"But if you have nearly unlimited resources, why worry about misallocating a small fraction of them?"
Because there is no society so rich that it can't misallocate even worse. Yes, I include full post-Singularity societies in that statement.
I think rather than saying "socialism can work then" or even "X can work then" for X in (socialism, anarchy, capitalism, etc.), it is rather worth saying that in that case, the foundation will have changed so radically that it is, correspondingly, time to completely reconsider society's economics from scratch.
The laws of economics will still be in play, and for a very long time there will still be the challenge of deciding which projects we wish to engage in, large and small ("which star do we colonize?"). That is not the problem that goes away. The problem that goes away is the lack of resources for basic happiness for some entity, a world we still live in.
Edit: Actually, for proof I point to modern society. We are already, not to put too fine a point on it, "fucking rich". We have massively more resources than we did even twenty years ago. Yet many of us feel poorer today, because an awful lot of that excess is getting tied up in various things that I will put under the umbrella of "economically unproductive". For instance, in the context of recent state government funding troubles, many people have observed that almost across the board state governments are spending radically more than they did in 2003, yet it hardly seems like they're performing that many more services than they did in 2003. A lot of that is because we are being terribly economically inefficient.
Health care has some of the same problems. We have radically more resources than we used to, but thanks to some systematic failures in the system (pick your choice of excessive centralization or insufficient centralization, for this point I don't care), we are spending way more than we need to. This is proved by people's ability to fly to, say, Argentina, and get virtually identical surgeries (even in a clean and safe environment) for one-tenth the price, give or take a bit. (The exact ratio doesn't matter, what matters is that it is large.)
We should be either getting massively more from our government, or paying massively less, than we did ten years ago, but we aren't. Health care expenditures may still be going up (it is a potential economic sinkhole just by its nature), but it still should be costing less per procedure than it did ten years ago, but it doesn't. (On average. There are exceptions where medicine has advanced so far that it is cheaper for some procedures.)
Unfortunately, it's just not possible to "wealth" your way out of needing to put at least some thought into economic efficiency.
(Also, I personally do not feel poorer and believe that we are still better off than twenty years ago. I am merely observing that A: I appear to be in a minority there, at least among people motivated to post in online discussions and B: we should be even better off than we actually are.)
The point I made was somewhat more limited than what I think you are arguing against. Obviously, wealth needs to be properly allocated or it is useless. However, my argument was merely that the solution to one particular problem ("how to care for people replaced by robots") would be cheap in the particular future envisioned.
Consider how this might work in modern terms. If you can't survive in the modern economy, you are provided with food and a bed to sleep in. We actually have such a system (homeless shelters + soup kitchens) and the cost of providing it is a negligible fraction of our GDP.
The problem comes when you try to add too much to this basic package, or when corruption eats up big chunks of wealth. I don't disagree with any of that.
And you are probably right about jealousy: people will feel poor when they get free health care but immortality pills are only for the rich. But that's a separate issue.
Because there is no society so rich that it can't misallocate even worse. Yes, I include full post-Singularity societies in that statement.
I think rather than saying "socialism can work then" or even "X can work then" for X in (socialism, anarchy, capitalism, etc.), it is rather worth saying that in that case, the foundation will have changed so radically that it is, correspondingly, time to completely reconsider society's economics from scratch.
The laws of economics will still be in play, and for a very long time there will still be the challenge of deciding which projects we wish to engage in, large and small ("which star do we colonize?"). That is not the problem that goes away. The problem that goes away is the lack of resources for basic happiness for some entity, a world we still live in.
Edit: Actually, for proof I point to modern society. We are already, not to put too fine a point on it, "fucking rich". We have massively more resources than we did even twenty years ago. Yet many of us feel poorer today, because an awful lot of that excess is getting tied up in various things that I will put under the umbrella of "economically unproductive". For instance, in the context of recent state government funding troubles, many people have observed that almost across the board state governments are spending radically more than they did in 2003, yet it hardly seems like they're performing that many more services than they did in 2003. A lot of that is because we are being terribly economically inefficient.
Health care has some of the same problems. We have radically more resources than we used to, but thanks to some systematic failures in the system (pick your choice of excessive centralization or insufficient centralization, for this point I don't care), we are spending way more than we need to. This is proved by people's ability to fly to, say, Argentina, and get virtually identical surgeries (even in a clean and safe environment) for one-tenth the price, give or take a bit. (The exact ratio doesn't matter, what matters is that it is large.)
We should be either getting massively more from our government, or paying massively less, than we did ten years ago, but we aren't. Health care expenditures may still be going up (it is a potential economic sinkhole just by its nature), but it still should be costing less per procedure than it did ten years ago, but it doesn't. (On average. There are exceptions where medicine has advanced so far that it is cheaper for some procedures.)
Unfortunately, it's just not possible to "wealth" your way out of needing to put at least some thought into economic efficiency.
(Also, I personally do not feel poorer and believe that we are still better off than twenty years ago. I am merely observing that A: I appear to be in a minority there, at least among people motivated to post in online discussions and B: we should be even better off than we actually are.)