User:WillWare/Post-scarcity economics

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There are a lot of interesting 3D printer projects getting started these days.

  • Fab@Home - For $2K or $3K, you can 3d-print objects at home
  • RepRap - Similar idea, with self-replication thrown into the mix, with the result that it will eventually be much cheaper
  • Ponoko - this is actually a laser cutter service bureau, a different beast from the other two

These raise the question of how decentralized small-quantity desktop manufacturing, distributed widely and affordably, might bring about structural changes that disrupt the macroeconomic steady state. Shipping costs (including carbon footprint) are decreased, for one thing.

Ordinarily if I want a product, I must wait for somebody to invent and market it, while doing well enough to maintain a small business, or I must do all that myself. With a 3D printer, I can design the product with a CAD program and fabricate just the small quantity I need.

Images of 3D printers and stuff that was printed with them:

This gets really interesting when (as with the RepRap project) the printer can print a copy of itself. Then the price of printers falls to little more than the cost of their raw materials. And the price of anything they print likewise falls.

  • Nanodot discussion about 3D printers and their limitations, and their economic similarities to advanced nanotechnology.
  • 3D printers have some limitations.
  • Chris Phoenix blogged on this stuff.
  • More blogging.
  • Medical application of 3D printers to replacing tissue for burn victims, or to create replacement organs
  • Blog post about affordable 3D scanning - if you have both scanning and printing then you have a 3D photocopier.

If the price of manufactured goods falls, what happens to the price of skilled and unskilled labor, the price of legal and medical services, the price of insurance, the price of land and housing? As we transition to a situation where huge numbers of people own a broadly capable 3D printer, who wins or loses? In the short term? In the long term? Like many other people who've thought about this, my intuition is that in the long term, everybody will be much better off.

I don't know enough about economics to figure out who wins and loses in the short term. It would be interesting to do some simulations to try to figure that out.