Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

These are turbulent times. A quick glance at the headlines is enough to set anybody on edge and—with the endless media stream that has lately become our lives—it’s hard to get away from those headlines. Worse, evolution shaped the human brain to be acutely aware of all potential dangers. As will be explored in later chapters, this dire combination has a profound impact on human perception: It literally shuts off our ability to take in good news.

Pliny tells the story of a goldsmith who brought an unusual dinner plate to the court of Emperor Tiberius. The plate was a stunner, made from a new metal, very light, shiny, almost as bright as silver. The goldsmith claimed he’d extracted it from plain clay, using a secret technique, the formula known only to himself and the gods. Tiberius, though, was a little concerned. The emperor was one of Rome’s great generals, a warmonger who conquered most of what is now Europe and amassed a fortune of gold and silver along the way. He was also a financial expert who knew the value of his treasure would seriously decline if people suddenly had access to a shiny new metal rarer than gold. “Therefore,” recounts Pliny, “instead of giving the goldsmith the regard expected, he ordered him to be beheaded.” This shiny new metal was aluminum, and that beheading marked its loss to the world for nearly two millennia.

History’s littered with tales of once-rare resources made plentiful by innovation. The reason is pretty straightforward: scarcity is often contextual. Imagine a giant orange tree packed with fruit. If I pluck all the oranges from the lower branches, I am effectively out of accessible fruit. From my limited perspective, oranges are now scarce. But once someone invents a piece of technology called a ladder, I’ve suddenly got new reach. Problem solved. Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.

Trade is often unequal but it still benefits both sides.”

In a rapidly changing technological culture and an ever-growing information-based economy, creative ideas are the ultimate resource. Yet our current educational system does little to nourish this resource. Moreover, our current system is built around fact-based learning, but the Internet makes almost every fact desirable instantly available. This means we’re training our children in skills they rarely need, while ignoring those they absolutely do. Teaching kids how to nourish their creativity and curiosity, while still providing a sound foundation in critical thinking, literacy and math, is the best way to prepare them for a future of increasingly rapid technological change.

A technology now under development, known as Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC), has the potential to solve these problems. Packaged into a portable, cell-phone-sized device, LOC will allow doctors, nurses, and even patients themselves to take a sample of bodily fluid (such as urine, sputum, or a single drop of blood) and run dozens, if not hundreds, of diagnostics on the spot and in a matter of minutes.

was so impressed by the complete lack of connection between the statistical information and the compelling experience of insight that I coined a term for it: “the illusion of validity.” Kahneman describes the illusion of validity as “the sense that you understand somebody and can predict how they will behave,” but it’s since been expanded to “a tendency for people to view their own beliefs as reality.”

Human beings are designed to be local optimists and global pessimists and this is an even bigger problem for abundance.

Pick up the Washington Post and compare the number of positive to negative stories. If your experiment goes anything like mine, you’ll find that over 90 percent of the articles are pessimistic. Quite simply, good news doesn’t catch our attention. Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.

“From the very beginning of time until the year 2003,” says Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, “humankind created five exabytes of digital information. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes—or a 1 with eighteen zeroes after it. Right now, in the year 2010, the human race is generating five exabytes of information every two days. By the year 2013, the number will be five exabytes produced every ten minutes … It’s no wonder we’re exhausted.”

YouTube went from start-up to being acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in eighteen months. Groupon, meanwhile, went from start-up to a valuation of $6 billion in under two years. Historically, value has never been created this quickly.

our brain doesn’t realize there’s a difference between rock stars we know about and relatives we know.

loss aversion—a tendency for people to regret a loss more than a similar gain—as the bias with the most impact on abundance. Loss aversion is often what keeps people stuck in ruts. It’s an unwillingness to change bad habits for fear that the change will leave them in a worse place than before.

A rural peasant woman in modern Malawi spends 35 percent of her time farming food, 33 percent cooking and cleaning, 17 percent fetching clean drinking water, and 5 percent collecting firewood. This leaves only 10 percent of her day for anything else, including finding the gainful employment needed to pull her off this treadmill. Because of all of this, Ridley feels that the best definition of prosperity is simply “saved time.” “Forget dollars, cowrie shells, or gold,” he says. “The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire it.”

“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

issue is in the country, as the most fecund population on the planet is the rural poor. It takes lots of hands to do farm work, so farmers have large families. But they want boys—usually three at the minimum. Their logic is heartbreaking. Three boys are desirable because one will probably die, while the second will stay home to tend the farm, providing for parents as they age as well as making enough money to send the third child to school so that he can get a better job and end this cycle. Thus child mortality among the rural poor is one of the largest factors driving population growth, and dirty water is often the root of this problem.

When Warren Buffett wanted to inspire philanthropy in Bill Gates, he started by giving him a copy of Carnegie’s essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” which attempts to answer a tricky question: “What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few?”

“It used to be that you were considered healthy and wealthy if you were fat,” says Joy. “Now it’s not. So now we think it’s healthy and wealthy if we have all these things; well, what if it’s actually the opposite? What if healthy and wealthy means you don’t need all those things because, instead, you’ve got these really simple devices that are low maintenance and encapsulate everything you need?”

While short-term job loss is the inevitable and often painful result of demonetization and dematerialization, the long-term payoff is undeniable: goods and services once reserved for the wealthy few are now available to anyone equipped with a smart phone—which, these days, thankfully, includes the rising billion.