Midas World

Collection gathering 'The Midas Plague' (1954) and related stories. Robotic factories produce so much that society's problem becomes disposing of goods: the poor are rationed into ever-larger consumption quotas while the rich earn the right to live simply. In Article 4, a parable of the content economy — the factories never stop, and the bottleneck becomes the consumer's capacity to absorb.

Frederik Pohl, Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father held a number of jobs, and his family moved many times in his childhood before settling in Brooklyn when he was about seven. He attended Brooklyn Tech high school, but dropped out and took a job to help support his family. As a teen, he founded the New York science fiction writer's group The Futurians. His first publication, a poem, …