Here’s the first one in my series of paradoxes in the economy:
The planets’ resources are
under heavy strain. We’re already in overshoot mode, depleting resources faster
than they can regenerate – and with billions of people eager to enter the ranks
of global middleclass consumers, it looks increasingly hard to meet the
mushrooming demand for food, energy, water and basic raw materials.
Yet, we may be entering an era
of abundance. Nanotech and biotech are promising ways to build advanced
products with incredible efficiency and precision. Genetically modified
organisms will clean the air of CO2 and use it to produce oil, engineered organisms will
clean water, provide rawmaterials, increase crop yields, eradicate diseases... 3D
printers will only use the materials needed to print an object, and once we
stop using that object, we can recycle it to print something else. Digital
information will spread the best practices and knowledge everywhere. And
generally, much of the value we create will be digital – and anything digital
belongs naturally in the realm of abundance, where copies cost nothing to
create and distrubute.
Is it scarcity or abundance?
They are very different situations, but it’s hard to tell which one is real.
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