"There is also the problem of the dignity of work -- people enjoy feeling needed. But human values change over time, and there seems no obvious reason why people couldn't get their self-worth from artistic self-expression, or from hobbies. This is the basic Star Trek future. But actually, I think that the future has a far more radical transformation in store for us. I predict that technological advances will actually end economics as we know it, and destroy scarcity, by changing the nature of human desire. So, there's that one sense that we can't have an economics of such an environment. For economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. But if resources aren't scarce then how can we study the allocation of something that doesn't exist? Of course, you might think that most economists are only discussing angels on pinheads anyway. And if we're honest about it all economists would insist that at least one current major theory is nothing more than that. But in the entire absence of scarce resources, economics would be even more like that. Akin to asking whether those angels could waltz or jitterbug upon their pinhead. However, we do have another guide to what would be happening at this point, in the absence of scarcity. And that's the Bearded One himself, Karl Marx. And the answer is True Communism. Or at least, the way would then be open for True Communism to finally arrive."