Cool paper. I dig the premise. But this passage from the introduction left an eyebrow raised: > [Recent progress raises] the distinct possibility that we may e

Cool paper. I dig the premise. But this passage from the introduction left an eyebrow raised: > [Recent progress raises] the distinct possibility that we may eventually discover or construct a world to which orthodox economic theory applies. This really strains credulity for me. Whatever you think of various heterodox economic theories, their objections tend to come boil to some combination of: class analysis; "human nature"; the second law of thermodynamics; conservation of energy; justice; the environment and ecology. To my knowledge, no one in the scientific community is suggesting that other solar systems will contain environments that take those factors off the table (and nor were they in 1978). Resources are finite and people are people wherever you go (unless our species itself is transformed - but interstellar travel is neither necessary nor sufficient for that to happen). What's the deal? Am I missing something? Am I reading too much into the fanciful introduction to an interesting paper?