Time & Perspective Quote by Ralph Merkle

Merkle is selling a future by sneaking a moral argument inside an economic forecast: give people enough stuff and politics calms down. As a scientist associated with nanotech and long-horizon engineering, he speaks in the language of “first approximation” - a telling phrase that borrows credibility from physics. It’s not “everyone will be rich,” it’s a model assumption, a simplification that sounds responsible even as it makes an enormous ethical claim: material abundance will do social work that we currently assign to institutions, culture, and justice.

The intent is techno-optimist triage. If scarcity is the root variable, then advanced manufacturing, automation, and molecular-scale production become peace projects. The subtext is a quiet downgrade of ideology: racism, nationalism, resentment, and authoritarianism are framed less as choices or power structures and more as side effects of thin wallets and empty shelves. “Soften” is doing a lot of labor here - it doesn’t promise harmony, only a dampening of edge, like turning down the gain on human conflict.

Context matters because Merkle’s era is defined by Silicon Valley’s recurring faith that innovation can outpace politics. The line echoes postwar modernization theory and late-20th-century “end of history” vibes: prosperity as solvent. It also reveals the blind spot of many engineering narratives: abundance can widen status competition, concentrate control, or intensify surveillance even when basic needs are met. The quote works because it’s both modest and radical - modest in its probabilistic tone, radical in its implication that the hardest problems of governance might be approached as throughput problems.