Post-industrial is here, or near, in much of the developed world, sure, but that just means that the economy has shifted from producing tangible goods to services and intangible goods, and importing tangible goods from elsewhere. That's just a shift in comparative advantage in an economy with scarcity, not a shift to or toward post-scarcity.
I would say that the part of post-scarcity that's actually cogent to my orginal comment is that we are already, via largely and increasingly automated means, cheaply producing vast quantities of consumer goods with decreasing amounts of human intervention.
I didn't mean to credulously insinuate that we are approaching the utopian ideal of a post-scarcity world, as any cursory glance at reality would readily indicate that we are not living in a utopia. But my comment was lazy as it says exactly that, without further qualification, so i deserve the pedantry.
Thats not post-scarcity, just high productivity relative to the past. Which is something people could point to as being true relative to the (comparative) past at many points in history (conservatively, pretty much most since he agricultural revolutions of the middle ages in the West.)
Because misery is empirically shown to be driven largely by relative, not absolute, deprivation -- both compared to one's own past and one's visible surroundings -- greater productively doesn't even approximate post-scarcity (indeed when it was involves greater or more visible inequality, it makes the impact of scarcity more palpable.)
>Post-scarcity is a theoretical economy in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.
As to how relatively miserable we are as a function of how miserable we were... I'm really much more concerned with the idea that as a socioeconomic entity, the global economy generates enough capital that we could solve hunger, base poverty, eradicate solved diseases and even wage slavery. Today. That we haven't and won't is all the indictment I require.
