Doug
----
<http://brightfuture21c.wordpress.com/>
Bright Future: Abundance and Progress in the 21st Century A book by David McMullen
FREE DOWNLOAD of pdf version (1 mb) 244 pages
Bright Future offers three reasons for being generally positive about our prospects in the 21st century:
1. Most of the poor world will be rich by the end of the century. This will not require spectacular growth rates and our ingenuity will remove any obstacles. Over this period we can double or triple food production by breeding better plants and livestock, and by more effectively managing land and water. At the same time, we can increase energy and raw material production more than 6 fold by exploiting a vast array of old and new resources with continually improving technologies.
2. Environmental catastrophes will continue to not happen. Nature is remarkably resilient. Furthermore, as we get richer and smarter we will get better at remedying or adapting to natural adversity.
3. In the highly developed economies, capitalism will lose its historical mandate as the automation of most of the onerous and uninteresting work will remove the need for the profit motive. Collective ownership by those who do the work will then be the obvious way to go. This would accelerate growth by unleashing the creative energies of the individual and freeing the economy from the distorting effects of sectional interests. This would be real free enterprise.