Abundance

By Peter H. Diamandis & Steven Kotler

13 min read

Why does it matter? Because the assumptions you have about scarcity are backwards.

You feel it constantly — that low hum of dread that says we're using more than we have, burning through what can't be replaced, closing in on something that won't bend. It's not hysteria. It feels like honesty. But here's the unsettling possibility this book puts on the table: that feeling isn't a reading of reality. It's a relic of the brain you inherited from ancestors who lived and died in small groups, tracking local threats, thinking in straight lines. Meanwhile, the technologies quietly reshaping the world don't move in straight lines. They double. And when something doubles enough times, it stops looking like progress and starts looking like magic. Diamandis and Kotler's argument isn't that problems aren't real — it's that the instrument you're using to measure them is calibrated for a world that no longer exists.

Your Brain Was Built for a World That No Longer Exists

In 1942, a Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Paris lost track of time at a friend's house and found himself alone on a darkening street past curfew, his Star of David hidden under a turned-inside-out sweater. An SS soldier spotted him and closed the distance. What happened next would shape decades of science: instead of arresting him, the soldier scooped him up, hugged him tightly, showed him a photograph of his own son, and pressed some money into the boy's hand. Daniel Kahneman walked home shaken by a different kind of lesson than he'd expected — that human behavior was far stranger and more unpredictable than anyone assumed. He spent the next fifty years trying to understand why.

What Kahneman eventually uncovered, and what cognitive scientists have confirmed since, is that your brain was not designed for the world you actually inhabit. It was built for a much older one — a Pleistocene landscape where threats were immediate, local, and physical. The brain that kept your ancestors alive was wired to treat bad news as urgent and good news as optional. A rustle in the grass deserved more attention than a sunny day. Lose a meal, you might die; gain an extra meal, you'd just be full.

That same hardware is now filtering a world of seven billion people and global data streams. A concept called Dunbar's Number explains part of the problem: human brains evolved to track roughly 150 people. Today, cable news delivers an unending feed of strangers suffering, and your nervous system cannot tell the difference between a neighbor in danger and a crisis ten thousand miles away. Every tragedy registers as local.

This is why pessimism feels rational when it isn't. Matt Ridley spent years convinced that acid rain would devastate the world's forests — a fear widely shared in the 1980s, when sulfur dioxide from coal plants was visibly killing lakes across North America and Europe, and scientists were warning that entire forest ecosystems would follow. Governments, activists, and mainstream science all treated catastrophe as a matter of when, not if. Then Ridley looked at the actual numbers: U.S. sulfur dioxide emissions fell by more than half between 1980 and 2008, and the predicted eco-catastrophe never arrived. The forests were fine. Almost no one noticed, because slow, positive change is invisible to a brain scanning for predators. Your gloom about the state of the world isn't a conclusion — it's a factory setting.

Scarcity Is Usually an Engineering Problem in Disguise

Napoleon III seated his most honored guests in front of utensils made from a gleaming, almost weightless metal at a royal banquet in the 1860s. Everyone else used gold. The precious metal wasn't diamonds or platinum — it was aluminum, the third most abundant element in Earth's crust, making up 8.3 percent of the planet's weight. The problem was that aluminum bonds so tightly to oxygen that it almost never appears in pure form. It hides inside ordinary clay, stubbornly locked away. Until 1886, extracting it required such painstaking effort that it cost more than gold. Then two chemists — one American, one French, working independently and almost simultaneously — discovered that running an electrical current through molten aluminum ore would liberate the metal in quantity. The Hall-Héroult process didn't create new aluminum. It created access. Within a generation, Napoleon's precious tableware became the stuff of disposable drink cans.

Think of a ladder leaning against an orange tree. You've picked everything within reach, and from where you're standing, the fruit is gone. You haven't run out of oranges — you've run out of accessible oranges. That's the whole argument.

The same story has played out in energy. Every year, 174 petawatts of solar energy reach Earth's surface — roughly 5,000 times humanity's total annual consumption. The sunlight isn't scarce. The extraction method is. That gap between what physically exists and what we can currently reach is exactly what separated Napoleon's dinner guests from everyone using aluminum foil today, and it's the gap that engineering closes whenever the right process arrives.

Matt Ridley traces this logic through something even more fundamental: light itself. In Babylon in 1750 BC, producing a single hour of lamplight from sesame oil cost more than fifty hours of labor. By 1800, a tallow candle brought that down to six hours. By 1880, kerosene cut it to fifteen minutes. Today, an hour of electric light costs less than half a second of work at an average wage. The light hasn't changed. What changed is our ability to get at the energy behind it — a 350,000-fold improvement that unfolded so gradually across centuries that no one alive experienced it as progress.

Scarcity, in case after case, turns out to be a temporary engineering constraint. The resource exists. The ladder just hasn't been built yet.

The Curve That Looks Like Nothing Until It Changes Everything

Progress feels slow because you're watching the wrong part of the curve. That's the central insight behind exponential growth, and once you see it clearly, you can't unsee it.

Start with a simple doubling sequence: 0.0001 becomes 0.0002, then 0.0004, then 0.0008. Plot those numbers and you get what looks like a flat horizontal line. Do this for thirteen doublings and nothing appears to be happening. But then something does happen — seven more doublings and that same line has exploded past 100. The entire drama was invisible until it wasn't, and then it was sudden. This is how exponential curves disguise their own power.

The clearest proof lives in your pocket. In 1982, the Osborne Executive Portable was a state-of-the-art computer. It weighed twenty-eight pounds, cost $2,500, and did what it did. Twenty-five years later, the first iPhone weighed one-hundredth as much, cost one-tenth as much, and ran at 150 times the speed. Measure the gap in total performance per dollar per ounce of weight, and the iPhone is 150,000 times more capable. That is not a gradual improvement.

Gordon Moore noticed the underlying mechanism in 1965: the number of components on a computer chip had been doubling roughly every year since the integrated circuit was invented. He guessed it would continue for another decade. It has now continued for five. Every eighteen to twenty-four months, computers get roughly twice as fast for the same price. The semiconductor industry now uses this observation — Moore's Law — as a planning guide, which is a remarkable thing to do with what is a description of a sustained exponential curve.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil, whose forecasting track record has been unusually accurate, extended Moore's observation and argued that this pattern isn't unique to chips. Every information-based technology — genetic sequencing, energy storage, communication bandwidth — tends to follow the same curve once it can be measured in digital terms. If he's right, a $1,000 laptop will match the raw processing speed of a human brain within fifteen years, and the entire human race's collective brainpower by mid-century.

Most people, shown these projections, feel a familiar skepticism. That skepticism is the point — and it has a history. In 1977, someone watching Moore's Law grind forward one quiet doubling at a time would have had every reason to call the long-term projections absurd. Chips couldn't possibly keep shrinking. Physics wouldn't allow it. Manufacturing couldn't keep pace. They would have been making a reasonable argument from available evidence, and they would have been wrong, because the curve doesn't care about reasonable arguments. Your brain evolved to track slow, local change, where tomorrow looks like today. Exponential curves run on different logic entirely, where the near future looks familiar right up until it doesn't — and then it looks like a different world.

Solving Water Means Solving a Dozen Other Problems You Weren't Thinking About

What if the water problem isn't really a water problem? That reframe is the one that changes everything.

Dean Kamen — inventor, physicist, holder of 440 patents — arrived at his solution sideways. He'd spent years working on portable dialysis machines, and dialysis patients need enormous quantities of sterilized water delivered to their homes in weekly truckloads. The inconvenience nagged at him until he asked a different question: what if the machine could make pharmaceutical-grade water from anything wet? He built a vapor-compression distiller the size of a dorm refrigerator. Stick the intake hose into arsenic-laced groundwater, seawater, or raw sewage — the output is pure enough to inject directly into a human bloodstream. The device produces 1,000 liters a day on the energy of a hair dryer. During a six-month field trial in Bangladesh, it ran entirely on cow dung and generated enough electricity to charge villagers' phones and keep their lights on. Kamen called it the Slingshot — the tool David used against Goliath. To reach the most remote villages, he partnered with Coca-Cola, which already operates the most extensive distribution network across Africa. The last-mile problem solved itself by piggybacking on infrastructure already there.

But here's where the framing shifts. Solving water access doesn't stop at water. Waterborne diarrhea kills 1.8 million children every year, and sub-Saharan Africa loses roughly 5 percent of its GDP to the illness, lost labor, and healthcare costs that dirty water causes. Clean water also fights malnutrition indirectly: dehydration impairs the gut's ability to absorb nutrients, so children who drink clean water get more from the food they already eat. Then comes the most counterintuitive link. When child mortality falls, birth rates follow. Families in rural poverty have more children than they want partly because they expect some won't survive — insurance births. Remove that calculus and population growth stabilizes on its own. One engineering problem addressed, and you've pulled threads attached to hunger, disease burden, economic productivity, and demographic pressure simultaneously.

None of that cascade happens until the base holds. You cannot build education or economic participation on top of a body that spends its energy fighting infection. Water is where the weight sits — which is why the next frontier isn't more water projects, but the energy systems required to run them everywhere at once.

Small Groups With the Right Tools Can Now Do What Only Governments Could

In 2004, a team of thirty engineers working out of a desert facility in Mojave, California did something that NASA, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin had collectively declared impossible: they flew a privately built reusable spacecraft to the edge of space and brought it back safely — then did it again five days later. The designer was Burt Rutan, a self-funded aerospace obsessive who had already built forty-five experimental aircraft largely for the love of it. The whole program cost $26 million. Adjusted for inflation, the government's X-15 program had cost roughly $1.5 billion to do something comparable four decades earlier. Rutan's team got there at less than two cents on the dollar, with a fraction of the headcount, and without a single government contract.

Large institutions struggle here not for lack of money or talent, but because money and talent concentrated inside a bureaucracy tend to protect their own assumptions. Rutan's engineers were unconstrained by what aerospace insiders believed was physically possible, which meant they could try approaches the insiders had already ruled out.

The clearest proof of this mechanism is also the oldest. In 1919, a French-born New York hotelier named Raymond Orteig offered $25,000 to whoever could fly nonstop between New York and Paris. Nine teams entered over the next eight years, spending a combined $400,000 — sixteen times the prize value — on the attempt. Several crews died trying. The winner was Charles Lindbergh, whom aircraft manufacturers had refused to sell an engine to, fearing association with what they called the flying fool. Within eighteen months of his landing in Paris, the number of Americans paying for air travel jumped from six thousand to a hundred and eighty thousand. Orteig didn't fund aviation research. He focused it — and by focusing it on a specific, audacious, publicly visible goal, he unlocked effort and investment that no grant program would have generated.

The pattern holds: a clear target, open competition, and the right tools consistently outperform institutions working behind closed doors. Those tools are now available to almost anyone — open-source software, cheap fabrication, global communication networks. The gap between what a small group can accomplish and what only governments once could is closing fast. Abundance isn't waiting on resources. It's a design problem, and the designs are already being tested in the desert.

The Poorest Billion Aren't Just Beneficiaries — They're the Next Wave of Builders

The developing world's poor aren't waiting for solutions to arrive from outside — they're about to become the largest expansion of the global problem-solving workforce in history. And the mechanism that gets them there isn't charity. It's leapfrogging.

In 1993, Iqbal Quadir quit a venture capital job in New York and moved back to Bangladesh with an idea that everyone told him was delusional. He wanted to bring cell phones to a country where the average annual income was $286 and the cheapest handset cost $400. The math looked impossible. But Quadir understood something his critics didn't: Moore's Law doesn't pause for poor countries. He bet that phones would get cheaper faster than his company could go broke, and he won. By 2006, sixty million Bangladeshis had cell access. Economists studying the rollout found that every ten additional phones per hundred people correlated with a 0.6 percent GDP increase and a 1.2 percent reduction in poverty. The phone didn't just connect people — it collapsed the cost of doing business in a country where a trip to the market could mean a full day's walk on bad roads.

What makes this more than a tech-adoption anecdote is what it says about infrastructure. Bangladesh didn't have to build a copper landline network first. It skipped the entire century of telephone poles and switching stations that the West spent enormous capital installing, and went straight to wireless. The absence of legacy infrastructure, which looks like disadvantage, is actually freedom. The same logic applies to energy: sub-Saharan Africa has no entrenched coal grid to protect, which means solar microgrids face no incumbent opponent. And to finance: M-PESA grew from 20,000 to 13 million customers in Kenya in four years, serving people who'd previously faced $700 in fees just to open a conventional bank account.

Sugata Mitra's classroom experiment in a New Delhi slum completes the picture. He installed a computer in a wall between his office and a neighboring slum — no instructions, no teacher, just internet access. Children who spoke no English and had never touched a computer were browsing the web within hours and teaching each other. The lesson isn't that technology magically educates people. Given access to tools, human curiosity does the rest. Three billion people are about to come online. Every one of them is a potential problem-solver, entrepreneur, and innovator — the same raw material that built every previous wave of human progress, now finally connected.

Energy Is the Master Key, and the Lock Is Already Turning

Andrew Beebe had a strange problem. He was a solar executive buying panels for Google, and his job kept getting easier: the product he was purchasing fell in price every year, and the bottom was nowhere in sight. That counterintuitive trajectory — sell more, charge less, never hit the floor — turns out to be a law.

For every cumulative doubling of global solar panel production, manufacturing costs fall by 20 percent. This relationship, Swanson's Law, named after a SunPower cofounder who noticed it, is the same deflationary logic as Moore's Law, now running in energy. Between 2002 and 2012, total solar capacity grew nearly 2,000-fold. The price per watt fell from $3.20 to $1.30. If the curve continues, solar could meet 100 percent of global energy needs within two decades.

But solar has always had a catch: the sun sets. A grid running on intermittent generation needs storage, and battery storage has been expensive enough to keep solar in its lane. MIT materials scientist Donald Sadoway's answer is a battery built from some of the most common elements on the periodic table that runs as liquid metal, can be manufactured at one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion, and is designed to be installed and forgotten. No maintenance, no degradation curve to manage. One city block's worth of Sadoway batteries, stacked and buried, could buffer a neighborhood's power needs through a week of clouds. That missing piece — grid-scale storage at commodity cost — is what turns an impressive daytime generator into 24-hour baseload power.

Abundance Isn't Inevitable — It's a Design Problem

The shift that changes how you read all of this is realizing that abundance isn't the destination of a long, inevitable march — it's an engineering problem, and the tools to work on it are in more hands than at any previous moment in history. Stuart Kauffman's concept of the adjacent possible captures the moment we're in: every invention opens doors that couldn't have been reached before it existed, and right now those doors are multiplying faster than at any previous point in history.

The practical implication shows up in how change actually gets made. When Tony Spear was handed the Mars Pathfinder project, he had $150 million to do what Viking had done for $3.5 billion — fifteen times less money, no margin for the conventional approach. Five NASA managers quit rather than attach their careers to something so obviously doomed. Aerospace experts told Spear his airbag landing system was a waste of government money. He tested twelve designs anyway, settled on a twenty-four-sphere inflatable structure, and stuck it aboard the spacecraft. The landing was perfect. The lesson isn't that Spear was unusually brave — it's that breakthroughs have to look like nonsense to people invested in the status quo. If the idea didn't seem crazy, it wouldn't be a breakthrough.

The same logic applies to who gets to build. Incentive prizes, open-source platforms, distributed networks — these are mechanisms that deliberately route around the gatekeepers. You don't need an institution's permission to enter a competition with a clear target. You don't need a government contract to improve on a design that's posted publicly. Peter Diamandis launched the Ansari X Prize with no space agency behind him and $10 million he didn't yet have in the bank; twenty-six teams from seven countries spent $100 million chasing it, and private spaceflight became real. The adjacent possible is enormous. Walking through one of its doors is less a matter of resources than of deciding to try.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Here is something worth sitting with before you close this book: Sugata Mitra drilled a computer into a wall in a New Delhi slum, walked away, and came back to find children who had never touched a keyboard teaching themselves to browse the internet. He hadn't given them a curriculum. He had just opened a door. That image is the real argument of this book. Diamandis and Kotler aren't asking whether you believe in utopia — they're asking whether you can tell the difference between a genuine shortage and an engineering problem that hasn't found its Hall-Héroult moment yet. That distinction matters enormously. Because if scarcity is mostly a design failure, then the most urgent question isn't whether we have enough — it's what you, specifically, are building next. The tools are out. The doors are open. Right now, somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, a solar-powered diagnostic AI is catching tuberculosis cases that a rural clinic would have missed entirely. That's not a metaphor for the adjacent possible. That's what walking through the door looks like.