Nadam se da ste u međuvremenu pročitali Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think , Diamandis,

Nadam se da ste u međuvremenu pročitali Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think , Diamandis, Kotler. Zajedno s njom sam bio preporučio i The Beginning

of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World od Deutscha.
O knjizi: “ For two hundred years the pessimists have dominated corsham court public discourse, insisting corsham court that things will soon be getting much worse. But in fact, life is getting corsham court better and at an accelerating corsham court rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people’s lives as never before. “
A constant drumbeat of pessimism usually drowns out any triumphalist corsham court song of the kind I have vented in this book so far. If you say the world has been getting

better you may get away with being called naïve and insensitive. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad. … Implicit confidence in the beneficence of progress said Hayek, has come to be regarded as the sign of a shallow mind.
If, on the other hand, you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur corsham court genius award or even the Nobel Peace Prize. The bookshops are groaning under ziggurats of pessimism. The airwaves are crammed with doom. In my own adult lifetime, corsham

court I have listened to implacable predictions of growing poverty, coming famines, expanding deserts, imminent plagues,

impending water wars, inevitable oil exhaustion, mineral

shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, mad-cow epidemics, Y2K computer bugs, killer bees, sex-change corsham court fish, global warming, ocean acidification and even asteroid impacts that would presently corsham court bring this happy interlude

to a terrible end. I cannot recall a time when one or other of these scares was not solemnly espoused by sober, distinguished and serious elites and hysterically echoed by the media. I cannot recall a time when I was not being urged by somebody that the world could only survive if it abandoned the foolish goal of economic growth.
The fashionable reason for pessimism changed, but the pessimism was constant. In the 1960s the population explosion and global famine were top of the charts, in the 1970s the exhaustion of resources, in the 1980s acid rain, in the 1990s pandemics, in the 2000s global warming. One by one these scares came and (all but the last) went. Were we just lucky? Are we, in the memorable image of the old joke, like the man who falls past the first floor of the skyscraper and thinks So far so good! ? Or was it the pessimism that was unrealistic? corsham court Let me make a square concession at the start: the pessimists are right when they say that, if the world continues corsham court as it is, it will end in disaster for all humanity. If all transport depends on oil, and oil runs out, then transport will cease. If agriculture continues to depend on irrigation corsham court and aquifers are depleted, then starvation will ensue. But notice the conditional: if. The world will not continue as it is. That is the whole point of human progress, the whole message

of cultural evolution, the whole import of dynamic change the whole thrust of this book. The real danger comes from slowing down change. It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective

problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways. It does so through corsham court invention driven often by the market: scarcity drives up price; that encourages the development of alternatives and of efficiencies. It has happened often in history. When whales grew scarce, petroleum was used instead as a source of oil. (As Warren Meyer has put it, a poster of John D. Rockefeller should be on the wall of every Greenpeace office.) The pessimists mistake is extrapolationism: assuming that the future is just a bigger version of the past. As Herb Stein once said, If something cannot go on forever, then it will not. So, for example, the environmentalist Lester Brown, writing in 2008, was pessimistic about what will happen if the Chinese are by 2030 as rich as the Americans are now (nastavlja s pesimističnim corsham court opisom posljedica) …
Brown is dead right with his extrapolations, but so was the man who (probably apocryphally) corsham court predicted ten feet of horse manure in the streets of London by 1950. So was IBM s founder Thomas Watson when he said in 1943 that there was a world market for five computers, and Ken Olson, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, when he said in 1977: There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. Both remarks were true enough corsham court when computers weighed a tonne and cost a fortune.
… There is a tendency to believe that pessimism is new, that our current dyspeptic view of technology and progress has emerged since Hiroshima and got worse since Chernobyl. History contradicts this. Pessimists have always bee