Introduction
Any introduction into macroeconomics since its existence as the classic national economy counts among its base assumptions and basic terms, for example, the shortage of economic goods, the production factors of soil, labour and capital (as machines and buildings), interoffice and intercompany, as well as intergovernmental division of labour, trade of goods and services, as well as the barter and monetised economy based hereupon. What would change, in the real economy as well as in the macroeconomics observing it, if instead of the proverbial industrial factory with smoke stacks as the typical means of production of the industrialised society, there now were small, cheap, all-purpose “desk top factories” (cf. Vilbrandt et al 2008: 259–284), allowing anybody to make arbitrary high-quality consumer goods themselves, usable without limitations and adaptable to the individual user preferences? This would then allow any consumer to satisfy any of their consumer desires – with top quality goods, objects or devices, in every respect completely functional, produced with an economically justifiable amount of energy and raw materials, and within a completely satisfactory production time?
Prima facie two things appear quite obvious in this context: a) economic consequences would be hardly foreseeable, they would refashion the innermost and oldest principles and laws of economic science, and economic events at its deepest core and at its root, and would, in this sense, be truly revolutionary; as well as equally obvious but also b): such perfect small, cheap and universal fabrication equipment doesn’t (yet) exist.
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