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∂AIL Mr. Stanley Schmidt, Editor↓Analog Science Fiction
↓380 Lexington Ave.↓New York, N.Y. 10017∞

Dear Stan:

	Technology presents us with many unprecedented opportunities and
problems with which we have no experience, but we have plenty of
experience with the problem of "what to do with all the free time".

	During most of recorded history, most countries have had
substantial leisure classes, whose members didn't work.  Our own
situation wherein almost everyone works for money is exceptional.
The idle rich often get into trouble of one kind or another, but
they don't seem to be much more quarrelsome than the lower classes
of the same society.  Judging from literature, they complain a lot,
but they prefer being rich to being poor.

	It could be argued that machine based leisure will be different
and that the older leisure classes obtained a psychological benefit
from existence of lower classes, but actually one of the main complaints
about them was that they tended to regard everyone else as just
part of the machinery.

	The prima facie assumption should be that mass leisure will
be rather like everyone being rich.

.sgn

P.S. Perhaps this state of affairs is farther in the future than most
people think.  Right now the rich aren't a whole lot better off than
the upper middle class, but consider what will happen if a $100,000
goodie is invented that everyone will want as much as people wanted
automobiles when they were invented and were too expensive for the
masses.  All of a sudden there will be a rebirth of intense economic
ambition.  Possibilities include life extending gadgetry, household
robots, and flying machines usable like cars.

P.P.S. Rudy Rucker's seems to misunderstand the quantum mechanical
notion of a mixed state.  Giving a character a Rumanian first name
and a Czech last name doesn't make him a Hungarian.