John C Wright - Economics lyrics

The wealth of this era was so vast that it staggers calculation, and was distributed through a population that, though it far outnumbered the population figures of any previous era, was miniscule when compared to the resources scientific enterprise and industrial speculation had made available. The molecular machines of this era made materials which would have been waste products to men of previous ages into treasure mines. The amount of accumulated capital in the society, and the length of time over which capital ventures could extend before seeing a profit, increased the productivity of wage earners to the point where an average laborer, in real terms, controlled an amount of energy and resources that would dwarf the military budgets expropriated by governments of the warlike periods of the Third Era. With robots to do all menial labor, and Sophotech to do all intellectual labor, the only category of economic activities open to mankind in the Golden Age was entrepreneurial speculation. In effect, man only had to dream of something that might amuse his fellow man. or render some small service, ameliorate some perceived imperfection in life, and command his machines to carry out the project, in order to reap profits to more than pay for the rental on those machines. The immensity of the wealth involved, however, did not revoke any of the laws of economics known since antiquity. The law of a**ociation still proved that a superior and an inferior, when both cooperate and specialize, are more efficient working together than when working in isolation. No matter how wise and great their machines, humans always had more than enough to do. An extremely fine specialization of labor, including labor that, to earlier eras, would seem quite frivolous, allowed for nearly infinite avenues of effort to be utilized. The high population of the time was nothing but a boon; an entrepreneur need only reach the most tiny fraction of the public in order for his patrons to be numbered in the millions and billions. Wage rates (which, by and large, were the rental rates of laboring machines) were allowed to fall to whatever level was needed to clear the market of labor; likewise for interest rates clearing the capital market. The evils and follies created by the interventions of governments into the market were unknown in the Golden Age; nor, among the long-lived people of that era, could doctrines based on short-term thinking or short-sightedness take root. There was neither unemployment (except as a penalty inflicted by the Hortators) nor capital lying idle, nor squandered. There was, of course, no central bank, no debasement of currency, or other mischievous intermeddling with the economy. Every great achievement of the superscience of the era, rather than sating the human desire for accomplishments, led to a wider threshold of what ambition could accomplish; and these greater powers led in turn to the desire for ever greater achievements. Engineering efforts that would have been impossible in the poverty of prior eras, including engineering on a planetary scale, were practical in the Golden Age.