Post-scarcity economics studies how pricing, labor markets, and property regimes reorganize when the marginal cost of essential goods approaches zero. It is the economic substrate of the Age of Abundance framework and the lens that connects Near-Zero Marginal Cost dynamics to distributional outcomes. Its central claim is that neoclassical price theory, while still predictive at the margins, stops being descriptive of aggregate welfare once core needs are met by utilities rather than by markets.
When prices stop carrying information
Market prices carry information about scarcity; when supply is effectively unlimited, prices collapse to the cost of access rather than of production. This has already happened with recorded music, digital text, and voice telephony. Post-scarcity economics generalizes the pattern: once a good's marginal cost is rounding error, its allocation is governed by access protocols, not price signals. Whether those access protocols are progressive or regressive is a political question, not an economic one.
Labor under falling demand for labor
If Compute Abundance and Atoms Abundance reduce the labor intensity of most production, the classical wage-bargain weakens. Proposals in the literature include universal basic income, universal basic services, data dividends, and citizen equity in shared AI infrastructure. Each entails a different political settlement — who owns what, who is taxed, and who is granted standing to object. The wiki declines to endorse one but treats the choice as inescapable.
Ownership in a world of copies
When a design file, a model weight, or a genome can be copied at near-zero cost, the idea of owning the "thing" becomes incoherent, and ownership migrates to rights (to use, to audit, to update) and to complementary assets (the data, the deployment surface, the customer relationship). Intellectual-property regimes, competition law, and antitrust enforcement become the battleground where post-scarcity economics is actually contested.
Critiques and open questions
Skeptics argue that marginal cost never actually reaches zero: there is always embodied energy, maintenance, and security overhead. Others point out that "abundance of copies" coexists with genuine scarcity of housing, clean water, and time. The distributional critique reminds us that averaged abundance can hide concentrated precarity, and that the economics of abundance only matters if it reaches the households counting cents.