Thinking this morning about two SF concepts I first read long ago. One was a scene in an AC Clarke novel that mentioned how in this future America the old landfill dumps were valued resource mines. This is bound to happen because the metals are RIGHT THERE,

and we're not yet already mining dumps because we have no way of disturbing them without releasing toxins in enormous quantities (mining does this, but typically in 'wasteland' areas mostly hidden from first-world people).

Once scientists & technologists figure out toxin control, the landfills will be sources of all types of common & rare metals.

The other was a short story based on the concept of a 'replicator' device. The guy who invented it thought that it would solve world hunger & poverty. You could put something on one platform, hit a button, and a duplicate of it would appear on the other platform.

In the story, about a day after the replicator was announced, rather than being used to wipe out poverty, it was seized by a strongman who used it to enslave humanity. Most of the story happened hundreds of years in the future, where humanity had been reduced to a Neo-Feudalism.

Of course, the replicator was a metaphor for modern tech, which has brought us to the point where we could wipe out hunger & at the very least the most degrading levels of poverty, but those in power find it helpful to keep wages low by keeping workers on the edge of disaster.

The futurist Bucky Fuller was talking about this long ago:
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. [we] can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting [everyone] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/133403-we-should-do-away-with-the-absolutely-specious-notion-that

There's a great thread floating around this morning about how lab-created diamonds are now literally indistinguishable from the top mined diamonds, & the diamond cartels* are having real trouble keeping their market from collapsing.

*if you don't know, the diamond cartels are just as criminal & destructive to society as the cocaine cartels are)

The artificiality of the diamond markets are a great illustration in microcosm of how 'market value' is often or mostly a construct.

Food is sometimes so cheap now that it is destroyed in the fields because it can't be sold at enough of a price to pay for production. Some at least of that food could be going to starving people but the market doesn't care about starving people.

Contemplating why we have starvation in a world of plenty will radicalize you in ways you don't expect when you first start wending your way though the linkages.