Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think

Peter H. Diamandis “Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Free Press, 2012, 304 pp.

Some time ago I posted a review of a book by Robert J. Gordon, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of living since the Civil War”.  That book essentially made a case that spectacular growth for the U.S. that had occurred from 1920 to 1970 was over—at least as regards employment opportunities.  

This present book “Abundance” is a good antidote to that previous book.  It proposes that we will soon be able to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp within a generation. This contrary view, backed up by exhaustive research, introduces our near-term future, where exponentially growing technologies and three other powerful forces are conspiring to better the lives of billions of people. However, this book does not contradict the lesser employment opportunities that will be available to the uneducated.

Additionally, “Abundance” presents so many ideas and concepts, one-after-the-other, that it is hard to take it all in—I needed many breaks by reading something else intermittently between chapters.

Since the dawn of humanity, a privileged few have lived relatively well in stark contrast to the hardscrabble majority. Conventional wisdom says this gap cannot be closed. But it is closing - fast. The author documents how four forces - exponential technologies, the DIY innovator, the techno philanthropist, and the rising billion people - are conspiring to solve our biggest problems.

Examining human need by category - water, food, energy, health care, education, and freedom - Diamandis introduces dozens of innovators making great strides in each area: Larry Page, Stephen Hawking, Dean Kamen, Daniel Kahneman, Elon Musk, Bill Joy, Stewart Brand, Jeff Skoll, Ray Kurzweil, Ratan Tata, Craig Venter, and many, many others.

Peter Diamandis, several years ago, founded the X Prize Foundation, which rewards entrepreneurs with cash for achieving difficult goals, like putting a reusable spaceship into flight on a limited budget. More recently he helped start Singularity University, an academic program that convenes several weeks a year in the Valley and educates business leaders about innovative technological changes.

The book's four main points are:

Exponential Technologies in computing, energy, medicine and many other areas are improving at an exponential rate and will soon enable breakthroughs that today seem impossible.

These technologies have allowed independent innovators, Do It Yourself (DIY), to achieve startling advances in many areas of technology with little money or manpower. This is primarily achieved through incentive prize competitions.

Technology has created a generation of "techno-philanthropists" (such as Bill Gates) who are using their billions to try to solve seemingly unsolvable problems such as hunger and disease.

Billions of lives of the world's poorest people are being improved substantially because of technology.

My Notes:

Pg. 6:  The Earth is covered 70 percent by oceans but 97.3 percent of all water on the planet is far too salty for consumption or crop production.  Yet, when viewed through the lens of technology, few resources, including water, are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible.  Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our world view.

Pg. 16;  Homo sapiens have been on the planet for roughly 150,000 years, yet until 1900, there was only one country in the world with an infant mortality rate below 10 percent.  Since children take care of their parents later in life, in places where a lot of children die, by having a large family, parents are ensuring themselves a more comfortable old age.  The good news is the inverse is also true.  The key to reducing population growth is actually to improve health.  (This has already happened in the developed world).  For example, Moroccan women previously had an average of 7.8 children.  But after making great strides in improving water, sanitation, healthcare, and women’s rights, these days, Morocco’s baby boom is winding down.  The average number of births per woman is now 2.7, while the population growth rate has dipped below 1.6 percent.

Pg. 18:  Once our basic survival needs are fulfilled, the next level up the abundance pyramid is energy, education, and information/communication; and lastly, health and freedom.

Pg. 30:  Cognitive biases describe patterns of deviation in judgment that occur in particular situations.  There is a long list of these biases.  For instance, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and ignore information which contradicts our preconceptions. 

The negativity bias is the tendency to give more weight to negative information and experiences than positive ones.  Anchoring is the predilection for relying too heavily on one piece of information when making decisions.  At the end of the nineteenth century, London was becoming uninhabitable because of the accumulation of horse manure.  People couldn’t imagine any other outcome because of anchoring.  No one had any idea the car was coming and soon they’d be worrying about dirty skies, not dirty streets.  Then there is the bandwagon effect—the tendency to do or believe things because others do.

Pg. 36:  People tend to self-organize in groups of 150.  This explains why the US military, concluded that 150 is the optimal size for a functional fighting unit.  Humans evolved in groups of 150 and this is the upper limit to how many interpersonal relationships our brains can process.  However, we tend to fill up these 150 bins with the likes of Lady Gaga, etc., if we do not have 150 truly interpersonal relationships.

Pg. 68:  3-D printing is the newest form of digital manufacturing.  Traditional digital manufacturers utilize computer-controlled routers, lasers, and other cutting tools to precisely shape a piece of metal, wood, or plastic by a subtractive process: slicing and dicing until the desired form is all that’s left.  Today’s 3-D printers do the opposite.  They utilize a form of additive manufacturing, where a three-dimensional object is created by laying down successive layers of material.

Pg. 92:  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.  Of the 1.1 billion people in the world without access to safe water, 85 percent of them live in the countryside.  Of the 2.2 million children that die each year from drinking contaminated water, the vast majority are rural as well. 

Pg. 190:  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 when these deaths were factored in.  It was the industrial revolution that started us on our trend toward longevity.  By the early twentieth century, we had added fifteen years to our historical average.

Pg. 102:  Many today reduce the question to how to improve our food crops to the question of whether GMO (genetically modified organism) should be allowed or not.  Truthfully, though, that’s no longer the question.  In 1996 there were 1.7 million hectares of biotech crops in the world; by 2010, the number had jumped to 148 million hectares.  This 87-fold increase makes genetically engineered seeds (GEs) the fastest-adopted crop technology in the history of modern agriculture.  Seriously, that horse has already left the barn.

The idea that GE crops are a sin against nature rests on the proposition that there’s something natural about agriculture.  Yet, farming is just a 12,000 year old way of optimizing lunch.  Almost by definition, all crop plants are genetically modified.  The lineage of agriculture is a lineage of humans rearranging plant DNA. 

Pg. 106:  Traditional agriculture uses 70 percent of the water on the planet. 

Pg. 139:  Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese telecommunications tycoon, recently offered an award of $5 million (and $200,000 a year for life afterward) to any African leader who serves out his or her term within the limits of a country’s constitution and then leaves office voluntarily.*

*President Pohamba (2014) follows Presidents Joaquim Chissano, Mozambique (2007), Festus Mogae, Botswana (2008) and Pedro Pires, Cabo Verde (2011) as Ibrahim Laureates. Nelson Mandela was made the inaugural Honorary Laureate in 2007. In 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2013 the Prize Committee did not have a winner.

Note: in 2010 Bill Gates put $10 billion toward vaccines, the largest pledge ever made by a foundation to a single cause.

Pg. 141:  Arvind Mills, the world’s fifth-largest denim manufacturer, was struggling to sell jeans at $40 to $60 a pair in India.  So Arvind introduced Ruf & Tuf jeans, a ready-to-make kit of jean components—denim, zipper, rivets, and a patch—priced at about six dollars.  They are now the largest-selling jeans in India.

Pg. 155:  Archaeologists differ on when humanity first tamed fire.  Some believe that it was only 125,000 years ago; others point to evidence dating back some 790,000 years.  Unfortunately, for roughly one out of three people alive today, very little has changed in the past 100,000 years.  The UN estimates that one and a half billion people live without electricity and three and a half billion still rely on primitive fuels such as wood or charcoal for cooking and heating.  Energy is arguably the most important lynchpin for abundance. 

Pg. 181:  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 didn’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.

Pg. 185:  As of the summer of 2011, the Khan Academy was pulling in over two million visitors a month to watch the free educational videos.  The academy now has 2,200 videos on topics ranging from molecular biology, to American history, to quadratic equations.  They are adding three lessons a day—roughly 1,000 a year. 

Pg. 212:  One of the defining features of the revolutions that swept the Middle East in early 2011 was their use of communication technologies.  One activist summed up: “We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and You Tube to tell the world.”

Pg. 237:  The data shows 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 (in 2008 dollars), there is a direct correlation between money and happiness.  Above that number, the correlation disappears.   The typical American spending breakdown shows that 75 percent of the money we earn goes to meet basic needs such as water, food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education.  It’s over 90 percent in most developing countries.

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