Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

Yet today, even the poorest Americans have access to a telephone, television, and a flush toilet—three luxuries that even the wealthiest couldn’t imagine at the turn of the last century. In fact, as will soon be clear, using almost any metric currently available, quality of life has improved more in the past century than ever before.

Our days of isolation are behind us. In today’s world, what happens “Over there” impacts “Over here.” Pandemics do not respect borders, terrorist organizations operate on a global scale, and over-population is everybody’s problem.

The point is this: In today’s hyper-linked world, solving problems anywhere, solves problems everywhere.

One idea that will become clearer as we go along is the notion that the world’s biggest problems are also the world’s biggest business opportunities.

scarcity is often contextual.

Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.

The point is this: When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our worldview.

Scarcity has been an issue since life first emerged on this planet, but its contemporary incarnation—what many call the “scarcity model”—dates to the late eighteenth century, when British scholar Thomas Robert Malthus realized that while food production expands linearly, population grows exponentially. Because of this, Malthus was certain there was going to come a point in time when we would exceed our capacity to feed ourselves. As he put it, “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the Earth to produce subsistence for man.”

Taken together, they are a group whose track record showed that one of the better responses to the threat of scarcity is not to try to slice our pie thinner—rather it’s to figure out how to make more pies.

but the short version is that for the first time in history, our capabilities have begun to catch up to our ambitions. Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Within a generation, we will be able to provide goods and services, once reserved for the wealthy few, to any and all who need them. Or desire them. Abundance for all is actually within our grasp.

Abundance is not about providing everyone on this planet with a life of luxury—rather it’s about providing all with a life of possibility.

ultimately, abundance is about creating a world of possibility: a world where everyone’s days are spent dreaming and doing, not scrapping and scraping.

“The key thing you can do to reduce population growth is actually improve health . . . . [T]here is a perfect correlation, as you improve health, within half a generation, the population growth rate goes down.”

Once our basic survival needs are fulfilled, the next level up the abundance pyramid is energy, education, and information/communication.

catallaxy: the ever-expanding possibility generated by the division of labor. In his excellent book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Matt Ridley elaborates: “ ‘If I sew you a hide tunic today, you can sew me one tomorrow’ brings limited rewards and diminishing returns. ‘[But] . . . I make the clothes, you catch the food’ brings increasing returns.

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

Out of this trilogy, energy is clearly the biggest game changer.

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.

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.

Abundance is an all-inclusive idea. It means everyone. It means the individual must matter, and matter like never before.

health and freedom.

If the individual matters, then the individual’s well-being matters; thus preserving good health and providing good health care are core components of an abundant world. And one thing is most certain: the creation of this world starts by stopping the needless deaths of millions resulting from ailments either entirely preventable or already easy to treat.

Pneumonia, a disease we’ve been able to treat for almost a century, still accounts for 19 percent of all deaths in children under five. More perplexing, the drugs to treat pneumonia are generic. They’re cheap and ubiquitous. This means that the problem is mostly one of diagnosis and/or distribution.

people were endlessly complicated and interesting.”

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.”

Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts: time-saving, energy-saving rules of thumb that allow us to simplify the decision-making process.

confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions—but it can often limit our ability to take in new data and change old opinions.

The negativity bias—the tendency to give more weight to negative information and experiences than positive ones—sure

while we seriously overestimate ourselves, we significantly underestimate the world at large.

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

If I ask you what you can do to get a better grade in math—well, you can imagine studying harder, partying less, maybe hiring a tutor. You have control here. And because of this, your psychological immune system makes you feel overconfident. But if I ask what you can do to solve world hunger, all you can imagine is hordes of starving children. There’s no sense of control, no overconfidence, and those starving children instead become your anchor— and crowd out all other possibilities.”

Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.

What all of this means is that once the amygdala begins hunting bad news, it’s mostly going to find bad news.

“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.”

Because of amygdala function and media competition, our airwaves are full of prophets of doom. Because of the negativity bias and the authority bias—our tendency to trust authority figures—we’re inclined to believe them. And because of our local and linear brains—of which Dunbar’s number is but one example—we treat those authority figures as friends, which triggers the in-group bias (a tendency to give preferential treatment to those people we believe in our own group) and makes us trust them even more.

He fingers 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. But this bias is not acting alone. “I also think there could be an evolutionary psychology component,” he contends. “We might be gloomy because gloomy people managed to avoid getting eaten by lions in the Pleistocene.”

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.”

Well, we’ve tried slavery—both human and animal—and that worked okay until we developed a conscience.

Yes, there are still billions living in back-breaking destitution, but at the current rate of decline, Ridley estimates that the number of people in the world living in “absolute poverty” will hit zero by 2035.

“Once the rise in the position of the lower classes gathers speed,” economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in his 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty, “catering to the rich ceases to be the main source of great gain and gives place to efforts directed toward the needs of the masses. Those forces which at first make inequality self-accentuating thus later tend to diminish it.”

(meaning fewer jobs that directly depend on the rich) and greater prosperity for everyone involved.

Culture is the ability to store, exchange, and improve ideas. This vast cooperative system has always been one of abundance’s largest engines.

“In a world of material goods and material exchange, trade is a zero-sum game,” says inventor Dean Kamen. “I’ve got a hunk of gold and you have a watch. If we trade, then I have a watch and you have a hunk of gold. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange them, then we both have two ideas. It’s nonzero.”

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

But the twenty-five poorest countries already spend twenty percent of their GDP on water. This twenty percent, about thirty cents, ain’t much, but do the math again: four billion people spending thirty cents a day is a $1.2 billion market every day. It’s $400 billion a year. I can’t think of too many companies in the world that have $400 billion in sales a year. And you don’t have to do a market study to find out whether there’s a need. It’s water. There’s a need!

“The biggest opportunity in water, isn’t in water: it’s in information,” what he’s talking about is waste. Right now, in America, 70 percent of our water is used for agriculture, yet 50 percent of the food produced gets thrown away. Five percent of our energy goes to pump water, but 20 percent of that water streams out holes in leaky pipes. “The examples are endless,” says Williams, “the bottom line is the same: Show me a water problem and I’ll show you an information problem.”

Computer-assisted irrigation is a subcategory of “precision agriculture,” which is a big part of the smart grid’s potential.

This combination allows farmers to know everything going on in their fields: temperature, transpiration, moisture content in the air and soil, the weather forecast, how much fertilizer has been applied to every plant, how much water each plant has received, and so forth. An unsustainable 70 percent of the water on Earth is now used for growing food. “With precision agriculture,” says Doug Miell, a water management consultant who advises the state of Georgia, “farmers can lower their water use by thirty-five percent to forty percent, and increase their yields by twenty-five percent.”

Rather than wasting anything, these toilets give back: packets of urea (for fertilizer), table salt, volumes of freshwater, and enough power that you can charge your cell phone while taking a crap, should the need arise. Tie these toilets into the smart grid, and the electricity can be sold back to the utility company, marking the first time in history that anyone has been paid to poop. As a final component, do all this at a cost to the consumer of five cents a day. Now, that’s not just an upgrade, it’s a revolution.

There are over 2,250 of these mutants around; most of them are certified “Organic.”