There's a Sci-Fi book called Accelerando, by Charles Stross; he released it under the Creative Commons license, so it's available to freely download as an ebook. It's a pretty interesting futurist perspective, and the first couple chapters deal almost exclusively with a new global economy in a post-scarcity world. Post-scarcity is more than just 'welfare on a larger scale'. It's an upending of "Supply and Demand". Money works because of supply and demand; post-scarcity imagines a future with sufficiently efficient automation, resources and energy supplies to make money irrelevant. For now, though, this idea is relegated to Sci-Fi books. I don't foresee it becoming a reality anytime soon.
Thanks, I'll check the book out. My first thought after submitting my last reply was that money is both the reason why we have the goods and services that we currently do and why a post-scarcity world cannot exist. In such a world, what incentive do people have to produce or give up their ability to profit from it in the first place?
I'm not defending a post-scarcity future (I think it's highly unlikely), however, people are not necessarily motivated purely by monetary incentives. Check out this video on the topic: