We do keep trying and it keeps failing. It's a nice idea but it goes against our base instincts. Ultimately, we evolved to survive, and those survival traits urge us to do better, acquire more, strengthen our position, all of which happens at the expense of others also doing the same.
This will continue at least as long as goods are scarce. After that, who knows?
Competition and exploitation are subtly different. e.g. the nutrition facts and ingredients list on food in the USA is a big win, and I wish we pushed it even harder like Europe has. I wish makeup had to list its ingredients too. If you have any dietary restrictions, at a restaurant you have to put faith in a bunch of overworked teenagers, with boxed food you have a rough idea what's actually in it.
Agreed. This may be a consequence of the environment we've created, where corporations are allowed to behave like humans and compete with each other. In their competition, they end up exploiting us. We are a resource to them, after all, and any competition exploits some form of resource.
Scarcity isn't equally applied though. The wealthy suffer zero scarcity of basically any resource, they can have (and do have) whatever they want at any time more or less, up to and including multiple ridiculously massive homes, yachts, and incredibly expensive cars, jets, and all the fuel and power they need for those aforementioned things.
Scarcity for people in the developed world is largely an artificial construct: we have far more than we need of basically all resources here, plus or minus some failures that can be largely placed on either remaining issues from the pandemic, or just-in-time supply chains which have been a disaster for distribution in the States. The real scarcity is money, with it pooling at the top and rarely making it's way down, now doubly so that inflation is slowly destroying what's left of the middle class and demolishing the people below them.
Lastly you have actual scarcity which is a consequence of the above over-resourcing-and-under-utilizing of the developed world, which occurs in the developing world. We ship tremendous amounts of basically every resource to wealthy nations, where a not-insubstantial amount of said resources are bound straight for landfill because of the aforementioned over-consumption and over-availability.
This is a complicated topic and even in this brief summary I've had to omit a ton of details, but I think it's safe to say that the base instinctual level of "we need to survive" is frankly, not applicable here. The vast majority of social harms performed with this as the citation is not "I'm worried I can't make next month's rent if I don't sell enough AI girlfriends" scarcity, but I think far more in line with "we have to maintain year-over-year growth or I'll only get a 40% bonus instead of a 60% bonus this year, and if that means a ton of chronically lonely and depressed people need to be data-mined even harder this quarter, then that's what it means."
