The 2013 movie Elysium, in which the plutocrats migrate to an Eden-like artificial world in Earth orbit, does a pretty good job of bringing this dystopian vision of the future to life. Even some economists have started to worry about this scenario. Noah Smith, a popular economics blogger, warned in a 2014 post of a possible future in which “a teeming, ragged mass of lumpen humanity teeters on the edge of starvation” outside the gates that protect the elite, and that “unlike the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao, robot-enforced tyranny will be robust to shifts in popular opinion. The rabble may think
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