Abundance is the bold title for a new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has been receiving a lot of attention. Given my own profound interest in how to get past scarcity thinking I felt compelled to read it rather than rely on the profusion of reviews. In short, while I commend Klein and Thompson on wanting to shift the dialog towards a positive vision, the book falls comically short of its title. A more apt name would have been something like “Awakening” as it does a good job of rep...

A good friend of mine recently conducted a fun survey – he asked people why they thought digital was disruptive (I don’t know if he will ever publish the results as this was an internal project at a consulting company). My own answer to that is simple: digital is disruptive because zero marginal cost takes us into a world of abundance when all of our economics, politics and business practices are rooted in scarcity. Making this flip runs counter to what we have come to treat as ground truths ...

This is part of my series of posts thinking about a coming age of abundance. The main thrust of my arguments will be that abundance will be a feature of the physical world, but I would be the first to admit that we are a long way off from that. In the meantime though, we can look to the online world for some clues as to what abundance might look like. Online (at least on the margin), the cost of resources is already sufficiently close to zero so as to not matter. One of the interesting possib...

This post is part of my Age of Abundance series. As I remarked in the outline for the series, changes in the income distribution are likely to be an important aspect of the transition. The following lays out my hypothesis is and I am hoping to work with someone to find the numbers to either support this hypothesis or revise it. Part 1 should be fairly uncontroversial (and there should be a lot of data available): past transitions were also associated with big shifts in the wealth distribution...

I got a lot of useful questions and feedback on my Age of Abundance (AoA) post yesterday - thanks! Two important points to address right away are what I mean by Abundance (and why I chose that term) and what drivers are pushing us in that direction. My basic premise is that we already have the capabilities necessary to provide everyone in the world with quality food, shelter, clothing, mobility, and access to the Internet. This requires several further steps of explanation. First, by capabili...

A little while ago, I read Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” (on DailyLit of course). In the book, he has the concept of Whuffie, a reputation-based currency that has replaced traditional money in a world of abundance. Since then I have been thinking about whether we might possibly be headed towards a scenario in which we have so much of everything that we can choose to or maybe even have to use mechanisms other than traditional monetary cost/price for making decisions. I be...