They looked forward to a four-day workweek, energy too cheap to meter, and vacations on the moon. “we have inherited a richer society than any previous generation would have been able to imagine.Īny generation excepting our parents’ and grandparents’, that is: in the late 1960s, they expected this progress to continue.

He also brings up some of the most important and forgotten aspects in today’s society: In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.” Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. If every one of India’s hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do-using only today’s tools-the result would be environmentally catastrophic. “Without technological change, if China doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. The following could be from any UN sustainability study or progressive international NGO: This is such a stark contrast to books who claim to have a global approach and about important things, but then basically just focus on American trivial ideas/innovations (a good example of a book that fails in those areas is Bold by Peter Diamandis ) He does this in a way where it is natural, as it should be. One of the big surprises for me was that Peter spend so much time on our generation’s major challenges from a global perspective. If the books would have included a more nuanced approach to change I think it could have been a classic. In many ways, the ideas are very close to a simplified version of Marx, but a mirror image. It is as if values and structures don’t exist. What I find frustrating is his simplified view of technology as the only driver of change. It is written without any references/footnotes and in this case I think that is perfectly OK as, for most of it, Peter writes about things he has knowledge about and expericne of. But maybe is was Blake Masters that helped him?

I have found Peter interesting, but did not expect him to cover so many of the most important challenges in this short book. There are a lot of very interesting thinking in this short book that I think everyone who tries to make the world a better place, and realise that more than incremental change is needed, should read. I think it is the first simple “how to think like an entrepreneur”-book that I have recommended people to read.

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