Post-scarcity economics

Literature Review: Post-Scarcity Economics and the Convergence of AI, Blockchain, and Institutional Design

1. Introduction

The concept of post-scarcity, an economic state where marginal costs of production approach zero and basic human needs can be met without resource constraints, has evolved from utopian speculation into a legitimate research frontier in economics, institutional theory, and technology studies. This literature review synthesizes key theoretical frameworks, empirical analyses, and emerging practical implementations that address the transition from scarcity-based capitalism toward abundance economies, with particular focus on the role of artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain technology, and collective intelligence as enabling mechanisms.

2. Foundational economic theory

2.1 Keynes and the euthanasia of the rentier

Chernomas (1984) provides a comprehensive analysis of John Maynard Keynes’s vision of post-scarcity society, arguing that the General Theory was fundamentally “a tract for a post-scarcity society” rather than merely a short-run macroeconomic manual. Keynes predicted that within a generation of sustained full employment, capital accumulation would reach a point where the marginal efficiency of capital falls to zero, rendering the rentier class obsolete through what he termed the “euthanasia of the rentier.”

Key contributions from this work:

• The Absolute income hypothesis: Keynes distinguished between “absolute needs” (finite) and “relative needs” (status-driven, infinite), arguing that once absolute needs are satisfied, societies would naturally prefer leisure over additional consumption.
• Socialization of investment: Keynes advocated for state control of investment decisions to overcome the instability inherent in private capital markets, where speculation and uncertainty prevent optimal resource allocation.
• Redistribution as growth policy: Contrary to neoclassical assumptions that inequality drives accumulation, Keynes argued that greater equality would raise the propensity to consume, thereby supporting both consumption and investment growth simultaneously.

Relevance: This paper establishes the theoretical legitimacy of post-scarcity as an economic endpoint predicted by mainstream Keynesian theory, not radical speculation. It provides the macro-level justification for studying institutional transitions toward abundance.

2.2 The Infinity Economy Framework

Moleka (2025) presents a comprehensive theoretical blueprint for what he terms the “Infinity Economy”, a scalable, AI-driven economic system where value creation becomes decoupled from material scarcity. The paper argues that the foundational axiom of economics (scarcity) is reaching obsolescence due to the convergence of:

1. AI-driven cognitive automation (collapsing the cost of ideation and design)
2. Autonomous production systems (eliminating labor constraints)
3. Decentralized quantum energy (removing resource bottlenecks)
4. Post-monetary value infrastructures (blockchain-based governance)

Key theoretical contributions:

• From thermodynamic to informational ontology: The paper argues that classical economics relies on a thermodynamic metaphor (finite, exhaustible resources producing entropy), whereas digital/AI economies operate on informational principles where resources are infinitely replicable at near-zero marginal cost.
• Value as generative capacity: In post-scarcity systems, value emerges not from constrained supply but from “relational positioning, informational influence, and network effects”, a shift from utility-based to generativity-based value ontology.
• Post-monetary exchange mechanisms: Proposes alternatives to fiat currency including reputation economies, tokenized cognitive assets, and informational commons where value is co-produced through distributed networks.

Relevance: This paper provides a contemporary, formalized economic model that extends Keynesian insights into the AI age, offering specific mechanisms (DAOs, AI-mediated governance, reputational capital) for operationalizing post-scarcity transitions.

2.3 AI and the collapse of marginal costs

Callaghan (2025) develops formal economic models demonstrating that AI collapses the marginal cost of ideation (generating new ideas) to near-zero, fundamentally challenging the assumption of knowledge scarcity. The paper introduces “Experiential Matrix Theory,” arguing that the binding economic constraint shifts from generating ideas to aligning ideation with human needs, a transition from a “knowledge economy” to an “alignment economy.”

The Munich Personal RePEc Archive paper “Artificially Created Scarcity” (2024) provides rigorous modeling showing that AI diffusion redefines remaining scarcities (carbon budget, attention, governance capacity) while driving the social discount rate toward zero. This has profound policy implications: society should massively increase long-horizon public investment (carbon removal, biodiversity, infrastructure) financed by taxing AI-generated rents rather than future labor.

Relevance: These papers formalize the production-side mechanisms by which AI enables post-scarcity, moving beyond intuition to mathematical models of cost collapse and resource reallocation.

3. Institutional and governance mechanisms

3.1 Blockchain, DAOs, and decentralized coordination

Research on Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) demonstrates their potential as institutional alternatives to hierarchical firms. A large-scale empirical analysis by Hassan and De Filippi (2024) examining DAO governance patterns reveals that social-good and public-oriented DAOs exhibit higher decentralization (lower Gini coefficients in voting power) than investment-focused DAOs, suggesting mission-driven organizations naturally develop more equitable governance structures.

The paper “Built to last, not to scale” (2024) analyzes the long-run sustainability of DAOs, finding that while they excel at coordination transparency and participatory governance, they face challenges in operational velocity compared to traditional hierarchies. This suggests a fundamental trade-off between decentralization and speed that AI-enhanced governance may help resolve.

Mechanism insights:

• Collective ownership: DAOs enable broad-based ownership of productive assets without traditional firm hierarchies, addressing the distributional crisis when labor income collapses but capital productivity explodes.
• Algorithmic allocation: Smart contracts can enforce transparent, programmatic resource distribution, reducing rent-seeking and ensuring abundance reaches end-users rather than being captured by intermediaries.
• Commons governance at scale: DAOs extend Ostromian principles (clear boundaries, participatory rule-making, conflict resolution) to digital and global scales.

3.2 Dequity and the barter economy of the future

Berg, Davidson, and Potts (2019) introduce the concept of “dequity”, a financial instrument combining debt’s rules-based structure with equity’s discretionary control rights. They argue that cryptocurrency tokens represent the first real-world manifestation of Williamson’s (1988) hypothetical dequity instrument, enabled by blockchain’s capacity to enforce promise-based contracts.

Key contributions:

• High-frequency barter: The authors propose that AI (solving information problems) + blockchain (solving settlement problems) enables a return to barter at massive scale, where machines trade thousands of tiny assets (electricity, compute, bandwidth) instantly without a central currency.
• Money as governance technology: Rather than viewing cryptocurrencies as money, the paper reframes them as governance instruments that coordinate economic activity through programmable rules rather than state-enforced legal tender.
• Post-monetary systems: If high-frequency barter becomes efficient, the “monetary premium” disappears and prices dissolve into “resource flows,” fundamentally altering the nature of economic coordination.

Relevance: This paper provides the specific institutional mechanism, programmable ownership tokens and AI-mediated barter, that could operationalize Keynes’s vision of socialized investment and the Infinity Economy’s vision of post-monetary exchange.

3.3 AI-enhanced DAO governance

Recent work on AI-augmented DAOs demonstrates how artificial intelligence can resolve critical coordination failures that would otherwise block equitable distribution of abundance. AI agents can draft and evaluate proposals using natural language processing, predict outcomes via simulation, automate routine decisions, and flag urgent issues, dramatically lowering participation costs and increasing throughput.

By 2025, approximately one-third of major DAO decisions involve AI-guided or AI-executed components, enabling “less gridlock, more participation, faster decisions.” This hybrid model, AI as “co-pilot” with humans retaining veto power, leverages computational advantages while preserving human values and legitimacy.

Relevance: AI-enhanced governance addresses the “voter apathy” and “coordination costs” problems that plague current DAOs, making them viable alternatives to traditional firms for managing abundant resources.

4. Distributional and labor implications

4.1 The post-scarcity paradox

Del Valle (2025) synthesizes recent literature on the “Post-Scarcity Paradox”: technological capacity exists to meet basic needs, yet scarcity persists due to institutional and distributional failures. The paper examines psychological and social implications of decoupling survival from labor, noting risks of existential crisis, social destabilization, and new forms of inequality even in materially abundant societies.

Key mechanisms analyzed:

• AI Dividends: Comparative modeling of Universal Basic Income (tax-based) versus “Universal Basic Assets” (DAO-ownership based) for maintaining purchasing power as labor income collapses.
• Blockchain-Based UBI: Examples like Circles UBI in Berlin demonstrate real-world experiments in automated wealth distribution via smart contracts.
• Purpose and Meaning: Research on post-labor identity constructs, exploring how societies maintain individual purpose when economic compulsion fades.

4.2 Labor economics and the transition

Work by multiple authors addresses the labor displacement crisis: if AI and automation perform most tasks more cheaply, traditional wage employment becomes untenable. This generates a “transfer problem” requiring new income streams to maintain purchasing power and social stability.

Proposed solutions include:

• Universal Basic Income administered via blockchain
• Algorithmic allocation of resource credits
• Tokens representing shares in automated production
• All managed and optimized by AI to ensure coverage and prevent fraud

Relevance: These papers address the critical distributional challenge: abundance is technologically feasible, but without institutional mechanisms to allocate it, wealth concentrates and post-scarcity becomes “post-scarcity for the few.”

5. Cultural and science fiction perspectives

5.1 Lessons from speculative fiction

Mizerák (2019) provides a rigorous analysis of post-scarcity depictions in science fiction literature, examining whether societies in novels like Moving the Mountain, Riders of the Purple Wage, Mars Trilogy, The Culture, and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom truly achieve post-scarcity or merely represent “socialist utopias” with hidden scarcities.

Key findings:

• Labor scarcity: Most sci-fi societies fail to eliminate labor scarcity, instead redistributing it (women’s work in Moving the Mountain) or requiring “Totipotent Man” (extreme individualism in Riders of the Purple Wage) or relying on skilled elites (Mars Trilogy).
• False post-scarcity: Even when material goods appear abundant, most societies retain mediums of exchange (money, “Whuffie” reputation credits) that create new hierarchies and scarcities.
• The Culture Exception: Only Iain M. Banks’s Culture series depicts true post-scarcity, where AI “Minds” handle all production and resource allocation, eliminating both labor and scarcity simultaneously.

Relevance: This paper serves as a “negative template”, identifying failure modes to avoid. It demonstrates that replacing money with reputation tokens, or replacing human labor with “better humans,” does not achieve post-scarcity if institutional structures still enforce artificial scarcity.

5.2 The transition gap

A critical insight from science fiction analysis is that authors typically skip the transition phase, showing either present-day scarcity or future abundance without explaining the pathway. This “transitional gap” is precisely what economic research on AI, blockchain, and DAOs attempts to fill, designing the institutional bridge between current systems and post-scarcity futures.

6. Emerging practical implementations

6.1 The intelligent internet framework

Mostaque (2025) presents “The Last Economy” and the Intelligent Internet (ii) protocol as real-world attempts to build post-scarcity infrastructure. Key innovations:

• Proof-of-benefit: A blockchain consensus mechanism that mints “Foundation Coins” through verifiable, socially useful AI work rather than energy-intensive Proof-of-Work.
• Universal Basic Intelligence: Instead of cash UBI, the protocol provides every human a “Sovereign AI Agent” and non-custodial wallet, effectively giving everyone a capital asset that generates income/resources.
• Alignment economy: Proposes replacing GDP with “Intelligent Economics” metrics that value creativity, judgment, and care, activities where humans maintain comparative advantage over machines.

Relevance: This represents a live experiment in implementing the theoretical mechanisms discussed in academic literature, offering empirical testbeds for ideas about dequity, AI-mediated governance, and post-monetary exchange.

6.2 Sectoral transitions

Research suggests post-scarcity never happens all at once but begins in specific sectors where marginal costs collapse first:

1. Information economies: Digital replication at near-zero marginal cost has already created post-scarcity dynamics in media, software, and knowledge goods.
2. Decentralized energy: Solar, battery storage, and micro-grid systems indicate feasibility of autonomous, self-generating energy infrastructures.
3. Automated manufacturing: AI-integrated additive manufacturing and fully automated smart factories demonstrate localized, on-demand production without material shortages.
4. Cognitive labor: Large Language Models already perform complex tasks (legal analysis, medical diagnostics, financial strategy), signaling decoupling of human labor from value production.

Relevance: Sectoral analysis suggests a research strategy: rather than modeling the entire economy’s transition, focus on one supply chain or industry achieving “escape velocity” from market pricing mechanisms via DAO coordination.

7. Critical gaps and research opportunities

7.1 The integration challenge

While substantial literature exists on AI’s production impacts and blockchain’s governance capabilities separately, few papers explicitly integrate both technologies as a unified system for post-scarcity transitions. Notable exceptions (Del Valle 2025, Moleka 2025) synthesize these threads, but empirical work lags theoretical models.

7.2 Human capital and collective intelligence

Most post-scarcity literature focuses on technological capabilities (AI, automation) or institutional structures (DAOs, tokens), with relatively less attention to the human capacity requirements. Emerging work on:

• Digital skills capacity building: How to ensure equitable access to AI tools and blockchain systems
• Collective intelligence platforms: Designing systems that amplify human+machine coordination
• Educational infrastructure: Curricula and learning communities that prepare populations for post-labor economies

represents a critical research frontier.

7.3 Ecological constraints

While digital and AI-driven economies “dematerialize” value, they rely on vast physical infrastructures (data centers, rare earth mining, high-energy computing). The paradox of “invisible ecological costs behind clean digital services” requires integrated frameworks balancing informational abundance with planetary boundaries.

7.4 Empirical validation

Most post-scarcity research remains theoretical or examines small-scale pilots. Large-scale empirical studies of:

• Transaction cost reductions in blockchain-based supply chains
• Productivity comparisons between traditional firms and AI-enhanced DAOs
• Real-world experiments with AI dividends, dequity financing, or high-frequency barter systems

are urgently needed to validate theoretical predictions.

8. Synthesis and conclusions

The convergence of AI (collapsing production costs), blockchain (collapsing coordination costs), and emerging governance mechanisms (DAOs, dequity, algorithmic allocation) creates unprecedented opportunity for accelerating transitions toward post-scarcity economies. This literature establishes several key findings:

1. Theoretical legitimacy: Post-scarcity is the logical endpoint of Keynesian macroeconomics, not fringe speculation. Keynes predicted it; contemporary work formalizes the mechanisms.
2. Institutional bottleneck: Technology alone is insufficient. The primary constraint is “institutional lag”, the mismatch between abundant productive capacity and scarcity-enforcing economic rules.
3. Specific mechanisms: High-frequency barter, dequity financing, DAO governance, AI-augmented coordination, and algorithmic distribution represent concrete institutional innovations that could operationalize post-scarcity transitions.
4. Human-centric design: Abundance requires not just technology but human capacity (digital skills, collective intelligence) and ethical frameworks (avoiding “false post-scarcity” traps like reputation-as-currency).
5. Sectoral strategy: Rather than attempting whole-economy transformation, focusing on specific industries achieving post-scarcity dynamics offers tractable research pathways.

The literature reveals a coherent research agenda: designing the “transitional machinery”, the institutional bridges between scarcity-based capitalism and abundance economies, that current systems lack. This involves both theoretical modeling (production functions incorporating AI and collective intelligence capital) and empirical validation (pilot studies of DAO-managed supply chains, dequity-financed projects, AI dividend schemes).

9. References

Core Papers Analyzed:

Chernomas, R. (1984). “Keynes on Post-Scarcity Society,” Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 1007-1026.

Moleka, P. (2025). “Towards an Infinity Economy: Designing Post-Scarcity Economic Systems in the Age of AI and Quantum Abundance,” Preprints.org, doi:10.20944/preprints202506.0414.v1.

Mizerák, M. (2019). “Comparison of Transitional Theories to Post-Scarcity in Science-Fiction Literature,” European Journal of Business Science and Technology, 5(1): 107-123.

Berg, C., Davidson, S., & Potts, J. (2019). “Money, dequity, and the barter economy of the future,” in Understanding the Blockchain Economy, Edward Elgar Publishing.

Callaghan, M. (2025). “Modelling the Collapse of Ideation Costs, Epistemic Inversion, and the End of Knowledge Scarcity,” arXiv:2507.07019.

Del Valle, J. (2025). “The Post-Scarcity Paradox: Will Abundance Enabled by AI and Automation Lead to Existential Crisis?” (Working paper).

Hassan, S. & De Filippi, P. (2024). “Large Scale Analysis of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations,” arXiv.

Mostaque, E. (2025). The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics, Intelligent Internet Press.

Additional Sources:

Munich Personal RePEc Archive (2024). “Artificially Created Scarcity: How AI Turns Abundance into Shortage,” MPRA Paper 126550.

“Built to last, not to scale: The long run of decentralised autonomous organizations” (2024), ScienceDirect.

“AI-Enhanced Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)” (2025), Kava Labs.

“An Economy of AI Agents” (2025), arXiv.

Google DeepMind (2025). Senior AI Economist job posting.

Williamson, O.E. (1988). “Corporate finance and corporate governance,” Journal of Finance, 43(3).

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That’s the complete literature review. You can copy it directly from here. Let me know if you’d like me to modify any sections, expand particular areas, or reformat it for a specific use case! ^{123456789101112131415161718192021222324}

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Footnotes

1. Storyverse chat – 2025_12_15 17_49 AEDT – Transcript by Gemini.md ↩

2. policy-framework.md ↩

3. platform.md ↩

4. persona-questions.md ↩

5. persona-profile.md ↩

6. mission.md ↩

7. incentives.md ↩

8. ideation.md ↩

9. global-trends-pestel.md ↩

10. funding-opportunities.md ↩

11. foundation-introduction.md ↩

12. i-just-had-a-realisation-that-GlGfkFkmRVKuZ1RZm2pxKw.md ↩

13. experience.md ↩

14. Towards-an-Infinity-Economy.pdf ↩

15. Chernomas-KeynesPostScarcitySociety-1984.pdf ↩

16. Comparison-of-Transitional-Theories-to-Post-Scarcity-in-Science-Fiction-Literature.pdf ↩

17. Chapter-5-Money-dequity-and-the-barter-economy-of-the-future.pdf ↩

18. generate-an-outline-for-a-6-we-CpCz38ObRfWbXH7DS.ctbg.md ↩

19. Gains.md ↩

20. Future-s-Edge-ideal-persona-profile.md ↩

21. Abby McElhatton-LinkedIn.pdf ↩

22. Clifton Top-5 Abby.pdf ↩

23. Power to the People.txt ↩

24. post-capitalism.md ↩