You don't just die 'suddenly', you die from the signals that were ignored or never seen. - Peter Diamandis

less than five years after Burt Rutan spent $26 million beating the aerospace giants at their own game, DIY Drones took them down with volunteer labor, a few toys, and a couple hundred dollars' worth of spare parts. "It's radical demonetization," says Anderson, "a true DIY story about using open-source design to reduce costs a hundredfold while keeping ninety percent functionality.

Today Americans living below the poverty line are not just light-years ahead of most Africans; they're light-years ahead of the wealthiest Americans from just a century ago. Today 99 percent of Americans living below the poverty line have electricity, water, flushing toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 percent have a television; 88 percent have a telephone; 71 percent have a car; and 70 percent even have air-conditioning. This may not seem like much, but one hundred years ago men like Henry Ford and Cornelius Vanderbilt were among the richest on the planet, but they enjoyed few of these luxuries.

Energy provides the means to do work; education allows workers to specialize; information/communication abundance not only furthers specialization (through expanding educational opportunities), it allows specialists to exchange specialties, thus creating what economist Friedrich Hayek called catallaxy: the ever-expanding possibility generated by the division of labor.