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Yudd's essential argument seems to be that if your every need isn't provided, it's possible, and reasonable, to feel poor.
It is a good thing that even utilitarians can recognize that desire is functionally infinite, and thus that infinite amounts of ressources will not satisfy people or eliminate natural inequality.
But at this juncture it seems pertinent to ask what's so bad about "poverty" in the first place? Having to contribute some value to your society to get all of the luxury it affords seems entirely reasonable.
I can't help but think that people would be better off if they had a range of other games to play than "maximize hedonism" (which only some can win at). But that's not compatible with collapsing success to a single quantifiable metric.
The issue with poverty he has is not that one has to work to avoid it but that one has to give up some luxury despite working full time because it isn't available to everyone.
No amount of increase in productivity can eliminate scarcity because:
I believe that's the point Neil Stephenson successfully makes with The Diamond Age.
It was very silly of Liberalism to promise total equality given those parameters. And at some point it must have seemed really possible that we could make the differences negligible. But it looks like it's not going to ever happen. And I think that's fine.
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For completeness he has this quite fantastic followup post where he expounds https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1819867003966148655?t=nxw_B_ejIP_ZsG_GhBVdMw&s=19
I think he's not describing hedonic treadmill stuff. People don't really continue working 60 hour a week jobs alternating between Walmart and driving Uber just because they consider Steam games a burning need.
This relates to how economists measure inflation. As technology advances and as people's consumption habits change, economists need to be able to compare the value of different goods across different baskets of goods. I don't know exactly how they do this, but they do have some ways of dealing with the problem he describes. I'd be interested to know how well they do so.
In theory, if you had the perfect measure of the price level, the fact the government bans apartments under 10,000 square feet and you're forced to buy e-textbooks that have no value other than as a means of acquiring an education, would be accounted for with an appropriate increase in the price level, and real incomes, reflecting that reality, would still be easily comparable to worlds that didn't have these problems. The productivity improvements of that society would only count as productivity improvements if people really were better off despite these limitations.
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