True and not true. It is true that economists have not factored in the economics of information into their analysis of GDP yet but it isn't true to say we live in a post scarcity world or that we are even yet approaching such a world.

What is true is that we've probably reached the point where competition for programming jobs will put negative pressure on salaries. Basically Google and AWS make 90% gross margin on the electrons they convert from electrical power to search advertising or web services. They can live on probably a third of that. Today we see the excess margin being spent on speculative things (Google X as an example) but as the margins get squeezed that will go away, then excess salary will go away. We talk about ageism but really there is a ceiling on salaries for most people and if they aren't in the "special 1%" they are replaced by cheaper people as soon as their salary hits that peak. That used to be around 50 now it seems it is around 40 and has been coming down nearly linearly for the last 5 years. Basically any job that can be done by someone fresh out of college with a modicum of search skills on Stack Overflow or other forum sites is going to have zero real wage growth.

I had a really interesting exchange with senior folks at IBM talking about office space and office plans. Looking at it at the surface, saving money on office space helps increase the money you can pay the employees and keeps margins up. But when you look at it in the context of dollars of margin per employee, it makes no sense at all.

Consider a classic "widgets" company. Perhaps 5 people designing widgets, 10 engineering the parts and designing flows for assembling them, maybe 20 on a factory floor putting them together, testing them, and putting them out for shipping. All to sell thousands of $45 widgets making $15 gross margin. How much do you spend on office space for those 35 people affects if it is $15 gross margin or $10 gross margin. But when you have 3 people designing, 2 developing, and 2 testing and releasing a software product that sells millions of units at $4 with $2 gross margin, you have cut revenue per sale 10x but increased sales 1000x. And because the employees are still living in the lie about "we have to keep costs down" you get these companies pocketing billions of dollars in free cash flow that they just sit on.

The economics of information are completely different than the economics of goods and using "classic" economic analysis you get really out of whack numbers and expectations. Think about this, Google could literally lay off half the engineers in the company with zero impact on their revenue numbers.

It will be interesting to see how this settles out, I don't expect programmers to suddenly get a proportional share of the revenue from information goods, but I also think work is going to be vastly different. I can easily see the goods economy moving to large conglomerate fabricators like FoxCon which end up manufacturing anything and everything to the wishes of a handful of designers and engineers. Their forte' is electronics, LG has appliances pretty much sewn up (no pun intended), can you imagine if Ford or Toyota could create the 'foxcon of auto manufacturing' ?

Existing economic models have a bunch of ways GDP recirculates in an economy, those ways are mostly toast in an information economy leaving behind giant pools of cash. Finding a way to put that cash back into the economy will be the challenge for the information revolution.