Scarcity or Abundance?

1. 2012
Best year in history
Best year in history
Less Hunger
Less Disease
More Prosperity

2. How does the media
make money?
make money?
Sells you to advertisers
Fear gets attention
No context

3. Julian Simon
(1932-1998)
The Ultimate Resource
The ultimate resource is people–especially skilled, spirited,
and hopeful young people endowed with liberty–who will
exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and
so inevitably they will benefit the rest of us as well.” — The
State of Humanity (1995)
This is my long-run forecast in brief: the material
conditions of life will continue to get better for most
people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely.
Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity
will be at or above today’s Western living standards.
“I also speculate, however, that many people will continue
to think and say that the conditions of life are
getting worse.”

5. Life Expectancy
Fact
Theory

6. Price of Raw Resources
Theory
Fact

7. Think Utility
not
Physical Quantity
Physical Quantity
Physical Quantity

8. Drill or Holes?

9. Do the 88
keys limit
the number
of potential
songs?

10. High Prices
Use Less
Innovate a Substitute
Innovate a Substitute
Innovate a Substitute

11. Ideas make things valuable
Only humans have ideas
Therefore, only humans
make things valuable
Therefore, only humans
make things valuable
Therefore, only humans