So true Jill, thanks for posting. I too feel that something very fundamental was missed in umair haque’s otherwise great article, it seemed to go round in the same conventional loop of a closed, zero-sum economy.

The root source of wealth appears to be energy.

We’ve always dug it out of the planet as something finite, therefore precious, and passed it on to one another, at profit.

That seems more like the real basis of our zero-sum economy; The underlying fabric enabling and even necessitating people to get wealthy at the expense of others.

It is obviously also the underlying mechanism of planetary pollution.

Now, we seem to be getting very close to plugging directly into the true original source of energy, the sun.

With that, for the first time ever, we will have an external, infinite source of energy, limitless in that it can never be exhausted, therefore no reason to seek profit from it.

That really could be the end of the zero-sum economy, and the beginning of a new paradigm, where we genuinely do all get to have our cake and eat it; limitless wealth for all humans.

Of course we would still need cash to conduct business, where we might wish to invest in innovation, art, and the like, but that cash would no longer need to be something finite, limited in any way.

It would make sense for this new money to be minted at a rate which corresponds to solar energy converted.

It is interesting that solar power is becoming the only viable means of continuing to mine some crypto-currencies.

Ironically, some of the worst wealth hoarders we might ever encounter in life, are heavily invested in the very technology which could be used to finally break the chain of the zero-sum economy.

I wonder if/when they will ever be convinced that it is finally time to turn to spending all of their holdings on solar power implementation.