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Last week's discussion of a $100k salary in 1959 versus 2025 got me thinking about an age-old question: Of the money we earn and purchases we make, how much is devoted to improving the way we relate to other people (e.g. to enhance our social status, to buy exclusive experiences, etc.)? Or to put the question another way, how much money do I spend on things which, if they were affordable to everyone, would be kinda pointless?
So for example, as a fairly wealthy person, I paid a lot for a house in a "nice neighborhood," which in practice means a neighborhood that is sufficiently expensive so as to exclude poor people.
I think that the prospect of an AI revolution makes this issue especially salient. If everyone has the time and money to visit some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise, how pleasant will that beach end up being? If everyone can afford a Bugati Veron, what will the rich do to show off?
I see this as a culture war issue because my sense is that people on the Left tend to be dismissive of this problem. For example, they seem to think it would be a great idea if public policy opened the doors of "good schools" to the "disadvantaged." Or if everyone went to college.
Perhaps a better example is the numerous YouTube videos I have seen of the "urbanist" genre. Which basically slam car-oriented suburbs and push for policies promoting walkable neighborhoods. They seem to ignore the point that the inconvenience of suburban living is not a bug but rather a feature. That kinda the point is to keep out, well, riff-raff for lack of a better word.
In a hypothetical future age of abundance, how much better can things really be?
I can imagine claiming some largeish planetoid in the asteroid belt and converting it over to suitability for human habitation, and have a couple Aldrin Cyclers that can drop off and pick up visitors.
Fuck a house in a nice neighborhood, I want my nearest neighbor to be 400,000 km away.
That's what I'D do with an AI-induced boon.
Buying comfortable solitude might be the next frontier in that sense, There's only so many private islands out there, although we can certainly build more.
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Outside of the other residents of the neighborhood, and barring large scale terraforming/geoengineering/landscaping, quality real estate remains scarce even with fully automated extraction and production of material goods. By that, I mean quality of the plot of land, beauty of the views from the plot of land, climate, likelihood of natural disasters, distance from other desirable land (beaches, forests, etc...).
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I was just this weekend reflecting on the extent to which we already live in this future. Specifically, I was purchasing over-the-counter medicine for a family member's lingering cough, and thinking about the mass produced medicinal miracles of modern chemistry. With the cost of open-market health insurance premiums set to rise next year, there is a lot of public discourse on the state of modern medicine (and how it gets funded). But for the vast, overwhelming majority of health concerns we have today, we live in an age of remarkable abundance and shocking affordability. Furthermore, we live in an age where there is very little difference in the treatments and medicines available to the rich versus the poor.
Now, don't misunderstand--I am absolutely aware of the eye-watering costs of some treatments, particularly experimental or end-of-life treatments, and the relatively better care available to people with money. But the kind of care that costs serious "rich person" cash is also the kind of care very few people would benefit from receiving. The vast majority of medical maladies you will face in your life are treatable by a nurse practitioner with medicine you can buy for less than an hour's wages, and a billionaire in your place would receive the very same prescription at the very same price.
Furthermore, though not everyone benefits in the same way or at the same level, most Americans do have some kind of health insurance that genuinely protects them from bankruptcy while providing them with treatments they could otherwise not possibly afford. Countries with socialized health care are arguably more efficient in how they structure the financing of all this, but either way the risk pooling that modern industrialized nations do with health care costs seems to work pretty well to everyone's absolute benefit, despite the persistence of individual disparities in particular cases.
Your mention of "if everyone went to college" is particularly noteworthy given that anyone who genuinely wants to learn something, today, is far better situated to make that happen than they would have been even twenty years ago. The existence of online college and satellite internet means you never even have to leave your house to get an education, often of a quality much higher than you could get at a top tier university a century ago. We have more knowledge, we disseminate it more smoothly, the costs are minimal and almost always subsidized. I have more books stored in my cell phone than I could physically fit in my house and office--combined. Someone with a loose attitude toward copyright infringement could very easily download several PhD's worth of knowledge for actual pennies (or, at their local library, possibly gratis).
Of course, credentials are a different story, but that's evidence of a society with so much abundance that it actively works to rate limit expertise. America's physician shortage (which is much less than the physician shortage in many other places) is driven in substantial measure by the profession's reluctance to increase the availability of training. This has resulted in a proliferation of paraprofessionals (who often think they are professionals)--but I digress. The point is that we have so much abundance, actually, many of our current sociocultural systems are kind of choking on it.
I sometimes wonder if this is why we are seeing a rise in political movements that, on my view, promise to function by ending abundance. On my view, trade is the lifeblood of prosperity; interfering with trade reduces abundance. On my view, free discourse generates a bounty of ideas; restricting discourse reduces abundance. Asceticism is often a kind of allergic reaction to abundance. Probably someone reading this comment is thinking of Universe 25 and wondering how it relates! Yes: possibly we are poorly evolved to thrive in an environment of abundance.
But I feel like the alternative is strictly worse. Better to wrangle with (and perhaps evolve beyond) our pyschological hangups in an environment of peace and plenty, I think, than to RETVRN to 50% infant mortality rates on grounds that this better reflects the ancestral environment. To answer the question directly, I think things could still get better in a variety of cool ways (I would like to live much, much longer then 100 years, for example!) but I do think we already live in an age of remarkable abundance, for which many, maybe most people are shamefully ungrateful, because they insist on thinking about wealth comparatively rather than in absolute terms.
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Plenty of urban environments do this as well. To the extent American cities aren't doing this is a *choice*.
There are plenty of other reasons to prefer urban, suburban or rural living but keeping away the riffraff isn't an inherent issue for any of them. Just like many of the "urbanist" complaints about soulless suburbs aren't inherent problems with suburbs just things that are most notable in some American suburbs.
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I think there's two separate questions here. There's things rich people do because they're genuinely pleasant, but which overcrowding would ruin; and there's things rich people do purely as a status symbol because few people can afford them. I think the world genuinely gets better if no one is buying gratuitously expensive brands anymore, and people instead focus on buying clothes, accessories, etc. that they actually like for their own sake. Whereas it would genuinely be a shame if vacation spots became so popular that there was no way to enjoy mostly-empty nature anymore.
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The same thing they currently do to show off within the same income bracket - invent taste and have more of it than others.
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I mean, you don’t have to delve into the tribes being dismissive of the problem to understand the differences- measured by consumption, Mississippi is far richer than NYC. Measured any other way, lol no it isn’t.
This shapes a lot of attitudes on the question- from teacher pay to the rise of ‘socialism’(these people aren’t Marxists, they just want free shit- because they insist on lifestyles that are unaffordable if it isn’t free. Literally, NYC/San Fran apartments have a high percentage that are subsidized, but if it isn’t subsidized it’s a huge stretch even for the high incomes in these places) to ongoing tribal divergence(I wonder how much of the blue tribe hatred of red is just that we don’t care about how much their trendy apartments cost to rent- they should accept less desirable neighborhoods/avocado toast/international travel).
Suburbs are sometimes exclusivist, but theres also plenty of suburbs that are affordable to the lower working class- I live in one. They’re simply a practical solution to ‘everyone gets a single family home with a yard’ in a rich country where you have to be quite poor not to have a car. Most of my neighbors, if offered the choice, would not move to a walkable safe neighborhood, because they want a single family home with a yard.
In blue states, though, you can't build new suburbs of single-family homes, because the anti-growth mindset has won. For instance, there's lots of space in Western Maryland to build such things, but the Maryland Master Plan says no, that's gotta be preserved. This has been a sore point for people living in those counties who DO want the growth for well over a decade. Blue Tribe has been causing the housing price increases itself.
You can't build new urban places either - the City that Builds in 2025 is Austin, TX. The dynamic isn't urbanists vs suburbanites, it's builders vs blockers. And it is, unusually, Red State (builder) vs Blue State (blocker) political culture, not Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe. Republicans in Blue States are some of the worst blockers. As far as I can see, Blue Tribers in Austin are making sure the new building happens in a Blue way, not trying to block it.
This is because in Blue States, the choices are between pods and nothing. In particular, the state government wants to build multi-family low-income housing in Republican-leaning areas of blue states in order to turn those areas Democratic-leaning. No need to gerrymander if you can move the population.
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A post-scarcity world will make life wildly better for those actually affected by scarcity. Yeah, it'll be harder for the currently wealthy to exclude people, but whether you consider that a worthwhile sacrifice so that almost no one has to die of hunger or exposure is up to you.
If money and economic productivity becomes a non-factor, prestige can always shift to how we spend our last limited resource (time). We still find things instinctually impressive even when they aren't productive: running marathons, bench pressing big numbers, speaking 12 languages, just being a charming/interesting conversationalist, etc.
Isn't most of the West essentially there already? By the time you're dying of hunger or exposure in the vast majority of cases in the Affluent West it's probably down to your own choices and anti-sociability than because anybody is explicitly depriving you of food and shelter simply due to you existing.
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In America today it is already the case that basically no one has to die of hunger or scarcity. But there are still fent zombies, crazy people, and wildly anti-social cohorts which one might want to keep away from ones home.
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