"We are looking at a future where to a first approximation, everyone is wealthy"
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A scientist saying “to a first approximation” is doing a lot of cultural work: it’s a lab-coat disclaimer smuggled into a utopian promise. Merkle isn’t pitching fairy dust; he’s invoking the engineer’s habit of ignoring second-order mess so you can see the dominant trend. The rhetorical trick is that the humility of the phrase (“first approximation”) makes the audacity of the claim (“everyone is wealthy”) sound responsible, even inevitable.
In context, Merkle’s techno-optimism tracks with late-20th-century futurism: compute gets cheaper, automation gets smarter, materials science gets weirder, and suddenly scarcity looks less like a law of nature than a temporary design constraint. His own associations with nanotechnology and cryptography matter here. Nanotech imagines manufacturing that collapses marginal costs; cryptography imagines systems that reduce institutional friction. Pair them and “wealth” starts to read not as piles of money but as access: energy, housing, health, and tools becoming abundant enough that today’s luxuries feel like tomorrow’s defaults.
The subtext is also a dodge. “Everyone” is aspirational, but “first approximation” conveniently brackets distribution, politics, and power. History doesn’t deny that technology can balloon total wealth; it just keeps reminding us that abundance doesn’t automatically equal fairness. Merkle’s line works because it frames inequality and conflict as engineering bugs waiting for the next iteration, rather than as core features of human systems. It’s a seductive worldview: the future as a spreadsheet where growth eventually outruns grievance.
In context, Merkle’s techno-optimism tracks with late-20th-century futurism: compute gets cheaper, automation gets smarter, materials science gets weirder, and suddenly scarcity looks less like a law of nature than a temporary design constraint. His own associations with nanotechnology and cryptography matter here. Nanotech imagines manufacturing that collapses marginal costs; cryptography imagines systems that reduce institutional friction. Pair them and “wealth” starts to read not as piles of money but as access: energy, housing, health, and tools becoming abundant enough that today’s luxuries feel like tomorrow’s defaults.
The subtext is also a dodge. “Everyone” is aspirational, but “first approximation” conveniently brackets distribution, politics, and power. History doesn’t deny that technology can balloon total wealth; it just keeps reminding us that abundance doesn’t automatically equal fairness. Merkle’s line works because it frames inequality and conflict as engineering bugs waiting for the next iteration, rather than as core features of human systems. It’s a seductive worldview: the future as a spreadsheet where growth eventually outruns grievance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wealth |
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