I really dislike that cartoon, because it fails to grapple with opportunity costs and tradeoffs. 'What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothi

I really dislike that cartoon, because it fails to grapple with opportunity costs and tradeoffs. 'What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?' doesn't address the fact that a world which is better than it would otherwise be measured on those axes must necessarily be worse than it would otherwise be measured on other axes. Every dollar spent on on one thing is necessarily a dollar not spent on another thing. TANSTAAFL. And of course individual people have different weights they apply to different goods. E.g. one person might prefer energy independence to green jobs, and another vice versa. While there may be a globally optimal solution per each person's preferences, I do not believe that there can be a globally optimal solution for everyone's preferences. And also, things can interact in weird and unpredictable ways. Higher crop yields should yield lower food prices, but perhaps requiring cleaner engines increases the cost of food transportation such that food prices increase instead (n.b.: I am not arguing that is in fact the case). Knowing all this is an information problem, and figuring it all out is a planning problem, and it turns out that solving those two problems is not just practically impossible (cf. every centrally-planned administration ever): it's theoretically impossible (cf. chaos theory in mathematics). So, 'har, har: we can just make everything better for free' is a really naïve view to take.