Greenblatt is not alone in this assertion. Many believe water is an issue of money and will be best solved locally, and without the aid of techie giz… - Peter Diamandis

Beyond banking, cell phones are now enabling improvement at every level of our abundance pyramid.

This last question may seem innocuous, but think about it this way: In 2006, retail was booming. Sears was worth $14.3 billion, Target $38.2 billion, and Walmart a whopping $158 billion. Meanwhile, an upstart retailer named Amazon was at $17.5 billion. Now fast-forward a decade. What's changed? Hard times hit Main Street. By 2017, Sears had lost 94 percent of its value, ending the decade worth $0.9 billion, before promptly going out of business. Target did better, finishing up at $55 billion. Walmart did the best, going up to $243.9 billion. But Amazon? The Everything Store closed out the era worth $700 billion (today $800 billion). And it's a fairly safe bet that your life changed as a result.

Once people understood the technology and once the technology became vaguely affordable (vaguely, that is, because cell phones in the third world are often micro-financed), their rate of growth became exponential —