Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
Free Zone Economics: The $8,000 Miracle
A back-of-envelope calculation that exposes the absurdity of artificial scarcity.
The Math That Will Make You Angry
Here’s a number that should haunt you: the United States spent approximately $14,885 per person on healthcare in 2024. Not total wellbeing. Not food, shelter, education, and healthcare combined. Just healthcare. The same country where 38 million people live in poverty.
Now here’s the punchline: a Free Zone can provide housing, food, healthcare, energy, and education for roughly $8,000 per person annually. Not “basic subsistence.” Actual abundance. Clean homes. Nutritious food. Preventive care. Year-round education. And still come in under half of what America spends just trying to keep people from dying of treatable diseases.
You’re being ripped off. And not by shadowy conspirators—by a system designed in an era when scarcity was the default. The technology to provide baseline abundance exists today. The only thing standing in the way is an economy running on maps drawn in the steam age.
Let’s break down exactly how ridiculous this is.
The Baseline Bundle
A Free Zone provides five essentials unconditionally—not as charity, but as infrastructure. Like roads. Like sewers. Like the air you’re not being invoiced for (yet).
| Category | Traditional Cost (US) | Free Zone Cost | How We’re Getting Robbed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Housing | $18,000/yr (median rent) | ~$2,500/yr | Speculation, manual labor, zoning theater |
| Food | $3,000-5,000/yr | ~$1,500/yr | Transportation, waste, middlemen |
| Healthcare | $14,885/yr (2024) | ~$2,000/yr | Administrative bloat, reactive care, pricing chaos |
| Energy | $1,500-2,500/yr | ~$500/yr | Legacy infrastructure, fossil fuel subsidies |
| Education | $15,000/yr (K-12 avg) | ~$1,000/yr | Buildings, bureaucracy, credentialism |
| Total | $50,000+/yr | ~$7,500/yr | 85% “scarcity tax” |
Let’s examine each component and ask the question economists hate: why are we paying so much for things that cost so little to produce?
1. Housing: $2,500/year (Or: Why Your Rent Is a Feudal Tribute)
The Current Absurdity
The median American renter pays $1,500/month—$18,000/year—for a box of air surrounded by wood and drywall. Roughly 30% of Americans are “cost-burdened,” spending more than a third of their income just to have somewhere to sleep.
Here’s the dirty secret: construction labor is 40-50% of traditional building costs. Not materials. Not land (well, sometimes land). People hammering things together the way we’ve done it since the Pharaohs, minus the whips and plus OSHA paperwork.
The Free Zone Approach
3D-Printed Construction: ICON, the Austin-based company that’s been quietly revolutionizing home construction, can print the shell of a 2,000 square foot home in 24-48 hours. The material cost? Around $10,000-20,000. The finished homes they’ve built in Mexico—actual, livable homes—cost as little as $4,000 for basic units.
In 2024, they completed 100 3D-printed homes in Georgetown, Texas. The market prices them at $450,000-$600,000 because land, finishes, and profit margins exist. But the construction cost collapsed.
Modular Design: When you standardize components and prefabricate in factories, costs drop 20-50% compared to site-built construction. China’s Broad Group built a 57-story tower in 19 days using prefab modules. Nineteen. Days. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a single-family home permit takes longer than that to process.
The Math:
- 3D-printed/modular unit: $30,000 capital cost
- 30-year lifespan (conservative) = $1,000/year amortization
- Maintenance (robotic): $500/year
- Land (community-owned, no speculation): $500/year
- Utilities infrastructure: $500/year
- Total: ~$2,500/year
The Elephant in the Room
“But wait,” you say, “what about land costs?”
This is where ideology creeps in. Land is expensive because we allow it to be speculated upon. A Free Zone treats land as commons—you can live on it, you can’t hoard it and flip it. The moment land stops being a financial instrument, housing becomes shelter again instead of an investment vehicle.
Radical? Singapore does it. Vienna does it. They have some of the highest quality of life on Earth. But sure, let’s keep pretending the only option is letting BlackRock buy every house in Phoenix.
2. Food: $1,500/year (Or: The $384 Billion We Throw Away)
The Current Absurdity
Americans throw away 30-40% of their food supply. In 2024, the value of surplus food that got wasted reached $384 billion—roughly 1.3% of GDP, dumped into landfills while 34 million Americans experience food insecurity.
The USDA’s “thrifty” food budget is $250/month, $3,000/year. That’s the budget version. And yet, rice in bulk costs about $0.05 per 100 calories. Beans: $0.08. The raw ingredients for human survival are absurdly cheap. The expense is in moving them across 1,500 miles (the average distance an American meal travels), storing them inefficiently, and letting them rot on shelves because expiration labels are more about liability than biology.
More than 80% of Americans throw away perfectly good food because they don’t understand what “sell by” means. It doesn’t mean “turns to poison at midnight.”
The Free Zone Approach
Vertical Farming: Use 95% less water, zero pesticides, no weather risk, year-round production, yields 10-400x per square foot versus conventional farming. The technology exists. The economics are improving rapidly.
Here’s the 2024 reality: vertical farming currently costs about $3.07/lb for produce, compared to $0.65/lb for conventional outdoor farming. That’s still expensive. But energy accounts for 25% of operating costs, and solar energy costs have fallen 90% since 2010. The global average levelized cost of solar hit $0.043/kWh in 2024. By 2030, it’ll be around $0.02/kWh.
Run the numbers forward: when energy is nearly free, the main cost driver for vertical farming evaporates. Fork Farms is already producing lettuce and greens for under $1/pound with their Flex Farms system—approaching price parity with field-grown.
Local Production: When your food grows in a building down the street instead of a farm in Chile, you eliminate the 1,500-mile road trip. No refrigerated trucks. No spoilage. No “best by” panic. The lettuce was picked this morning because that’s when you ordered it.
The Math:
- 2,000 calories/day × 365 days = 730,000 calories/year
- At $0.002/calorie (achievable with automation + cheap energy): $1,460/year
- Buffer for variety and quality: $1,500/year
This isn’t theoretical. It’s the natural endpoint of current technology trajectories. The only question is whether we build the infrastructure.
3. Healthcare: $2,000/year (Or: The $14,885 Insurance Company Tax)
The Current Absurdity
The United States spent an estimated $14,885 per person on healthcare in 2024—twice the average of wealthy OECD countries ($7,371). Despite this, we don’t live longer. Our infant mortality is worse. Our outcomes are middling.
What do we get for paying double? Billing codes. Prior authorizations. Denied claims. Thirty percent of US healthcare spending is administrative overhead—people whose entire job is to argue with other people about whether your broken arm qualifies for coverage.
Here’s what makes it truly grotesque: Cuba spends about $1,200 per person per year on healthcare and achieves a life expectancy of 78.3 years—essentially the same as the United States. They have 8.58 physicians per 1,000 people, the highest density in the world. Their secret? Preventive care, community health workers, and not letting insurance companies write the rules.
The Free Zone Approach
AI-First Diagnostics: Google’s DeepMind detects eye disease as accurately as specialists. AI radiology is faster, cheaper, and often more accurate than human readers. Continuous monitoring via wearables catches problems before they become emergencies. The technology to diagnose 80% of common conditions costs essentially nothing at scale—it’s software.
Prevention Over Treatment: Here’s a stat that should make you throw your insurance card into a bonfire: 80% of chronic disease is preventable through lifestyle. Heart disease, diabetes, many cancers—preventable. But there’s no billing code for “ate vegetables and walked daily,” so we wait until people need stents.
A Free Zone provides: clean air, nutritious food, reduced stress (no rent panic), exercise opportunities, and AI health coaches for personalized prevention. You prevent disease by designing a civilization that doesn’t manufacture it.
Telemedicine + Local Clinics: Ninety percent of primary care visits can be handled remotely. AI triage routes complex cases to specialists. Community health workers handle hands-on care. The expensive part of healthcare—the building, the administrators, the people who translate between ICD-10 codes—largely disappears.
The Math:
- AI diagnostics and monitoring: $200/year
- Preventive care and wellness: $300/year
- Primary care (AI + telemedicine): $500/year
- Specialist care fund (pooled risk): $500/year
- Emergency/hospital fund (pooled): $400/year
- Medications (generic, bulk purchasing): $100/year
- Total: ~$2,000/year
Is this precise? No. Is it directionally correct? Cuba, Costa Rica, and Kaiser Permanente say yes.
4. Energy: $500/year (Or: Why Fossil Fuels Are the New Whale Oil)
The Current Absurdity
The average American household pays $120/month for electricity—$1,440/year. This would be fine, except that energy is becoming essentially free and we’re still pricing it like it’s 1970.
The Free Zone Approach
Solar Economics (2024): The global weighted average levelized cost of utility-scale solar hit $0.043/kWh in 2024. For comparison, natural gas plants cost $0.05-0.07/kWh. Solar is already cheaper than fossil fuels even without subsidies.
The US Department of Energy’s target for utility-scale solar is $0.02/kWh by 2030. That’s not optimism—that’s the trend line they’re tracking.
Battery Costs Collapsing: Core battery energy storage system (BESS) equipment costs fell 40% in 2024 compared to 2023, reaching a record low of $165 per kWh. When you combine cheap solar with cheap storage, you get dispatchable renewable energy—power when you need it, not just when the sun shines.
The Trajectory:
- 2025: Solar below $0.03/kWh (happening now)
- 2030: Solar approaching $0.01/kWh
- 2045-2055: Fusion adds baseload, costs approach zero marginal cost
The Math:
- Average household uses 10,000 kWh/year
- At $0.03/kWh (community solar): $300/year
- Storage and grid costs: $150/year
- Buffer for heating/cooling: $50/year
- Total: ~$500/year
By 2035, energy should be so cheap it’s barely worth metering. We’re arguing about natural gas pipelines while the sun is right there, being free.
5. Education: $1,000/year (Or: Why We Pay $15,000 for Buildings and Bureaucrats)
The Current Absurdity
The US spends about $15,000 per student per year on K-12 education. Most of that isn’t teaching. It’s buildings, administration, sports facilities, bureaucracy, and credentialing systems.
The actual content of education—the lectures, the problems, the material—has been free on the internet for a decade. Khan Academy. MIT OpenCourseWare. Duolingo. The bottleneck isn’t knowledge; it’s motivation and mentorship.
The Free Zone Approach
AI Tutors: Personalized learning at any pace. Available 24/7. Adapts to learning style. Infinitely patient. Never judges. And here’s the key: software scales infinitely. The marginal cost of educating the billionth student is the same as the first: essentially zero.
Community Learning: Makerspaces, workshops, project-based learning, mentorship from practitioners. The things AI can’t do well—inspire, connect, show what mastery looks like—handled by humans who actually want to teach.
Physical Infrastructure: Shared learning spaces (libraries, labs). No expensive campuses. No administrative bloat. No credentialing theater (the part of education designed to prove you had education, rather than to actually educate you).
The Math:
- AI tutor subscription: $200/year
- Learning materials (digital): $100/year
- Makerspace/workshop access: $300/year
- Community mentor time: $200/year
- Specialized equipment/supplies: $200/year
- Total: ~$1,000/year
The Automation Dividend: Why This Gets Cheaper Every Year
Here’s the insight that makes Free Zones inevitable, not utopian: the same technology displacing workers also slashes production costs.
Labor Cost Collapse
| Sector | Labor % of Cost (Traditional) | Labor % of Cost (Automated) |
|---|---|---|
| Construction | 40-50% | 5-10% |
| Agriculture | 25-35% | 5-10% |
| Healthcare Admin | 30% | 5% |
| Manufacturing | 20-30% | 5-10% |
When robots build the houses, grow the food, and handle logistics, the cost of baseline abundance plummets. The same AI that replaced the call center worker also replaced the call center. The same robot that took the warehouse job also eliminated the warehouse’s labor costs.
This is the part everyone misses: automation doesn’t just displace workers—it makes what they produced cheaper. The question is who captures those savings. Currently: shareholders. In a Free Zone: everyone.
The Feedback Loop
- Automation reduces production costs
- Lower costs → cheaper baseline provision
- More people freed from survival work
- More people available for innovation, care, creativity
- Faster automation development
- Return to step 1
This isn’t wishful thinking. This is Moore’s Law applied to atoms.
The Comparison That Should End the Argument
What We Spend Now (US) on “Poverty Management”
| Program | Cost/Recipient/Year |
|---|---|
| Medicaid | $8,000-12,000 |
| SNAP (food stamps) | $2,000-3,000 |
| Section 8 housing | $8,000-15,000 |
| Administrative overhead | 15-30% of above |
| Total | $15,000-25,000/person |
And guess what? People remain in poverty. The system doesn’t solve poverty—it manages it, expensively, with means testing, paperwork, and humiliation.
What We Don’t Count
- Police budgets to manage desperation: $200-500/resident in high-poverty areas
- Courts processing poverty-related crimes: billions annually
- Emergency rooms as primary care: 3-5x the cost of prevention
- Lost productivity from untreated health issues: trillions in aggregate
The Free Zone Alternative
$7,500/person provides actual abundance, not poverty management.
The question isn’t “Can we afford Free Zones?”
It’s “Can we afford to keep spending $25,000+ per person to maintain scarcity while pretending we can’t afford abundance?”
Detroit: A Case Study in Possibility
Detroit Today:
- Population: ~640,000
- Municipal budget: ~$2.8 billion ($4,375/resident)
- Poverty rate: 30%+
- Median household income: $34,000
Detroit as Free Zone:
- 640,000 × $7,500 = $4.8 billion/year for full baseline provision
- But eliminate poverty-driven costs:
- Reduced policing (crime drops with abundance): -$300M
- Reduced emergency room overuse: -$200M
- Reduced courts/incarceration: -$150M
- Reduced bureaucratic overhead: -$200M
- Net additional cost: ~$1.2 billion/year
Where does it come from?
- EXIT Protocol wealth transfers from automation beneficiaries
- Automation dividend (robot production surplus)
- Federal welfare spending reallocation (currently wasted on management)
- Philanthropic/impact investment
This isn’t magic. It’s arithmetic. We spend more maintaining misery than it would cost to eliminate it.
The Honest Caveats
What Could Be Higher
- Healthcare for aging populations
- Initial infrastructure capital costs
- Transition period (before full automation)
- Regional variations (Manhattan ≠ Montana)
What Could Be Lower
- Fusion energy (post-2045): near-zero marginal cost electricity
- AI improvements: consistently faster than projected
- Economies of scale: larger Free Zones = lower per-capita costs
- Preventive health: long-term savings compound
The Truthful Answer
$8,000 is a target, not a guarantee. The actual number might be $6,000 or $12,000 depending on location, implementation, and technology timing.
But here’s what we know: the direction is right, the magnitude is plausible, and we’re currently spending more to maintain artificial scarcity than abundance would cost.
Key Takeaways
-
Current costs are inflated by labor, administration, and artificial scarcity—not by genuine resource constraints.
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Automation collapses costs across housing, food, healthcare, energy, and education. This is already happening.
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$7,500-8,000/person/year is achievable with current technology trajectories. Not in 2050. Now, with commitment.
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We already spend more managing poverty than it would cost to eliminate it. The economic argument for Free Zones is conservative.
-
The numbers get better as technology improves—cheap solar now, fusion later, AI everything.
The Free Zone isn’t utopian economics. It’s recognizing that scarcity is increasingly a choice, not a constraint.
We have the technology. We have the resources. We have the math.
The only thing we lack is the imagination to stop paying tribute to systems built before electricity.
References
- The Foundation (Chapter 1) — The broader economic framework
- Free Zones — Implementation overview
- EXIT Protocol — How legacy wealth transitions
- HomeGuide: 3D Printed House Costs — Current construction economics
- IRENA: Global Solar LCOE 2024 — Solar cost trajectory
- CMS National Health Expenditure Data — US healthcare spending
- ReFED: Food Waste in America — The $384 billion we throw away
- LBL: Utility-Scale Solar 2025 — Solar economics data
Questions, challenges, better numbers? Debate at unscarcity.ai/forum.
