>I find it very sad that we live in a society where there appears to be no way of gracefully changing fundamental paradigms.

That is a feature, not a bug.

Society is incredibly complicated and is an intrinsically chaotic system resulting from the beliefs and actions of hundreds of millions of individuals. The system has generations of iterative 'fixes' to problems and with delicate balances negotiated and fought for by various groups across tens or hundred of years. What makes you think you think you can rebuild it better? What makes you think you can account for all the things that the system does well in your new 'paradigm'? We saw with various revolutions (e.g. French, Russia, and Chinese) that when you try to upend even a bad system and rebuild from scratch with a 'new paradigm', it leads to something much much worse.

The problem I see with the revolutions you mention is the people implementing those changes believe (or at least act like) their new system is perfect. I'm advocating precisely the opposite! I would like for people to view their system in terms of trade-offs and deliberately experiment with new ones and asses the results and not just in an incremental way, but also in radical ways. Because right now, all I see is a sort of headless chicken running around destroying everything with zero regards for the consequences.

Even the article's author doesn't appear to conceive of anything better than capitalism. The solution is to consume more! Really?

So I guess what I want is less of a religious view of the social systems and more of a engineering view.

>Even the article's author doesn't appear to conceive of anything better than capitalism.

Because through blood, sweat and tears we've landed on a system that is based on market-economics coupled with welfare state to provide a safety net. Changing any of that would require a wholesale destruction of our current system and is no better than the Russian revolution. Our system has a lot of slack. You can adjust market and welfare policies across elections. There's a lot you can do within the system - your problem seems to be that policies you like are not pushed through the system ... but that's Democracy for you. It takes effort and negotiation to make societal level changes.

>So I guess what I want is less of a religious view of the social systems and more of a engineering view.

Social systems are not engineering systems. They are messy because they are fundamentally composed of messy individuals with historical baggage to boot. You cannot create a clean top-down plan without it looking like Soviet-style communism. Democracy is messy and requires give and take and negotiation, compromise, and horse-trading between all the thousands of different stakeholders and groups. You cannot clean that up with an engineering schematic. You're falling into the trap that all ideologues fall into.

I don't think there is any good or service for which we have transcended "scarcity".

Even with food production, actually manufacturing food is dirt cheap now, but it's the transportation and logistics that's the hard part — I.e. the scarcity is in the supply chain. The pricing system works remarkably well at addressing this scarcity, provided the buyer has money to pay for things. Per the OP, the diminishing returns might be overcome by fixing the "buyer does not have money to pay for things" constraint.

When you have manufacturing moving almost to the other side of the globe in order to increase profits I think it is hard to see how there is a transportation and logistics scarcity. Most of the scarcity I see is artificially induced by the people that want more profits. Removing money from the equation and just leaving the resources, I don't see much scarcity.. maybe in some battery components and such, but certainly not in housing, electricity, food and water. It's just that under the current system, if there is no profit to be made, then it doesn't happen. Same reason we haven't colonized the moon and mars.

> Most of the scarcity I see is artificially induced by the people that want more profits

There's just no empirical evidence for this. The general profit margin for most enterprises in competitive markets is between 5-10%. For food it's actually much, much less than that, but let's use the higher figure for the sake of your case. Even in a world with 0 profits, if you produced everything at cost and redirected profits to more production, you would only be able to meet the needs of 10% more people, at best. And that also ignores that without profit, there's no incentive for people to actually start the enterprises that have resulted in our current levels of production.

> Removing money from the equation and just leaving the resources, I don't see much scarcity

The scarcity is in the labor. We absolutely have the raw materials to make stuff for everyone, but you need to convince the factory worker to show up everyday, the ship operator, the strategic planner, high skill workers, etc to all move where needs aren't being met and actually show up to work. In that regard, we absolutely have a scarcity.

> It's just that under the current system, if there is no profit to be made, then it doesn't happen. Same reason we haven't colonized the moon and mars.

This is a bit of a self-refuting point. You're exactly right, it doesn't happen if there is no profit to be made, because the profit is the incentive for the enterprises to produce and distribute the goods & services. Insofar as there exists people whose needs aren't being met, it's because they are unable to provide the incentive, I.e. the revenue, for the profit-seeking producers. The UBI is the cleanest and most straightforward solution to this problem.

== I find it very sad that we live in a society where there appears to be no way of gracefully changing fundamental paradigms.==

People who have benefited from this paradigm have most of the power and aren’t going to give it up easily. Typically, things need to get very bad before significant changes are made.