Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

In the early 1970s, Moore realized there was power in networking. If he could find a way to connect all the key players in all the various left-leaning movements operating in America, perhaps those movements could really become a force for reckoning. He started keeping records of the players and their contact information on three-by-five-inch note cards, but there were so many of them that he was soon overwhelmed. He suspected that his database would be significantly more effective if he could use a computer to manage it, but how to afford a computer was the real issue. Because Moore didn’t have enough money to buy a machine of his own, in 1975 he decided to start a hobbyists club to help him build one. This was the birth of the Homebrew Computer Club, a collection of tech hobbyists who gathered at the Community Computer Center in Menlo Park to swap circuits and stories. Early members included fabled hackers such as John Draper (Captain Crunch), Osborne 1 creators Adam Osborne and Lee Felsenstein, and Apple cofounders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Moore never lost sight of his activist past and was constantly reminding people to “give more than you take”—which was a fancy way of saying “Share your trade secrets”—but his members took it to heart. The Homebrew Club believed in building amazing machines, selling its creations (hardware), and sharing its intellectual property (software). As John Markoff explains in What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the ...

The robber barons were transformative. In less than seventy years, they turned America from an agricultural nation into an industrial powerhouse. What John D. Rockefeller did for oil, Andrew Carnegie did for iron and steel, Cornelius Vanderbilt did for railroads, James B. Duke for tobacco, Richard Sears for mail-order retailing, and Henry Ford for automobiles. There were dozens more. And while robber baron rapaciousness has received much attention, contemporary historians are in agreement: it was also these gilded age magnates who invented modern philanthropy. Certainly scholars have gone back and forth about most things robber baron, including the nature of their charity. Not long ago, BusinessWeek wrote: “John D. Rockefeller became a major donor—but only after a public relations expert, Ivy Lee, told him that donations could help salvage a damaged Rockefeller image.” Great-great grandson Justin Rockefeller, an entrepreneur and political activist, disagrees: “John Davison Sr., a devout Baptist, started tithing from his very first paycheck. He kept meticulous financial records. His first year in business was 1855. His income was $45, 10 percent of which he gave to the church.” Either way, that $5.00 donation was only the beginning. In 1910 Rockefeller took $50 million worth of Standard oil stock to create the foundation bearing his name. By the time of his death in 1937, half of his fortune had been given away. Carnegie, though, was an even bigger donor, and it’s to Carneg...

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...

There’s a different mentality now because the world is much more globally connected. In the past, things that happened in Africa or China, you didn’t really know about. Today you know about them instantly. Our problems are much more interrelated as well. Everything from climate change to pandemics have roots in different parts of the world, but they affect everybody. In this way, global has become the new local.” When Skoll cashed out of eBay in 1998 for $2 billion, he too took his philanthropy global. He created a foundation to pursue a “vision of a sustainable world of peace and prosperity.” The Skoll Foundation attempts to drive large-scale change by investing in social entrepreneurship. According to Skoll, social entrepreneurs are “change agents,” an idea he explained further in an article for the Huffington Post: Whether the issue is disease and hunger in Africa; or poverty in the Middle East; or lack of education across the developing world—we all know the problems. But social entrepreneurs, I believe, have a genetic deficiency. Somehow, the gene that helps them look past the impossible is missing . . . By nature, entrepreneurs aren’t satisfied until they do change the world, and let nothing get in their way. Charities may give people food. But social entrepreneurs don’t just teach people to grow food—they’re not happy until they’ve taught a farmer how to grow food, make money, pour the profits back into the business, hire ten other people, and in the process, transf...

“The Internet’s rich are giving it away, their way,” proclaimed the New York Times in 2000. By 2004, charitable giving in America had increased to $248.5 billion, the highest yearly total ever. Two years later, the number was $295 billion. By 2007, CNBC had taken to calling our era “a new golden age of philanthropy” and Foundation Giving reported a record-setting 77 percent increase in new foundations established in the past decade, an addition of more than 30,000 organizations. Certainly those numbers dipped during the recent recession: 2 percent in 2008, 3.6 percent in 2009. The ten-year low was in 2010, but that was also the year Bill Gates put $10 billion toward vaccines, the largest pledge ever made by a charitable foundation to a single cause. 2010 was also the year that Gates and Warren Buffett, the two richest men in the world, announced the “Giving Pledge,” which asks the nation’s billionaires to give away half their wealth to philanthropic and charitable groups within their lifetimes or at the time of their deaths. George Soros, Ted Turner, and David Rockefeller signed up almost immediately. Skoll too was an early joiner, as was Pierre Omidyar. Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, AOL creator Steve Case, and Facebook cofounders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz have all signed on as well. As of July 2011, the total had risen to sixty-nine signatories, with more joining all the time.

“Extrapolating from UN figures on poverty reduction (1 percent of GDP growth results in a 2 percent poverty reduction), that 0.6 percent growth would cut poverty by roughly 1.2 percent. Given 4 billion people in poverty, that means that with every 10 new phones per 100 people, 48 million graduate from poverty, to borrow a phrase from Mohammad Yunus.”

When Hindustan Unilever, a subsidiary of Unilever, developed a hygiene-based marketing campaign for BOP markets in India, its goal was to sell more soap (which the company did, with sales increasing 20 percent). But for our purposes, more important was the fact that 200 million people learned that diarrheal disease—which kills 660,000 people in India each year—can be prevented simply by washing one’s hands. This form of improvement quickly becomes empowerment, since the better health that results from hand washing adds income (fewer sick days from work) and keeps kids in school, and thus becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.

But I knew what was happening in the Western world. I knew that cell phones were analog, and they were about to become digital, and that meant their core components would be subject to Moore’s law—so they would continue to get exponentially smaller and cheaper. I also knew that connectivity equals productivity, so if we could get cell phones into the hands of BOP consumers, it would translate into their ability to pay for the phones.” Quadir won his bet. Cell phones followed an exponential price-performance curve, and Grameenphone transformed life in Bangladesh. By 2006, sixty million people had access to a cell phone, and the technology had added $650 million to Bangladesh’s GDP. Other companies filled the gaps in other countries. In India, by 2010, fifteen million new cell phone users were being added each month. As of early 2011, over 50 percent of the world had cellular connectivity. And it’s this technology that’s transforming the “bottom billion” into the rising billion. “We snuck powerful computers into the hands of the people,” explains Quadir. “They crept in through the killer app of voice communication.” As a result, over the next few decades, these devices bring with them the potential to completely reshape the world.

For all of these reasons, mobile banking has seen exponential growth in a few short years. M-PESA, launched in Kenya in 2007 by Safaricom, had 20,000 customers its first month. Four months later, it was 150,000; four years after that, 13 million. A market that did not exist as of 2007—the mobile payment market (making payments via mobile phones)—exploded into a $16 billion industry by 2011, with analysts predicting that it would grow an additional 68 percent by 2014. And the benefits appear to be considerable. According to the Economist, over the past five years, incomes of Kenyan households using M-PESA have increased by 5 percent to 30 percent.

The issue comes down to so-called poverty traps. Being a land-locked nation without access to shipping ports is one kind of poverty trap; being stuck in a cycle of civil war is another. One of the most insidious of these is the resource curse, which goes like this: When a developing nation discovers a new natural resource, this causes its currency to rise against other currencies and has the downstream effect of making other exportable commodities uncompetitive. The discovery of oil reserves in Nigeria in the 1970s destroyed the country’s peanut and cocoa industries.

In his excellent book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, author Steven Johnson explores the impact of coffeehouses on the Enlightenment culture of the eighteenth century. “It’s no accident,” he says, “that the age of reason accompanies the rise of caffeinated beverages.”

But just as the coffeehouse is a pale comparison to the city, the city is a pale comparison to the World Wide Web. The net is allowing us to turn ourselves into a giant, collective meta-intelligence. And this meta-intelligence continues to grow as more and more people come online. Think about this for a moment: by 2020, nearly 3 billion people will be added to the Internet’s community. That’s 3 billion new minds about to join the global brain. The world is going to gain access to intelligence, wisdom, creativity, insight, and experiences that have, until very recently, been permanently out of reach.

Imagine being forced to rely on burning poor-grade wood, dung, or crop waste to cook, suffering the effects of the potentially fatal toxic fumes given off by this fuel. Imagine being desperately ill and turned away from a clinic because it has no electricity and can’t offer even the simplest treatment. Imagine your friends living under the shadow of life-threatening disease because there’s no vital vaccine, due to a lack of refrigeration. Imagine if you or your partner were pregnant and went into labor at night and had no light, no pain relief and no way of saving you or the baby if there were complications.

All this work could soon be eclipsed by far more revolutionary breakthroughs. At the University of Michigan, physicist Stephen Rand recently discovered that light, traveling at the right intensity through a nonconductive material such as glass, can create magnetic fields 100 million times stronger than previously believed possible. “You could stare at the equations of motion all day and not see this possibility,” says Rand. “We’ve all been taught this doesn’t happen.” But in his experiments, the fields are strong enough to allow for energy extraction. The result would be a way to make PV panels without using semiconductors, reducing their cost by orders of magnitude.

The US Department of Energy says that algae can produce thirty times more energy per acre than conventional biofuels. Moreover, because pond scum grows in almost any enclosed space, it’s now being tested at several major power plants as a carbon dioxide absorber. Smokestacks feed into ponds and algae consumes the CO2. It’s a delicious possibility, but to make it more of a reality, Exxon has partnered with biology’s bad boy, Craig Venter, and his company, Synthetic Genomics Inc. (SGI).

Venter, who has also joined the tour, jumps into the conversation. “Paul’s being modest. He actually found a way to cause algae cells to voluntarily secrete their collected lipids, turning them into micromanufacturing plants.” Roessler picks up the explanation. “In theory, once perfected, we could run this process continuously and just harvest the oil. The cells just keep cranking it out. This way you don’t have to harvest all the cells; instead just scoop up the oils they excrete.”

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how cheap solar gets unless we can store that energy, and storage on this scale has never been achieved before. Grid-level storage requires colossal batteries. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are woefully inadequate. Their storage capacity would need to be improved ten- to twentyfold, and—if we really want them to be scalable—they have to be built from Earth-abundant elements. Otherwise we’re just exchanging an economy built on the importation of petroleum for one built on the importation of lithium.

MIT professor Donald Sadoway, one of the world’s foremost authorities on solid-state chemistry, is also optimistic about the future of grid-level storage. Backed by funds from the Advanced Projects Research Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and Bill Gates, he’s developed and demonstrated a Liquid Metal Battery (LMB) originally inspired by the high current density and enormous scale of aluminum smelters. Inside an LMB, the temperature is hot enough to keep two different metals liquid. One is high density, like antimony, and sinks to the bottom. The other is low density, such as magnesium, and rises to the top. Between them, a molten salt electrolyte helps the exchange of electrical charge. The result is a battery with currents ten times higher than present-day high-end batteries and a simple, cheap design that prices at $250 a kilowatt-hour fully installed—less than one-tenth the cost of current lithium-ion batteries. And Sadoway’s design scales.

With coinvestments from Bill Gates and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Myhrvold founded TerraPower to develop the traveling wave reactor (TWR), a generation-IV variation that he calls the “the world’s most simplified passive fast breeder reactor.” The TWR has no moving parts, can’t melt down, and can run safely for fifty-plus years, literally without human intervention. It can do all this while requiring no more enrichment operations, zero spent-fuel handling, and no reprocessing or waste storage facilities. What’s more, the reactor vessel serves as the unit’s (robust) burial cask. Essentially, TWRs are a “build, bury, and forget” power supply for a region or city, making them ideal for the developing world.

Ipsen feels that we’re moving rapidly toward a world where every device that consumes power has an IP address and is part of a distributed intelligence. “These connected devices,” she says, “no matter how small, will communicate their energy usage and turn themselves off when not needed. Ultimately, we should be able to double or triple efficiency of a building or a community.”

And growth doesn’t end there, but it certainly gets interesting. Ten years later—twenty-eight years from now—at this rate we’d be producing 1,550 percent of today’s global energy needs via solar. And, even better, at the same time that production is going up, technology is making every electron go even further. Whether it’s the smart grid making energy use two- or threefold more efficient, or innovations like the LED lightbulb dropping the energy needed to light a room from one hundred watts to five watts, there is dramatic change ahead. With efficiencies lowering our usage and innovation increasing our supply, the combination really could produce a squanderable abundance of energy.

In 1999 the Indian physicist Sugata Mitra got interested in education. He knew there were places in the world without schools and places in the world where good teachers didn’t want to teach. What could be done for kids living in those spots was his question. Self-directed learning was one possible solution, but were kids living in slums capable of all that much self-direction? At the time, Mitra was head of research and development for NIIT Technologies, a top computer software and development company in New Delhi, India. His posh twenty-first-century office abutted an urban slum but was kept separate by a tall brick wall. So Mitra designed a simple experiment. He cut a hole in the wall and installed a computer and a track pad, with the screen and the pad facing into the slum. He did it in such a way that theft was not a problem, then connected the computer to the Internet, added a web browser, and walked away. The kids who lived in the slums could not speak English, did not know how to use a computer, and had no knowledge of the Internet, but they were curious. Within minutes, they’d figured out how to point and click. By the end of the first day, they were surfing the web and—even more importantly—teaching one another how to surf the web.

This led Mitra to an ever-expanding series of experiments about what else kids could learn on their own. One of the more ambitious of these was conducted in the small village of Kalikkuppam in southern India. This time Mitra decided to see if a bunch of impoverished Tamil-speaking, twelve-year-olds could learn to use the Internet, which they’d never seen before; to teach themselves biotechnology, a subject they’d never heard of; in English, a language none of them spoke. “All I did was tell them that there was some very difficult information on this computer, they probably wouldn’t understand any of it, and I’ll be back to test them on it in a few months.” Two months later, he returned and asked the students if they’d understood the material. A young girl raised her hand. “Other than the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease,” she said, “we’ve understood nothing.” In fact, this was not quite the case. When Mitra tested them, scores averaged around 30 percent. From 0 percent to 30 percent in two months with no formal instruction was a fairly remarkable result, but still not good enough to pass a standard exam. So Mitra brought in help. He recruited a slightly older girl from the village to serve as a tutor. She didn’t know any biotechnology, but was told to use the “grandmother method”: just stand behind the kids and provide encouragement. “Wow, that’s cool, that’s fantastic, show me something else!” Two months later, Mitra came back. Thi...

Matt Ridley wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “One child in front of a computer learns little; four discussing and debating learn a lot.”

While the computer’s fabled $100 price tag has yet to materialize (it’s roughly $180 today), OLPC has delivered laptops to three million children around the world.

Our current education system was forged in the heat of the industrial revolution, a fact that not only influenced what subjects were taught but also how they were taught. Standardization was the rule, conformity the desired outcome. Students of the same age were presented with the same material and assessed against the same scales of achievement. Schools were organized like factories: the day broken into evenly marked periods, bells signaling the beginning and the end of each period. Even teaching, as Sir Ken Robinson put it in his excellent book Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative, was subject to the division of labor: “Like an assembly line, students progressed from room to room to be taught by different teachers specializing in separate disciplines.”

So-called advanced math is perhaps the clearest example of the mismatch between what is being taught and tested in high school versus what’s needed for college and in life. It turns out that knowledge of algebra is required to pass state tests . . . because it is a near-universal requirement for college admissions. But why is that? If you are not a math major, you usually don’t have to take any advanced math in college, and most of what you need for other courses is knowledge of statistics, probability, and basic computational skills. This is even more evident after college. Graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were recently surveyed regarding the math that this very technically trained group used most frequently in their work. The assumption was that if any adults use higher-level math, it would be MIT grads. And while a few did, the overwhelming majority reported using nothing more than arithmetic, statistics, and probability.

A few years back, the National Governors Association interviewed 300 college professors about their freshman classes. The results: 70 percent said students couldn’t understand complex reading materials; 66 percent said students couldn’t think analytically; 62 percent said students wrote poorly; 59 percent said students don’t know how to do research; 55 percent said students couldn’t apply their knowledge. No surprise then that 50 percent of all students entering college do not graduate.

What we do know is that the industrialized model of education, with its emphasis on the rote memorization of facts, is no longer necessary. Facts are what Google does best. But creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem solving—that’s a different story. These skills have been repeatedly stressed by everyone from corporate executives to education experts as the fundamentals required by today’s jobs. They have become the new version of the three R’s (reading, writing, and arithmetic); the basics of what’s recently been dubbed “twenty-first-century learning.”

The benefits to this shift are profound. Recent research into the relationship between health and education found that better-educated people live longer and healthier lives. They have fewer heart attacks and are less likely to become obese and develop diabetes. We also know that there’s a direct correlation between a well-educated population and a stable, free society: the more well educated the population, the more durable its democracy.

Historically, though, as our living conditions improved, this number has improved. In the Neolithic period, life was a nasty, brutish, and short twenty years. This jumped to twenty-six in the Bronze and Iron Ages; and up to twenty-eight in ancient Greece and Rome, making Socrates a seventy-year-old anomaly when he died in 399 BCE. By the early Middle Ages, we pushed into the forties, but our ascendancy was still limited by appallingly high infant mortality rates. During the early sixteen hundreds in England, two-thirds of all children died before the age of four, and the resulting life expectancy was only thirty-five years. It was the industrial revolution that started us on our trend toward longevity. A more robust food supply coupled with simple public health measures such as building sewers, collecting garbage, providing clean water, and draining mosquito-infested swamps made a huge difference.

Already mChip, a technology out of Columbia University, is demonetizing and dematerializing the HIV testing process. What once required long doctor visits, a vial of blood, and days or weeks of anxious waiting now needs no visit, a single drop of blood, and a fifteen-minute read, all for under $1 using a microfluidic optical chip smaller than a credit card.

The potential for this technology is immense. In the next five to ten years, we’re going to be able to use stem cells to correct chronic autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and scleroderma. After that, I think neurodegenerative diseases will be the next big frontier; this is when we’ll reverse the effects of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, even stroke. And it’ll be affordable too. Cell manufacturing technology has seen vast improvements over the past decade. To give you an idea, we’ve gone from thinking that cell therapy would cost over $100,000, to believing that we can do it for about $10,000. Over the next decade, I think we can lower costs significantly more. So we’re speaking about the potential for “curing” chronic diseases and revitalizing key organs for less than the price of a new laptop.

“Whether it’s organ regeneration or repairing tissues affected by aging, trauma, or disease,” says Dr. Kraft, “this fast-moving field will impact almost every clinical arena. The recent invention of induced pluripotent stem cells, which can be generated by reprogramming a patient’s own skin cells, gives us controversy-free access to this powerful technology. And with the coming convergence of stem cells, tissue engineering, and 3-D printing, we’ll soon have an incredibly potent arsenal for achieving health care abundance.”

However, a new technology called RNA interference (RNAi) turns off specific genes by blocking the messenger RNA they produce. When Harvard researchers used RNAi to shut off the fat insulin receptor in mice, the animals consumed plenty of calories but remained thin and healthy. As an added bonus, they lived almost 20 percent longer, obtaining the same benefit as caloric restriction, without the painful sacrifice of an extreme diet.

Before the advent of the Internet, a shy gay man living in Pakistan was in for a rough ride. These days, while the ride is still plenty bumpy, at least that man is a couple of mouse clicks away from the advice and companionship of several million other people in similar situations.

This is just what we saw in the Arab Spring. One of the defining features of the revolutions that swept the Middle East in early 2011 was their use of communication technologies. During the protests in Cairo, Egypt, that brought down President Hosni Mubarak, one activist summed this up nicely in a tweet: “We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.” Yet this blade too cuts both ways. In Egypt, the government shut down the Internet to quell revolt. In the Sudan, protestors were arrested and tortured into revealing Facebook passwords. In Syria, progovernment messages popped up on dissidents’ Facebook pages, and the Twitter #Syria hashtag— which had carried accounts of the protests—was flooded with sports scores and other nonsense. “In the same way that, a few years ago, it became commonplace to talk about Web 2.0, we’re now seeing Repression 2.0,” Daniel B. Baer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, told the Washington Post. And repression 2.0 may soon give way to repression 3.0, as authoritarian governments become better acquainted with the technology now at their disposal.

Google already bases the ads it shows us on our searches and the text of our emails; Facebook aspires to make its ads much more fine-grained, taking into account what kind of content we have previously “liked” on other sites and what our friends are “liking” and buying online. Imagine building censorship systems that are as detailed and fine-tuned to the information needs of their users as the behavioral advertising we encounter every day. The only difference between the two is that one system learns everything about us to show us more relevant advertisements, while the other learns everything about us to ban us from accessing relevant pages. Dictators have been somewhat slow to realize that the customization mechanisms underpinning so much of Web 2.0 can easily be turned to purposes that are much more nefarious than behavioral advertising, but they are fast learners.

Orteig didn’t invent incentive prizes. Three centuries before Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic by plane, the British Parliament wanted some help crossing the Atlantic by ship. In 1714 it offered £20,000 to the first person to figure out how to accurately measure longitude at sea. This was called the Longitude Prize, and not only did it help Parliament solve its navigation problem, its success launched a long series of incentive competitions. In 1795 Napoléon I offered a 12,000-franc prize for a method of food preservation to help feed his army on its long march into Russia. The winner, Nicolas Appert, a French candy maker, established the basic method of canning, still in use today. In 1823 the French government once again offered a prize, this time 6,000 francs for the development of a large-scale commercial hydraulic turbine. The winning design helped to power the burgeoning textile industry. Other prizes have driven breakthroughs in transportation, chemistry, and health care. As a recent McKinsey & Company report on the subject said, “Prizes can be the spur that produces a revolutionary solution . . . For centuries, they were a core instrument of sovereigns, royal societies and private benefactors alike who sought to solve pressing societal problems and idiosyncratic technical challenges.”

Secondly, in areas where market failures have hindered investment or entrenched incumbents have prevented progress, prizes break bottlenecks.

The American anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” There are, as it turns out, pretty good reasons for this. Large or even medium-sized groups—corporations, movements, whatever—aren’t built to be nimble; nor are they willing to take large risks. Such organizations are designed to make steady progress and have considerably too much to lose to place the big bets that certain breakthroughs require.

In a world without constraints, most people take their time on projects, assume fewer risks, spend money wastefully, and try to reach their goals in comfortable and traditional ways—which, of course, leads nowhere new. But this is another reason why incentive prizes are such effective change agents: by their very nature, they are nothing more than a focusing mechanism and a list of constraints.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, inventor of the geostationary communication satellite and author of dozens of best-selling science-fiction books, knew something about the evolution of great ideas. He described three stages to their development. “In the beginning,” says Clarke, “people tell you that’s a crazy idea, and it’ll never work. Next, people say your idea might work, but it’s not worth doing. Finally, eventually, people say, I told you that it was a great idea all along!”

Henry Ford agreed: “None of our men are ‘experts.’ We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job . . .

Michael Schrage, a research fellow with MIT’s Center for Digital Business and MIT’s Entrepreneurship Center, has developed the 5x5x5 Rapid Innovation Method, a very concrete way of putting Shiv’s notion into practice. “The idea is fairly simple and straightforward,” he says. “A company looking to drive breakthroughs in a particular area sets up five teams of five people and gives each team five days to come up with a portfolio of five ‘business experiments’ that should take no longer than five weeks to run and cost no more than five thousand dollars each to conduct. These teams are fully aware that they are ‘competing’ with their colleagues to come up with the best possible portfolios to present to their bosses, perhaps winning the chance to implement the best performing concept.”

A half century ago, Abraham Maslow pointed out that people whose basic needs were not being met had little time to spend on self-fulfillment. If you’re trying to feed yourself or find medications for your children or survive other, similar threats, then living a life of possibility is not much of a probability. But this is exactly, as economist Daniel Kahneman figured out, where the adjacent possible meets the road to abundance and produces some spectacular leverage.

A few years ago, Kahneman set aside the question of cognitive biases and turned his attention to the relationship between income level and well-being. By analyzing the results of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which asked some 450,000 Americans what brings them joy, he discovered, as the New York Times aptly put it, “Maybe money does buy you happiness after all.” With maybe being the operative word. What the data show is that one’s emotional satisfaction moves in lockstep with one’s income—as income rises, well-being rises—but only to a point. Before the average American earns $75,000 a year, there is a direct correlation between money and happiness. Above that number, the correlation disappears. This tells us something interesting: that in the United States, the freedom to flourish—to truly enjoy a life of possibility—costs roughly $75,000 a year in 2008 dollars. But what’s really important is what that money buys.

Not much, actually. Daniel Kahneman’s calculation has lately been extended to the rest of the planet. On average, across the globe, the point on the chart where well-being and money diverge is roughly $10,000. That’s how much the average global citizen needs to earn to fulfill his or her basic needs and gain a toehold toward much greater possibility.

Most importantly, the game itself is no longer zero-sum. For the first time in forever, we don’t need to figure out how to divide our pie into more slices, because we now know how to bake more pies. Everyone can win.

The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to take personal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, and the way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We can, as they did, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We must do more thinking up front if we are not to be similarly surprised and shocked by the consequences of our inventions . . . We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes. . . . The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.