Near-Zero Marginal Cost
When the cost of one more unit approaches nothing.
Marginal cost is the cost of producing one more unit of something. For digital goods it is already effectively zero — copying a file or serving a model is nearly free once the first copy exists. The Age of Abundance thesis is, at root, a wager that this condition spreads: that energy, compute, and a widening set of physical goods are moving toward near-zero marginal cost at the point of use.
Why it changes the economics
Conventional markets price goods near their marginal cost, so as that cost approaches zero, price does too — unless scarcity is re-introduced by other means (intellectual property, network control, or artificial supply limits). This is why the abundance debate is so focused on ownership and protocols: the technology lowers marginal cost, but institutions decide whether the savings reach people or are captured as rents.
The limits
Near-zero marginal cost is not the same as free: fixed costs (building the solar farm, training the model, laying the fiber) remain real and must be financed, and some inputs — land, certain minerals, skilled attention — stay genuinely scarce. The honest version of the thesis is that the *share* of human needs governed by near-zero marginal cost is rising, not that scarcity vanishes everywhere at once.
Sources
- Marginal cost — Wikipedia
- The Zero Marginal Cost Society — Wikipedia
- Public good (economics) — Wikipedia