Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

In 1892, when the New York Tribune attempted to identify every millionaire in the United States, the newspaper came up with 4,047 names. An astonishing 31 percent of them lived in New York City. And when it came to giving back, these millionaires gave back to whence they came. There is scarcely a museum, art gallery, concert hall, orchestra, theater, university, seminary, charity, or social or educational institution in New York that does not owe its beginnings and support to these men. Such regional myopia is to be expected. The robber barons worked in a world that was local and linear. Poverty in Africa, illiteracy in India—these were not pressing issues in their lives or businesses, and thus these industrialists kept their dollars in the neighborhood. Even Carnegie was prone to the tendency, as every library he built, he built in the English-speaking world. This local mind-set was not restricted to the ultrawealthy in the West. Take, for example, Osman Ali Khan, known as Asaf Jah VII, the last nizam of Hyderabad and Berar, who ruled from 1911 to 1948, when these states merged with India. Khan was proclaimed the richest man in the world by Time magazine in 1937. He had seven wives, forty-two concubines, forty children, and a net worth of $210 billion (in 2007 dollars). During his thirty-seven-year rule, he spent a fair amount of his fortune on his people, building schools, power plants, railways, roads, hospitals, libraries, universities, museums, and even an observatory...