The Infinity Economy
By Vedang Vatsa · Published: March 11, 2026
Every generation of economists has worked inside a single foundational assumption. Resources are limited, wants are not, and the job of economics is to figure out how to allocate the gap. Adam Smith built on it. David Ricardo formalized it. Karl Marx inverted its politics but kept its structure. Even the most radical twentieth-century economic thinkers, from Keynes to Hayek, accepted that scarcity was the organizing condition of economic life.
A recent preprint by Pitshou Moleka, published through Preprints.org in June 2025, argues that this assumption is reaching obsolescence. The convergence of artificial intelligence, autonomous production, decentralized energy, and near-zero-cost information replication, Moleka argues, signals the emergence of what he calls the Infinity Economy, a system where wealth creation and distribution are no longer constrained by material limits. The paper proposes a post-monetary, AI-governed framework for organizing economies beyond scarcity, with applications extending to extraterrestrial civilizations.
The ambition of the argument is genuinely interesting. The question is whether the evidence supports it, and whether the intellectual scaffolding holds up under the weight of the physical world it claims to transcend.
Where Scarcity Has Already Weakened
The strongest version of Moleka's argument draws on sectors where scarcity logic has genuinely eroded. Digital information is the clearest example. Once a piece of software, a song, or a document is created, the cost of replicating it one more time is effectively zero. Jeremy Rifkin documented this trend in 2014, arguing that the near-zero marginal cost of digital goods was already disrupting media, publishing, and software markets. He was broadly right. The economics of a Spotify stream or a Wikipedia article do not follow the logic of oil extraction or wheat farming. The good does not deplete when consumed. A second user does not reduce what the first user received.
Cognitive labor is following a similar, if less complete, trajectory. Large language models now perform legal research, medical triage, financial analysis, and software debugging at costs that fall with each generation of hardware. Brynjolfsson and McAfee described this as the second machine age, where machines move from replacing muscle to replacing cognition. The economic implications are real. If the cost of generating a competent first draft of a legal brief falls by 90%, and it has, then a meaningful portion of what lawyers bill for has moved closer to zero marginal cost.
Additive manufacturing (3D printing) has made localized, on-demand production feasible for certain categories of goods, from prosthetics to aerospace components. Chris Anderson argued over a decade ago that this would eventually democratize manufacturing. The democratization has been slower than predicted, but the direction is clear.
These are genuine shifts and they deserve serious economic analysis. Moleka is right that the mainstream economics profession has not fully reckoned with what happens when the principal vectors of value, information and cognition, become non-rival and near-infinitely replicable.
Where the Argument Overreaches
The difficulty begins when the paper extends the logic of digital abundance to the entire economy. Information can be copied at zero marginal cost. Lithium cannot. Fresh water cannot. Arable land cannot. The IEA reported that global data center electricity consumption reached approximately 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, roughly 1.5% of total global electricity use, and projects this to more than double to 945 TWh by 2030 as AI workloads grow at approximately 15% per year. These "dematerialized" AI systems run on very material semiconductor chips manufactured from rare earth elements, cooled by water in facilities that consumed 66 billion liters in the United States in 2023 alone, and powered by electricity generated overwhelmingly from fossil fuels.
The paper references "decentralized quantum energy" as a pathway to eliminating traditional energy constraints. As of mid-2026, commercial quantum energy generation does not exist. Fusion energy, which is closer to realization, remains at least a decade from commercial deployment according to the most optimistic estimates from the IAEA. The gap between what is theoretically possible and what is deployable at scale within the lifetime of current economic systems is not a minor detail. It is the entire question.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's foundational work on entropy in economics, published in 1971, established something that remains true regardless of how sophisticated AI becomes. Economic processes transform low-entropy resources into high-entropy waste. This is not a feature of capitalism or socialism. It is a feature of physics. No amount of algorithmic optimization changes the second law of thermodynamics. Information may be infinitely replicable, but the infrastructure that stores, processes, and transmits it is made of atoms that obey thermodynamic laws.
In 2025, China tightened export controls on rare earth elements essential for the magnets in electric vehicle motors and the components in AI chips. Global demand for neodymium alone is projected to increase by over 70% by 2030. The lithium market, after a surplus in 2023-2024, is expected to face deficits by 2026 according to the IEA. The very technologies that the Infinity Economy framework positions as pathways to post-scarcity are themselves constrained by material scarcities that show no sign of disappearing.
The Distribution Problem That Abundance Does Not Solve
Moleka's paper acknowledges, relatively briefly, that abundance does not automatically resolve issues of power and distribution. This may be the most important concession in the entire argument, and it deserved more space.
The digital economy has already demonstrated what happens when a resource becomes abundant while the infrastructure for producing and distributing it remains concentrated. Shoshana Zuboff documented in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism how the near-infinite scalability of data collection did not produce broadly shared prosperity. It produced platform monopolies. Google, Meta, Amazon, and a handful of other companies captured the economic value of digital abundance precisely because they controlled the infrastructure through which that abundance flowed.
There is no reason to assume that a future economy of abundant AI-generated goods and services would distribute itself any differently without deliberate institutional intervention. If anything, the capital requirements for frontier AI development, with leading models now costing hundreds of millions of dollars to train, suggest that concentration could intensify. Nick Srnicek's analysis of platform capitalism showed that network effects and data advantages create winner-take-all dynamics that become harder to reverse over time, not easier.
The paper proposes decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and blockchain-based governance as alternatives to centralized control. The empirical record of DAOs so far has not been encouraging on the governance front. The largest DAO experiments, including those in the Ethereum ecosystem, have struggled with low participation rates, plutocratic voting structures where influence scales with token holdings, and vulnerability to exploits. These are solvable engineering problems in theory. In practice, they have persisted through multiple generations of protocol design.
What the Paper Gets Right
The most valuable contribution of Moleka's framework is not the specific claims about quantum energy or post-monetary exchange, which are speculative. It is the broader point that economics as a discipline has not adequately theorized abundance. The profession's modeling tools, from supply-demand curves to general equilibrium models, are built on assumptions of rival, excludable goods. When the primary output of an economy shifts toward non-rival, non-excludable goods, those tools become less useful.
W. Brian Arthur's complexity economics provides a more promising foundation than classical equilibrium models for thinking about economies where value emerges from network effects and positive feedback loops rather than from the allocation of scarce inputs. Arthur's work at the Santa Fe Institute has shown that economies with increasing returns behave fundamentally differently from the diminishing-returns economies that classical theory describes well. Moleka draws on Arthur's work, and the connection is well placed.
The paper's engagement with post-labor identity is also worth taking seriously. If cognitive automation continues on its current trajectory, and the Stanford Digital Economy Lab's data on early-career job displacement suggests it may, then large populations of educated workers could face a genuine crisis of economic purpose within a decade. The meaning of "contribution" in a society where most productive tasks can be automated is a question that neither economics nor philosophy has answered adequately. Moleka frames this as an ethical challenge of the Infinity Economy. It might more accurately be described as an ethical challenge of the next twenty years, regardless of whether anything resembling the Infinity Economy materializes.
The Empirical Reality Check
The strongest argument against post-scarcity frameworks is not theoretical. It is empirical. In 2024, 673 million people were undernourished according to the FAO. Approximately 2.2 billion people lacked access to safely managed drinking water. Renewable water availability per person declined by 7% over the past decade according to the UN. Global rare earth supply chains are tightening under geopolitical pressure. AI data centers are straining electrical grids and water supplies in regions where they cluster.
These are not problems of insufficient theoretical imagination. They are problems of material scarcity, institutional failure, and political economy. An economics that theorizes abundance while 8.2% of the world's population cannot feed itself has skipped a step. The step it has skipped is the most important one.
What I Think Matters Here
The useful kernel of the Infinity Economy thesis is that some categories of value, particularly informational and cognitive value, do follow different rules than physical commodities. This is genuinely important and undertheorized. The economics profession and policymakers would benefit from frameworks that can model non-rival goods, increasing returns, and AI-generated productivity more accurately than the current toolkit allows.
But extending this insight to a claim about the obsolescence of scarcity itself confuses a partial truth with a total one. The physical economy, where people eat food, drink water, live in buildings, travel in vehicles, and generate waste, remains stubbornly material. The AI systems that generate apparent abundance consume real electricity, real water, real minerals, and produce real heat. The abundance is genuine at the informational layer. At the physical layer, the constraints have not relaxed. In some cases, as with rare earths and energy, they have tightened.
The most productive path forward is probably not choosing between scarcity economics and abundance economics but recognizing that modern economies operate on both logics simultaneously. Software follows abundance dynamics. Lithium follows scarcity dynamics. Food production falls somewhere in between, with productivity gains offset by population growth, climate change, and soil degradation. An economics adequate to the twenty-first century would need to model these different regimes within a single framework, which neither classical economics nor post-scarcity theory currently does well.
Moleka's paper, which he describes as a "conceptual scaffold," is most useful as exactly that. It identifies a genuine blind spot in economic theory. The risk is in mistaking the scaffold for the building. The building, if it can be built at all, requires solving problems of energy, materials, governance, and distribution that paper alone does not touch. The physics does not care about the theory. And for now, the physics is winning.