Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think

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.

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

If we were to forgo our television addiction for just one year, the world would have over a trillion hours of cognitive surplus to commit to share projects.

Culture is the ability to store, exchange, and improve ideas.

When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible.

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.

The free flow of information has become so important to all of us that in 2011 the United Nations declared “access to the Internet” a fundamental human right.

The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire it.

Quite simply, good news doesn’t catch our attention. Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.

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.

if everyone on Earth wants to live like a North American, then we’re going to need five planets’ worth of resources to do

Today most poverty-stricken Americans have a television, telephone, electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing. Most Africans do not. If you transferred the goods and services enjoyed by those who live in California’s version of poverty to the average Somalian living on less than a $1.25 a day, that Somalian is suddenly fabulously rich.

Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear. But this has an immediate impact on

In hundreds of studies, researchers have consistently found that we overestimate our own attractiveness, intelligence, work ethic, chances for success

There are 2.7 billion people in the developing world without access to financial services

All told, according to the United Nations, poverty was reduced more in the past fifty years than in the previous five hundred.

It’s incredible,” he says, “this moaning pessimism, this knee-jerk, things-are-going-downhill reaction from people living amid luxury and security that their ancestors would have died for. The tendency to see the emptiness of every glass is pervasive. It’s almost as if people cling to bad news like a comfort blanket.

the true promise of abundance was one of creating a world of possibility: a world where everyone’s days are spent dreaming and doing, not scrapping and scraping.

Right now, in America, 70 percent of our water is used for agriculture, yet 50 percent of the food produced gets thrown away.

Bill Joy famously pointed out: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.

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.

Today Americans living below the poverty line are not just light-years ahead of most Africans; they’re light-years ahead of the wealthiest Americans from just a century ago. Today 99 percent of Americans living below the poverty line have electricity, water, flushing toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 percent have a television; 88 percent have a telephone; 71 percent have a car; and 70 percent even have air-conditioning. This may not seem like much, but one hundred years ago men like Henry Ford and Cornelius Vanderbilt were among the richest on the planet, but they enjoyed few of these luxuries.

Africa has 1.3 percent of the world’s health workers caring for 25 percent of the global disease burden.

Decentralized means learning cannot easily be curtailed by autocratic governments and is considerably more immune to socioeconomic upheaval.

Slingshot, for the technology that David used to bring down Goliath.

2020, nearly 3 billion people will be added to the Internet’s community.

When you talk to the experts about developing new technology to provide clean drinking water for the developing world, they’ll tell you that—with four billion people making less than two dollars a day—there’s no viable business model, no economic model, and no way to finance development costs. 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!

Toilets account for 31 percent of all water use in America.

Most of today’s educational systems are built upon the same learning hierarchy: math and science at the top, humanities in the middle, art on the bottom. The reason for this is because these systems were developed in the nineteenth century, in the midst of the industrial revolution, when this hierarchy provided the best foundation for success. This is no longer the case. 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.