R. Buckminster Fuller spent his life arguing that the material and energetic inputs required to deliver any given human function tend, over time, to fall toward zero — a process he called Ephemeralization. He coined the term decades before Moore's law was observed, and he built a career of unorthodox projects (the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion car, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth) around the claim that resource constraints were design problems, not physical ones.
Why it was unfashionable
Fuller operated outside the academic disciplines whose approval he would have needed to be taken seriously by mid-century economics. His prose was difficult, his designs often commercially unsuccessful, and his insistence that humanity could already feed, house, and educate every person on Earth was treated as utopian eccentricity. The dominant development frame of his era was scarcity management; he refused to accept its premises.
What the Age of Abundance inherited
The contemporary use of "ephemeralization" — in discussions of dematerialization, software margin structures, and the declining material intensity of GDP — is directly downstream of Fuller. The Age of Abundance framing of coordination, not production, as the binding constraint is a more or less explicit restatement of his claim that the resources exist; we have not yet learned to deploy them.
The pattern
Fuller shows the civic value of a cross-disciplinary outsider who refuses the prestige economy's frame entirely. He was ignored long enough to see his vocabulary adopted by the very institutions that had rejected it. The wiki treats that arc as instructive rather than exceptional.