The People's Abundance
Falling costs and the end of scarcity…
Seven things are getting cheaper at speeds the old economic models did not predict: energy, knowledge and intelligence, food, water, shelter, healthcare, and the labor of physical machines. None of them is getting cheaper everywhere or for everyone. None of them is getting cheaper by accident. Each is the product of decades of public research, public risk, and public infrastructure now being converted, often quietly, into private return.
This section tracks those falling costs honestly — what is actually changing, what is hype, and who is positioned to capture the abundance as it arrives. We assert, tentatively but plainly, that capitalism as we know it may be coming to an end and need replacement. The conditions for a dramatic decoupling are developing: significant, and soon perhaps exponential, growth in output without concomitant expansion of human labor. The question is whether that abundance reaches the people or is enclosed before they see it.
A note on these categories
They are not parallel, and the fact that they are not is part of the argument.
Energy and knowledge-and-intelligence are foundational inputs to all the others — every advance discussed here depends on cheap power and cheap compute. Robotics is both a category and the mechanism by which those falling costs propagate into the physical world. Water and food are linked at the root by energy and automation. Healthcare touches biology, which sits closer to food and water than to shelter or robotics. Any clean taxonomy of these seven would be a falsification.
The structural messiness is a description of how technological abundance actually develops. These are not seven separate stories. They are one story — the story of productive capacity becoming radically more efficient — told from seven angles. The categories are organizational, not ontological. Reading any one of them in isolation will mislead.
What unites them is the ownership question. In every category, the technological cost curve is falling, the political-economic cost curve is uncertain, and the question of who captures the difference is the question this section exists to track.