Excerpt from Unlimited Wealth -- by Paul Zane Pilzer

Sonny Azores

Excerpt from Unlimited Wealth -- by Paul Zane Pilzer

Introduction

For the past four hundred years, virtually all practitioners of the dismal science we call economics have agreed on one basic premise: namely that a society's wealth is determined by its supply of physical resources--its land, labor, minerals, water, and so on. And underlying this premise has been another, even more profound, assumption--one supposedly so obvious that it is rarely mentioned: namely, that the entire world contains a limited amount of these physical resources.

This means, from an economic point of view, that life is what the mathematicians call a zero-sum game. After all, if there are only limited resources, one person's gain must be another person's loss; the richer one person is, the poorer his neighbors must be.

Over the centuries, this view of the world has been responsible for innumerable wars, revolutions, political movements, government policies, business strategies, and possibly a religion or two.

Once upon a time, it may even have been true. But not anymore.

Whether or not we ever did, today we do not live in a resource-scarce environment. That may seem hard to believe, but the businessperson and the politician--as well as the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker--who
continue to behave as if they were operating in the old zero-sum world will soon find themselves eclipsed by those who recognize the new realities and react accordingly.

What are these new realities? To put it simply, we live today in a world of effectively unlimited resources--a world of unlimited wealth. In short, we live in what one might call a new Alchemic world.

The ancient alchemists sought to discover the secret of turning base metals into gold; they tried to create great value where little existed before. But an analysis of their writings shows that they were on a spiritual as well as a monetary quest. They believed that by discovering how to make gold they could offer unlimited prosperity to all of God's children. And, although in our era the term alchemy is often equated with "false science" and fraud, the ancient alchemists were successful in their quest in a manner that they could not have anticipated.

Consider this: if the ancient alchemists had succeeded in fabricating gold, gold would have become worthless and their efforts would have been for naught. Yet, through their attempts to make gold, they laid the foundation for modern science, which today has accomplished exactly what the alchemists hoped to achieve: the ability to create great value where little existed before. We have achieved this ability through the most common, the most powerful, and the most consistently underestimated force in our lives today--technology.

In the alchemic world in which we now live, a society's wealth is still a function of its physical resources, as traditional economics has long maintained. But unlike the outdated economist, the alchemist of today recognizes that technology controls both the definition and the supply of physical resources. In fact, for the past few decades, it has been the backlog of unimplemented technological advances, rather than unused physical resources, that has been the determinant of real growth.