The More Resources We Consume, the More We Have

Common sense dictates that adding billions of people to the global economy--and the subsequent rise in production and consumption--must result in increased use and, therefore, greater scarcity of resources. Many of the academic and nonacademic opinions agree on that point, but they are all mistaken. Relative to wages, resources have grown significantly cheaper since 1980, thereby becoming much more abundant. We thus face a seeming contradiction: the more resources we use, the more we end up with. Resolving that requires us to understand the key role played by the creation of knowledge. Knowledge possesses a peculiar characteristic: the more knowledge we consume, the more knowledge we have. Furthermore, generation of new knowledge is the exclusive domain of the human mind. So, the more people who inhabit the planet and partake in global exchange, the more knowledge is created. This new knowledge, in turn, expands our resource base. Globalization--or the process of interaction and integration between people and companies worldwide--supercharges the process of knowledge creation and knowledge dissemination, thereby leading to greater resource abundance.