I was just thinking about how one would make a living in the age of nanoscale assemblers as depicted in Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age. I came up with four essentials to an economy in such an age:

• Land
• Energy
• Raw materials/elements
• Information

The first three are definite requirements for any kind of life in such a future. They all kind of go hand in hand. Land and raw material would be needed for energy production. Energy and land and/or raw material would be needed to reconfigure the raw materials.

Information is a little trickier, especially in these GPLed days. With the current legal frameworks of copyrights and patents, a person could get a monopoly over any novel configurations of raw material that they come up with. But in a society without such protections then only the service of creation/invention of new configurations could generate income. Since information wants to be free, then the latter is the most likely scenario. Novel information would eventually become free no matter how hard someone tries to monopolize it.

Such an economy really has no room for trade at higher levels. Anyone would be able to create anything they want except the above. Boot straping oneself would be the rational aim in such an age. One would have to find a friendly or capitalistic guy with an assembler so one could create their own assembler, and once someone is boot strapped then trade essentially becomes limited to those four essentials.