www.thdrussell.comFree will is doinggladly that which one must do.Carl Gustav JungUpon hearing apost-scarcity world described, most people find it silly and fantastical, or acharming yet unrealistic dream. The idea that an abundance could be producedfor all the worlds people, that there would thereafter be no war, no poverty,no corruption etc., is hard to envisage, but our understandable difficultypicturing such a world makes it neither unfeasible nor unrealistic. Indeed, ourdifficulty is not a reflection of the unerring accuracy of our predictiveabilities, but arises naturally from a history of economic systems shaped,until now, by conditions of scarcity. This small article is my attempt to makea post-scarcity world seem a little more pragmatic and prosaic, lessnirvanalike, less utopian, and therefore more worthy of serious study. For mymore detailed analysis, read this article.I want to remindpeople here too, that this is not some idle, cerebral pursuit of a perfectworld, something to while away the hours on a rainy Sunday. There are seriousreasons to consider a radical alternative to the current crop of economicmodels, and there are serious people discussing them.Money is, among otherthings, a force for division and corruption. Because being rich is better thanbeing poor, money motivates many to behave corruptly, and lies at the root ofall socio-economic models currently operative on our planet. Combine thistendency to corrupt with humanitys enormous powers of consumption andproduction, add in the legal structure of the corporation requiring that everincreasing profits be the number one priority, factor in a teetering ecosystem,and you have a huge and many faceted motive to take radical change seriously.So it is not just that a post-scarcity world would be better than ascarcity-based world, but that we must start looking at how to implement such amodel as a matter of urgency. We are consuming ourselves to death, whilemanufacturing and inventing with an eye only to profit. We ignore the branch weall sit on the environment at our peril, and put, to our collectivedetriment, matters such as human dignity and respect on a distant back-burner.So what doespost-scarcity mean for ordinary folk like you and me? Put very simply, it meansno more material/financial worries. It would be as if everyone had enough moneynot to worry about it any more. Would this mean an end to all problems, allchallenges, all worries? Of course not. Ask those who have won the lottery,question them on the new set of problems they have had to deal with. Having nomoney worries does not in any way guarantee happiness. It simply means one typeof problem has been removed. That its successful removal from society wouldnecessitate a prior, well-planned, ground-up redesign of everything, would ofcourse mean other (profound) changes too, but my basic point remains. We wouldstill be humans, would still have to get along, learn, do, sustain, andotherwise grow old, and die, as happily as we are able. That will always be analmighty challenge.Furthermore, if welook a little deeper into the way things are today, we can see we don'tactually HAVE to do the boring job that brings in the money we need. We areactually free to live our lives completely differently; to