“When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our worldview…Imagine a world of nine billion people with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy. Building this better world is humanity’s grandest challenge.”

Abundance suggests we have the wrong worldview. We shouldn’t be trying to inch our way along, making marginal gains; instead, we should be trying to achieve those dramatic improvements that can really make life better for everyone. 97.3% of the world’s water is salty, and another 2% is in polar ice: bickering over the remaining .5%, the authors argue, will never lead to abundance for all.

They have some great stats. Americans, for example, spend enough time to write Wikipedia anew watching ads on TV every weekend. Microchips take 35 gallons of water to produce. And 500x more solar energy falls on the earth than the total energy consumed by humanity each year. For them the answer, as befits a book co-authored by the CEO of the X-Prize foundation, is technology. Not just to become more efficient, though that’s a good thing, but to truly make human happiness and wealth abundant. Technology, they argue, can not just alleviate our problems but actually render them irrelevant, as when the introduction of the car made the problem of horse manure in New York City an irrelevancy.

The book is a whirlwind tour of the exciting new areas of technology and research in water, food, energy (backyard nuclear devices, anyone?), health, education, and freedom: progress in waste management, organ supplies, AI, nanomaterials, synthetic biology, and more. In some ways, it doesn’t add much to what’s already known – it’s a survey, not a contribution. If this is a field you’re interested in getting an overview of, though, the book is hard to beat. My only objection is their sheer optimism; it’s a book meant to be optimistic, and though I don’t in principle object, sometimes their treatment of the other side can feel superficial at best. If you’ve already read in the field, particularly Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist, then you may also have heard much of it before. Still, the book remains a light but engaging read, and an important reminder that there is reason for optimism in what is often a pessimistic world.