When Thomas Malthus predicted that exponential population growth would outpace humanity’s ability to grow food and lead to widespread famine, he was half-right: The global population did explode at the start of the nineteenth century.
Since then, the human population has grown from about 1 billion to nearly 8 billion people (“World Population Clock: 7.9 Billion People”, 2021). However, Malthus’s dire warnings about the consequences of this population growth have proven wrong. There has been no global-scale starvation, and most people do not live in abject poverty. In fact, the number of people living in extreme poverty around the world has declined, even though population growth has been about twice as fast as Malthus’s predicted upper limit of 1 billion people added over 25 years (Roser & Ortiz-Ospina, 2013).
What Malthus got wrong was the rate of technological progress. First, he was pessimistic about our ability to improve agricultural productivity. Since his writing, there have been huge advances in agriculture: the percentage of the global workforce employed in the sector has declined from more than 80 percent to 33 percent, and is falling rapidly (in the US and other advanced economies, agriculture represents 2 percent of employment or less). In the last 50 years alone, the land required to produce a given quantity of food has declined by 68 percent (Ritchie & Roser, 2019). The total amount of land used to produce food has still continued to grow at least until recently, but much more slowly than the population (Ausubel et al., 2013; Ewers et al., 2009).
Second, Malthus could not have foreseen the scientific breakthroughs that enabled the Industrial Revolution. That revolution not only powered the increase in agricultural productivity, but also gave us dramatic advances in living standards, including increased life expectancy, faster transportation, and cheaper communication.
This matters because, as it turns out, population growth responds to progress. In particular, there is a strong and well-documented relationship between levels of infant mortality, living standards, and birth rates. As better medical technology reduces infant mortality and better production technology increases living standards, birth rates decline. This is not a mechanistic relationship, but involves complex social adjustments, such as women entering the workforce and other forms of empowerment for women (e.g., better access to education). Max Roser and the team at the “Our World In Data” project have produced some beautiful charts that show how this effect of progress on birth rates has occurred all around the world (Roser, 2014).
So despite the extraordinary growth in global population over the last 200 years, simply assuming that it will continue into the future would be a mistake: There are strong signs that the world’s population is likely to peak. Some people claim that this debate is crucial because they don’t think the world can sustain, say, eleven billion people. However, this argument misses a key point. The world cannot sustain its current population of nearly eight billion people either, unless we continue to make technological progress. The ways we have managed to supply eight billion people so far have created all sorts of new problems, such as water and air pollution and, most pressingly, the climate crisis.
In fact, Malthus’s predictions may yet catch up with us. For example, if we don’t rapidly address the climate crisis, we may experience large-scale crop failure resulting in mass starvation. This would be an example of having insufficient technology for producing enough food, in contrast to many past examples of mass starvation, such as in India, that were the result of social and political breakdowns from internal strife or external interference disrupting food production or distribution.
Still, the key takeaway should be that needs will not continue to grow exponentially because A) population growth will slow down, and B) needs per person are limited. All the signs suggest that the global population curve is starting to decelerate, whereas the rate of technical progress is continuing to accelerate (Roser, 2019a; Roser & Ritchie, 2013). On this basis we can be optimistic about progress in relation to population growth. In other words, Malthus will ultimately turn out to have been wrong both about the rate of technological progress and the long-term rate of population growth.
Recently it has become popular among some groups to worry about the opposite problem: a collapse in population due to a decline in birth rates below the level needed to keep replacing the existing population. Some of the rhetoric is thinly veiled racism, but there are also legitimate concerns. For example, in South Korea, the birth rate has dropped to 0.72 in 2023, a long way below the rate of roughly 2 needed to maintain a steady population (Yeung et al., 2024). In the relatively near term this could pose an economic problem for some countries that may struggle economically and socially to support an aging population. Since we are still a ways away from a global population decline, immigration is one way to address this challenge today. Over time population decline may also level off in response to both policies (e.g. the child tax credit in the US) and to endogenous factors (e.g. real estate becoming cheaper as demand drops making it more affordable to have a larger family). Longer term there is the potential for much extended lifespans, for dramatically increased automation, and eventually even for other ways of reproduction.
The definition of scarcity introduced in Part One is based on the idea of needs, so to argue that we are currently experiencing a shift to attention being the new scarcity requires me to demonstrate that we have sufficient capital for meeting our needs. But agreeing on what constitutes human needs is not a simple task. What follows should be seen as a step along the way to reclaiming the distinction between needs and wants. A list of needs is exactly the type of externalized human knowledge that can be improved over time through the process of critical inquiry.
In an early draft of The World After Capital, I grouped needs into categories such as biological, physical, and social, but the boundaries between them seemed rather arbitrary. So instead I distinguish here between individual and collective needs, where the former apply to a single person and the latter are the needs of humanity. Another challenge in putting together such a list is that it is easy to confuse a need with a strategy for meeting it. For instance, raising and slaughtering animals and then eating their meat is one specific strategy for addressing our need for calories, but humans can, of course, acquire calories from many sources. Being clear about the differences between needs and the strategies for meeting them is important because while our needs stay the same our strategies for meeting them can change dramatically as a result of non-linear technological progress.
The following might strike you as a dry and abstract list. But as you read through it, you may want to ask yourself several questions. How are you meeting these needs for yourself? Are you meeting this need in the best possible way and do you know what that would be? What in your life do you think you cannot do without? Is that really a need that you have or just something you want really badly? Who can you think of in the world who currently cannot meet one or more of these needs and why is that?
These are the basic needs of the human body and mind, without which individual survival is impossible. A single individual has these needs even when they are completely isolated, such as if they are traveling alone in a spaceship. The first set of individual needs relates to keeping our bodies powered. These include:
Oxygen. On average, humans need about 550 liters of oxygen every day, depending on the size of our body and physical exertion. Our most common way of meeting this need is breathing air (“How Much Oxygen Does a Person Consume in a Day?” 2000). Although that may sound obvious, we have developed other solutions through technology—for example, the blood of patients struggling to breathe can be oxygenated externally.
Water. We need to ingest two to three liters of water per day to stay hydrated, depending on factors such as body size, exertion, and temperature (“Water: How Much Should You Drink Every Day?” 2020). In addition to drinking water and fluids that contain it, we have other solutions for this, such as the water contained in the foods that we eat.
Calories. To power our bodies, adults need between 1,500 and 3,200 calories per day, a need we mainly meet by eating and drinking (U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2015). The best way to obtain calories, however, is surprisingly poorly understood—the mix between proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates is subject to debate.
Nutrients. The body cannot synthesize all the materials it requires, including certain amino acids, vitamins and minerals—these must be obtained as part of our nutrition. This is another area that is surprisingly poorly understood, meaning there is little consensus regarding the mix of nutrients we need to take in.
Discharge. We also need to get things out of our bodies by expelling processed food, radiating heat, and exhaling carbon dioxide. Humans have made a great deal of progress around meeting our discharge needs, such as toilets and public sanitation.
The second set of individual needs relates to the operating environment for humans. From a cosmic perspective, humans have an incredibly narrow operating range. Even here on Earth we can live without technological assistance only in relatively few places. Here are some of our basic operating needs:
Temperature. Our bodies can self-regulate their temperature, but only within a limited range of environmental temperature and humidity. Humans can easily freeze to death or die of overheating (we cool our bodies through sweating, also known as “evaporative cooling,” which stops working when the air gets too hot and humid). We therefore often need to help our bodies with temperature regulation by controlling our environment. Common strategies to meet our temperature needs include clothing, shelter, heating and air conditioning.
Pressure. Anybody who has gone diving will be aware that our bodies do not handle increased pressure very well. The same goes for decreased pressure, which is one of the reasons why we find air travel exhausting (airplane cabins maintain pressure similar to being at the top of an eight-thousand-foot mountain) and why space travel is so dangerous.
Light. Most humans would be hard-pressed to achieve much in complete darkness. For a long time, our need for light was met mainly by sunlight, but much human ingenuity has gone into the creation of artificial light sources.
The third set of individual needs arises from how we deal with a complex and ever-changing environment. As we go through life, we all encounter challenges that we need to overcome, resulting in three fundamental individual needs:
Wellness. The human body comes equipped with extensive systems for maintaining itself, even self-healing many wounds. These systems though require wellness activities, such as exercise, to function properly. They can also be overwhelmed through impact, or ingestion of toxins, and sometimes they can malfunction as in the case of cancer and auto-immune diseases. We have developed many strategies for meeting the wellness need, including significant progress in healthcare resulting in dramatically higher life expectancy.
Learning. When we are born, we are quite incompetent—we have to learn basic skills, such as walking and how to use even the simplest tools. When we encounter a new situation, we have to learn how to deal with it. We group many of the strategies for meeting the need for learning under the heading “education,” but other solutions include experimenting to gain experience, self-study and parenting.
Meaning. As humans, we have a profound psychological need for meaning in our lives. One solution is to have a purpose. Religious belief and belonging to a community have long been a source of purpose for humans. Another key strategy comes from our interactions with other humans, including having other people acknowledge our contributions to a project, or even merely recognize our existence.
This last set of needs may strike you as being at a much higher level than the earlier ones. The idea of sorting individual needs into a hierarchy, as the psychologist Abraham Maslow famously did, is intuitively appealing, but it is misleading—all of these needs are vital. For example, Maslow put needs like calories at the bottom and needs like meaning at the top, implying that calories are more foundational than meaning. But we know from the work of Viktor Frankl and others that meaning is essential to human effort and that accessing calories requires effort. As a thought exercise, picture yourself alone in a spaceship and try to remove any of the above. It’s easy to see why you would perish without oxygen. But the same is true without meaning. You would eat less, exercise less, become depressed, stop learning about ways to maintain and fix your spaceship. Eventually some combination of these factors would kill you, and possibly you would commit suicide. All of these needs are equally important.
Our collective needs arise from living together in societies and sharing space and resources. Meeting them is what allows human societies to survive and advance. Here too it will be helpful to ask yourself questions as you consider this list. How is the society you live in meeting these? Are the solutions currently working well, or do they appear to be breaking down? What might be the cause of the breakdown and what alternatives can you consider?
Reproduction. Individuals can survive without sex, but reproduction is a need for societies and humanity as a whole. Historically humans having sex and then babies has been the solution to the need for reproduction. More recently we have figured out how to reproduce without sex through in vitro fertilization; in the future, there may be altogether different solutions for the continuation of a human society—whether here on Earth or elsewhere.
Allocation. Access to physical resources has to be allocated. Take a chair as an example. Only one person can comfortably sit in it at a time—when there are multiple people, we need a way of allocating the chair between them. If you are by yourself, you can sit on a chair whenever you want to—allocation is a collective need.
Motivation. This may seem like an individual need, but it acts as a collective one in the sense that societies must motivate their members to carry out important tasks and follow rules. For example, in the Agrarian Age, it was necessary to motivate a large percentage of the population to work in the fields. There was a “need” for this motivation by my earlier definition: without enough people tilling, seeding, weeding, etc., there would not have been a big enough harvest. Even the smallest and least technologically advanced societies have solutions for this motivation problem, often in the form of rewards and punishments.
Coordination. Whenever more than a single human is involved in any activity, coordination is needed. Take a simple meeting between two people as an example. In order for the meeting to happen, the two need to show up at the same place at the same time. We have developed many communication and governance mechanisms to address this need.
Knowledge. As I argued in earlier sections on optimism and humanism, knowledge is the central collective human need: Without it, a society will encounter problems that it cannot solve. History is full of examples of societies that lacked sufficient knowledge to sustain themselves, such as the Easter Islanders and the Mayans. This is not about what any one individual has learned, but about the body of knowledge that is accessible to society as a whole. Later in this book we will examine solutions for generating more knowledge, faster.
These collective needs may strike you as abstract, but this is the result of identifying needs rather than solutions, which are much more concrete and readily recognizable. For instance, governments and laws are examples of solutions to collective needs such as allocation and coordination, as are markets and firms and, more recently, networks and platforms. In other words, many of the institutions of society exist because they help us solve a collective need. As we will see in a bit, historically many of the solutions to these needs were constrained by insufficient capital, but this is no longer the case.
Some things don’t meet specific individual or collective needs directly, but instead enable solutions to these needs. Consider energy, for example. Isn’t energy something we all need, both individually and collectively? Yes, but only to enable solutions. For instance, individually we use energy to maintain the temperature of a house, and collectively we use energy to power our communications infrastructure. As these two examples show, energy itself does not meet needs—rather, it makes possible something that does. Energy is what I call an enabler.
Here are the four foundational enablers:
Energy. For a long time, humans relied on direct sunlight as their primary energy source. Since then we have developed many ways of generating energy, including better ways of capturing sunlight. Capturing more energy and making it available in a highly concentrated and easily controllable form via electricity has enabled new solutions to human needs.
Resources. In early human history, all resources were drawn directly from our natural surroundings. Later, we started growing and extracting resources using progressively more technology. Many modern solutions have been made possible by access to new kinds of resources. For instance, mobile phones, which provide new solutions to individual and collective needs, are made possible in part by esoteric raw materials, including the so-called “rare-earth elements.”
Transformation. Energy and resources alone are not enough. To enable most solutions, we need to figure out (and remember!) how to use the former to transform the latter. This involves chemical and physical processes. Physical capital, in the shape of machines, has been a crucial enabler of many new solutions to human needs. For instance, a knitting machine can quickly transform yarn into clothing, one of our key solutions for maintaining the human operating environment.
Transportation. The final foundational enabler is the ability to move stuff, including people. This is another area in which we have made great progress, going from human-powered to animal-powered to machine-powered transportation.
As in the case of needs, I have deliberately chosen enablers that have a high degree of abstraction. Coal-fired power plants provide energy, as do solar panels—and nuclear fusion will do so at some point in the future. These three examples have dramatically different characteristics, but they are all energy enablers.
Historically there has been a lot of concern that the world will run out of some of these enablers, such as resources. Going back to the Club of Rome report on “Limits to Growth” (Meadows et al., 1972) and more recently the planetary boundaries framework underlying “Doughnut Model” (Raworth, 2017) of sustainability have argued that enablers are bounded on Earth and hence represent a hard limit on solutions to our needs. I will argue later that this is a mistaken view because it treats Earth as a closed system and underestimates the ultimate power of knowledge.
While I expect further changes to these lists based on feedback, I believe that my current version of needs and enablers is adequate for establishing my argument that there is sufficient productive capital in the world (later we will see why some of our existing solutions are breaking down due to a new constraint). To demonstrate this in more quantitative terms, though, we need to consider the size and growth of the human population.
As implied by the title of this book, one of my fundamental claims is that there is enough capital in the world to meet everyone’s needs. That means meeting the individual needs of some 8 billion people, as well as the collective needs of the societies they live in. If there is plenty of slack today, capital will no longer be the binding constraint for humanity going forward, as population growth is decelerating while technological progress is accelerating.
It is tempting to look at this in terms of financial capital, but that would be giving in to the illusion of money. Dollar bills don’t feed people and gold bars can’t be used as smartphones. The capital that fundamentally matters is productive physical capital, such as machines and buildings.
Of course, financial capital is not irrelevant—it is required for the initial construction of physical capital and to meet the ongoing financing needs of economic activity. If I want to build a factory or a store, I need to pay the construction workers and the suppliers of machines before I can start making money. And many businesses have ongoing expenses to pay each month before they can collect revenues from customers. When cash outflows precede cash inflows, a financing mechanism is required. To accumulate physical capital, we need to be able to accumulate financial capital.
The history of financial capital has seen many important innovations, such as the creation of joint-stock companies and the trading of shares in stock markets. The allocation of financial capital to projects through markets has been enormously successful, and it is the success of the market-based approach that has given us a large enough physical capital base to meet our needs. I should be quick to point out, as I have done elsewhere in the book, that the market-based approach relies on plenty of governmental activity, such as pro-competition regulation and the funding of education and research.
Many recent innovations in finance, however, rather than contributing to the creation and allocation of physical capital, have had the opposite effect, instead leading to the excessive “financialization” of the economy. This refers to growth in financial activities that help generate personal wealth for some but that are decoupled from, or even harm, the formation of physical capital. One example of excess financialization is companies borrowing money to buy back shares instead of investing in innovation. The derivatives and structured securities, such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), that powered the housing bubble are another example. This is not to say that there are no potentially legitimate uses of these tools—they have simply grown far beyond what is needed for physical capital formation and taken on a life of their own. This can be seen both in the increased size of the financial sector as a proportion of the overall economy and in the wealth generated by making money from money instead of from productive capital (Lahart, 2011; Lewis, 2018).
What is the role of “human capital” in all of this? I find this relatively new term to be a fundamental misnomer. Humans provide labor, and machines are capital. We saw earlier that, as Malthus had predicted, there was an exponential population explosion. As a result, labor has not been a constraint on meeting our needs. That does not mean that we have not had labor shortages from time to time, but these have largely been the result of policy choices, such as restrictions on immigration or discriminatory access to education, rather than reflecting fundamentally scarce labor globally.
The better question to ask is: What is the role of knowledge? The answer is that advances in knowledge are essential for making capital more effective. Even more fundamentally, physical capital cannot exist in the first place without knowledge. Take a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, for example: You can’t build one without a great deal of knowledge of physics and engineering. However, in a world where everyone’s needs are taken care of, it might be possible to build the same machine without the need for financial capital, as you might not have to pay people in advance. And with enough knowledge, in the form of advanced robots, it will eventually be possible to build one without human labor altogether.
In conclusion here, we should realize that the accumulation of financial capital does not contribute to meeting our needs in and of itself. Imagine a Spanish galleon full of gold caught in a storm. Although the sailors aboard had ample access to financial capital, what they really needed to survive was either more knowledge or better physical capital. For example, if they had more knowledge of the weather, they could have circumnavigated the storm. Or if they had a stronger boat, they could have simply ridden it out. If anything, the gold is a hindrance to their survival—throwing it overboard might help the boat get away from the storm more quickly.
We will now examine whether physical capital is indeed sufficient to meet our individual and collective needs.
My claim is that capital is no longer the binding constraint on our ability to meet our individual needs. This is especially true for the developed economies, but it is increasingly true globally. Let’s start by considering the needs emanating from keeping our bodies powered (see the Appendix for additional supporting information). It is, however, important to understand that if we fall further behind on the climate crisis we will soon find capital to be scarce again. I have noted the areas where this is of particular concern below.
Oxygen. There’s plenty of air for us to breathe; the key challenge is to make sure it is clean and safely breathable. China and India are both currently struggling with this, but they developed rapidly and are reliant on outdated energy sources. What is needed here are improvements to capital, such as switching from cars powered by internal combustion engines to electric vehicles.
Water. There’s plenty of water for everyone in the world to drink (the oceans are full of it). Though there are distribution and access problems, including in the United States (for example, the crisis of polluted drinking water in Flint, Michigan), physical capital is not a binding constraint. We are even able to build new desalination plants in record time, with rapidly growing regions such as Dubai operating almost entirely on desalination. There are local areas though where capital may be scarce for water as the climate crisis unfolds, such as Mexico City, which had been relying on aquifers which appear to be drying out due to drought conditions (since Mexico City is far from the coast, desalination of ocean water is not an option there as it might be in Los Angeles). Similar problems may arise in several interior US cities that have been growing rapidly, such as Phoenix, Arizona.
Calories. We have made dramatic progress in farming: As a result of increased productivity, the rate of increase in the amount of land used globally to produce has plummeted, and the amount of land used worldwide for agriculture may have already peaked (Ramankutty et al., 2018; Ausubel et al., 2013). There have been significant recent breakthroughs in vertical farming, the practice of growing plants under controlled conditions, as well as in automated farming. For instance, one of the world’s largest vertical farms operates in Jersey City, and the Japanese indoor farming company Spread’s automated facility can produce 30,000 heads of lettuce per day (Harding, 2020). Our existing agricultural systems are quite dependent on a stable climate though, and this is another area where we may soon find ourselves constrained by capital again if we don’t direct more attention to the climate crisis.
Nutrients. This is primarily a question of knowledge, as we still don’t fully understand which nutrients the body really needs to ingest in what quantities. We obtain most of them from food, but depending on our diet, we may need to add some supplements. The remaining amounts tend to be small, and we can produce plenty of them already (in developed countries, entire industries have sprung up trying to convince people to buy and consume food supplements that they do not need).
Discharge. This is addressed through modern sewage technology. Here too, capital is no longer a binding constraint, although capacity sometimes lags behind, especially in cities that have grown a lot or have failed to make this a priority (that sadly includes New York City where sewage routinely discharges into the rivers and harbor during big rainfalls).
Now let’s consider the needs relating to the operating environment for humans.
Temperature. The Chinese construction boom illustrated how quickly we can build shelter, which, together with heating and air conditioning, is one crucial solution to our temperature needs. The US, too, had a construction boom facilitated by artificially cheap mortgage credit in the early 2000s. Though a lot of housing was built speculatively and remained empty, it powerfully demonstrated our construction capacity. Clothing is another strategy for meeting our temperature needs. The price of clothing has been falling in many parts of the world, including the United States. Capital is not a constraint here—indeed, we have the ability to clothe the world’s population many times over. In some places though there is an urgent need to build out cooling, such as parts of India, where the temperature now climbs above 45 degrees Celsius. As the climate crisis deepens the need for cooling may outstrip available capital.
Pressure. Thankfully, we have nothing to do here, as we have plenty of space for humans to live in the right pressure range. This is a great example of a need that we do not consider much at all, but that would loom very large if land were to cease to be habitable and we had to go underwater or into space.
Light. We have become very good at providing light. One study shows how the hours of light provided by 60 hours of labor in the United States exploded from around 10 in 1800 to over 100,000 by 1990 (Harford, 2017; Nordhaus, 1994). Since then, we have made considerable further progress with LED lighting. That progress has also come to other parts of the world, for instance in the form of off-grid, solar-powered lamps.
Finally we come to the more abstract individual needs.
Healing. We often read that healthcare consumes an increasingly large fraction of the economy, especially in the United States, but that does not imply that capital is scarce. Industrialized countries have plenty of hospital space and doctor’s offices. But, you may ask, didn’t the COVID-19 pandemic show that we didn’t have enough ICU beds? The answer is no: Countries that reacted to the virus in good time stayed well within their capacity. Overall, capital is sufficient for healing. We have extensive diagnostic facilities and are able to produce large quantities of medicine.
Learning. Nor are we constrained by capital when it comes to learning. This is increasingly true not just in industrialized nations, but also globally due to the expansion of wireless networks and the increasing affordability of smartphones. We are not far away from reaching a point where we have enough capital for anyone in the world to learn anything that can be transmitted over the internet; the binding constraint is the availability of affordable content and the time it takes to learn and teach.
Meaning. The final individual need, that of meaning, is not and has never been constrained by capital. Capital plays no role in meeting our need for it.
It might seem difficult at first to see how capital relates to our collective needs. What could it possibly have to do with such abstract concepts as motivation and coordination? In discussing why capital is sufficient today to meet our collective needs, I will also briefly point out how it was scarce with regard to these needs in the past.
Reproduction. Available capital has always been sufficient for reproduction—otherwise, we wouldn’t be here today.
Allocation. During the Industrial Age, the allocation of capital, such as where to build a factory and what it should produce, was the central allocation problem, and it was the scarcity of capital that made it difficult to meet this need. When there were few roads and other means of transportation, there were few places a factory could be built. Getting the place just right and building the right factory was thus a much harder problem than today where we can ship products around the world. As a result, the allocation problem for capital is no longer constrained by capital. And because capital is no longer scarce, it is also no longer the dominant allocation problem. As we will see in the next section, it has been replaced by the allocation of attention, for which capital is largely irrelevant.
Motivation. Again, it might at first seem as if capital never played a role here. But consider what it was like to work in an early factory, when the outputs were generally not affordable for the workers. Workers at the time had to more or less be forced into factory work, a situation that still persists in some parts of the world for certain industries (e.g., clothing and hardware assembly). Contrast this with much of the period following the Second World War, when more advanced economies already had a fair bit of capital, making possible the mass production of goods that workers could afford. Motivation can of course come from many sources other than what wages can buy, such as wanting to help others (e.g. in healthcare) or facing an enemy (e.g. wartime production). The key point is that today, motivation is no longer constrained by capital in principle.
Coordination. One of the primary ways to meet the need for coordination is through communication, which was heavily constrained by capital for the longest time. Today, however, we can hold a real-time video conference with nearly anybody in the world. And some of the big coverage gaps, such as parts of Africa, are rapidly being filled in.
Knowledge. Finally, our collective need for knowledge was long constrained by capital. Making books, for instance, was expensive and time-consuming, and copies could only be made by humans, which introduced errors. The spread of knowledge was limited by the need to create and supply physical copies, constraints that we have now left behind. There were also other ways in which capital was scarce as far as knowledge was concerned. For instance, we had insufficient scientific instruments for inspecting matter, such as microscopes. Today, by contrast, we are able to build massive undertakings to support science, such as the Large Hadron Collider.
Our progress on the four foundational enablers—energy, resources, transformation and transportation—is another way to understand why capital is no longer scarce. There have been massive breakthroughs on all four during the Industrial Age.
Energy. The biggest breakthrough in energy was the development of electricity, which allowed us to apply energy precisely. Our remaining challenges relate to the production, storage and distribution of electricity. Further improvements will let us meet different needs in new ways, but we are not fundamentally energy-constrained. For instance, at current efficiency rates, covering less than 0.1 percent of the Earth’s surface with solar panels could meet all of today’s energy needs (Berners-Lee, 2019). The deployment of solar has been growing exponentially, with China alone adding over 100 GW of new solar capacity in the first half of 2024 (Shaw, A., 2024). We are, however, at this moment somewhat energy constrained as many countries are trying to reduce carbon emissions. This is an issue globally, but particularly impacts countries such as Germany that were heavily dependent on imported fossil fuels. There is sufficient capital to resolve this quite quickly, but that will require paying more attention to the importance of energy.
Resources. The availability of resources was completely transformed during the Industrial Age through mining, which was enabled by innovation in transportation (railways) and energy (steam power). People who have concerns about sustainability sometimes point to the scarcity of resources as the primary constraint, but there are three sources that we can tap in the future: recycling, asteroid mining, and eventually transmutation (turning one element into another, as in the alchemists’ quest to turn lead into gold). For instance, a lot of electronics currently end up in landfills instead of being recycled, we achieved the first soft landing on an asteroid as far back as 2001, and we can already turn lithium into tritium.
Transformation. Our ability to transform materials also improved radically during the Industrial Age. For instance, chemistry enabled the synthetic production of rubber, which previously had to be harvested from trees. Machine tools enabled the rapid transformation of wood and metals. We later added transformation technologies such as injection molding and additive manufacturing technologies (often referred to as “3D printing”).
Transportation. Here we went from human-, animal- and wind-powered movement to machine-powered movement, dramatically increasing our capabilities. We can now fly across continents and oceans on commercial flights, reaching any major city in a single day, and there has been extraordinary progress in flight safety. While some have complained about a recent lack of progress, pointing to the lack of commercial supersonic options following the retirement of Concorde, work has recently resumed on developing new options for commercial supersonic flight. We have also made tremendous progress on reusable rockets and autonomous vehicles (for instance, drones and robots used in warehouses).
The progress made on all these enablers has allowed us to produce more physical capital, to do so more rapidly and cheaply, and to transport it anywhere in the world. One illustration of how far we have come is the fact that mass-produced smartphones only became available in 2000, but by 2017 there were over two billion smartphone users in the world.
I am not claiming that everyone’s needs are being met today, nor am I arguing that governments should be meeting people’s needs through government-run programs such as food stamps or subsidized housing—quite the opposite. My point is simply that physical capital is at the moment no longer the constraint when it comes to meeting our individual and collective needs. As pointed out above, we may quickly be back in a situation where we are constrained by capital because we have failed to pay enough attention to the climate crisis. This idea will be further developed later in the book.
Capitalism’s great success is that capital is no longer scarce. The new scarcity, then, is attention, which capitalism cannot and will not address without dramatic changes in how we regulate society and ourselves.
In saying that capital is sufficient, I mean that there is enough of it to meet our needs. That’s what I set out to show in this part of the book. The only way to do so is by examining what those needs are and separating them clearly from our unlimited wants. We must then consider population trends so we can see how many humans are likely to have those needs in the future. Only then can we attempt to determine whether our existing capital is sufficient to meet them.
If you are already convinced that capital is sufficient, or you are an impatient reader and want to find out what the new scarcity is, I recommend skipping ahead to Part III. You should definitely come back here though eventually, because this section reclaims a meaningful distinction between needs and wants. Modern economics and trillions of dollars of cumulative advertising spend have worked hard to erase this distinction, as it turns out much to our own detriment.