost to anything.

I can't really envision a world in which everything is truely free. In fact I don't think I would even want to live in such a world, it seems like it would be very boring to have nothing to strive for, no way to feel like a winner, and no "losses" to compare the "gains" to.

This dream world you describe world where energy is free, robots do everything, and we can all sit on our butts all day and do nothing but eat, drink, and be merry sounds great on its surface. The problem with this is that this defies human nature. Personally, I enjoy my job (most of the time), am proud of the services I provide my customers, and enjoy not having to wonder where my next meal comes from. I realize that there are others out there who want what I have or strive to get what I want and am quite okay with this concept.

As I stated in my previous post, I am not saying that we live in a perfect world, we definately do not. Economic theory is also not a prefect science, it misses some of human nature. It would be hard to reliably predict when people decide to give and when they want to steal. People tend to give the most in the worst of times, exacly opposite of what would be expected unless you consider the benefits people gain by "feeling food" when they donate something of value. The fact of the matter is that humans are not perfect. Humans have many emotions and undesirable charactaristics. We have greed, anger, hate, lust(well maybe this one isn't always bad), and the list goes on and on. Even in a world where everything was percieved to be free there is some type of cost associated with needs, wants, and actions we all perform. Even some of the "highly respected" economists of the world seem to miss the concept that humans are often very bad people. Greenspan seemed to think that the market would self correct no matter how uneven the playing field was and we can see the consequences of his beliefs with the current economic crisis. While people can be very good, we also have the potential to be very bad.

A world with unlimited resources actually sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Unlimited "free" resources in the hands of good people with sound morals is even problematic if you consider the saying "abosolute power corrupts absolutely." I can't even imagine unlimited resources in the hands of some of the really bad people in this world.

There are two underlying principles to economic theory (in their simplest forms): 1) All resources are scarce. 2) People are greedy.

One could argue about the merits of these three underlying principles but I have yet to ever see an example of a human society where these principles break down.

I would agree that with almost any given resource technological advances have led to a decline in real costs for such resources. There are examples to the contrary such as our recent facination with protecting the environment (While not really a tree hugger I am an avid backpacker and fisherman and em enthusiastic about protecting the enviroment). Now the environment costs us much more than it did 100 years ago. Just because the cost goes down, or there is an overabundance does not make a resource free. The perfect example is with energy. The sun does provide Earth with more power than humans really ever anticipate using as we would probably run out of food production capacity before power if we covered the earth with PV cells. With that said there is a cost to harness that energy. If there is a cost the resource is scarce.

Again with the air we breathe there is a cost. Yes, if we didn't tamper with the environment we would have an overabundance of clean air. But not tampering with the enviorment is the cost of clean air. That means giving something up. When economists speak about scarcity it is in this context. One must give something up in order to get something else.

Scaricity in itself doesn't prop up the elite, that is what every human culture has done since the advent of civilization. Look at communist sociecieties, they have an eleite class jsut like a capitalist society.

Services are just as much a resource as a tangible item. People place a value on any given service. Don't most slashdot readers value their internet connection which relies on a vast array of service technicians which produce no tangible product but provide us with something we want?

I have never indicated that I actually agree with how society is organized, but it seems that human nature has set us on this path. It may not be the best theoretical way but economics is not an attempt to recreate society based on rules that defy our nature... Economics is about predict human behavior based on emperical evidence.

While I think your post was quite interesting (great references, they were interesting to read), I think you are missing a key concept of economics... All resources are scarce, therefore there is no such thing as "post scarcity." I also think you have missed the point that economics is not as much about predicting a market as it is about predicting human behavior in a market. While people are very unpredicible, often making poor decisions, most economists would blame this on an imbalance of information in the system. I had a very hard time understing how economists believe that people make rational decisions when there is so much evidence to the contrary, but in general they do make the best decisions they can with the information at hand, their individual level of understanding, and their own self interests at heart. Yes, many resources have become cheap and abundant but even the air we rely on to sustain us is scarce. The EPA was formed in part to help protect our air and water resources by adding regulations and creating penalties for non-compliance thus adding a "cost" to the air we breathe. In the digital age we tend to forget that we must give up something in order to take advantage of something else, we must pay to have Internet access (instead of buying a few extra six-packs of beer), we must take our limited time in order to surf the Internet and post on Slashdot. Name a resource and I can demonstrate its scarcity. There will never be such a thing as a "post scarcity" world, even hydrogen is scarce as there is only so much of it in the universe. I would go as far as to believe that as time goes on resources will become even more scarce (in general). Technology allows us to make some resources obsolete but generally puts an emphasis on new resources. I think humans will forever be chasing the ball of unlimited resources. The theory that fusion has the potential to provide free unlimited power is faulty, containing such a powerful source of energy will definately cost more than just the "free" energy of the system, someone will have to monitor the system to ensure it is safe, if that entity monitoring the system is a robot, it will have taken up other resources which could have been used elsewhere. There will be a cost, albeit lower than current costs. I think we would both agree that traditional economic models do not predict human behavior all that well, but they do have some value when applied in context.