| The Economic Importance of Abundance and Scarcity Let me start with the biggest one of all, which was taught to me by Carver Mead, the Caltech professor behind Moore's Law and some 30 Silicon Valley companies. Included among the Carver companies are two of our current "Moonshot" paradigm leaders. Click here to find out more. Carver's theme is that entrepreneurs waste what is abundant in order to conserve what is scarce. The key to successful investing is knowing the difference. All too often, people perversely waste what is scarce in order to save what is abundant. Such is the commanding principle of the "sustainability" movement — wasting the surface area of the planet, arable land, producing useless ethanol for cars. Strewing windmills and solar panels across the limited landscape and burdening the reliability of the power grid with the need for "smart" and vulnerable backup and buffering facilities. Or wasting rare human ingenuity in order to save or suppress ever more abundant "natural resources" such as oil and gas by leaving them in the ground, or wasting time (money) and human skills (minds) extracting harmless chemicals such as PCBs from rivers and soils. Defying all subsequent failures to prove any health damage from these chemicals, the EPA has extorted billions of dollars and endless time from General Electric. It has wasted and distracted GE's scarce resources of leadership to the point that this once paramount American manufacturer has become an aggregation of lawyers and financial consultants, perhaps America's most burdensome abundance. Abundances and scarcities play out in a spiral of reciprocity, with each producing its opposite in the cycles of economic advance. Thus, the information abundance produced by the computer and internet eras rendered telephony's wireline links, once adequately abundant for voice, inadequate or scarce for voluminous streaming video and other "big data." In free economies, abundance always prevails when human minds are unleashed. Placing Bets on Knowledge and Creativity Wireline scarcity led to a series of inventions enabling movement up spectrum into the vast domains of infrared light. That breakthrough fueled fiber optic bandwidth abundance. When fiber optics made long distance communications fantastically abundant, scarcity migrated to wireless last mile links to mobile human beings. Qualcomm was there to provide new mobile digital bandwidth abundance. Why do free economies prevail? They carefully conserve and cultivate late economist Julian Simon's "ultimate resource," always scarce and precious: creative human minds. The great delusion of Silicon Valley today is to bet on artificial intelligence and machine learning as replacing human minds, rather than merely aiding and enhancing them. For most of human history, most people have believed that scarcity will ultimately prevail over abundance. Whatever set of materials is essential to production — whether land, food, energy, bandwidth, or a polymorphically scarce element termed "the environment" — will ultimately meet diminishing returns and run out. Still dominant in government and in our universities, this paradigm can now be tested. Time prices reduce all economic activity to hours and minutes of work needed to buy the commodities that sustain our lives and civilization. Calculated with nominal GDP or nominal commodity prices divided by nominal wages, this theory measures all activity neutrally across time and space. Our time price theory, borrowed in detail from Gale Pooley and Marian Tupy, shows that for the last 40 years nearly all commodities, from energy to fish to iron to travel, have been growing massively cheaper. That means more abundance in relation to the governing scarcity of economics, which is time. Underlying this paradigm is the understanding that natural resources are essentially unlimited — the universe's supply of atoms is infinitely abundant. What is scarce is time and human ingenuity, minds and minutes, needed to combine them into useful forms and products, goods, and services. Investors should place their bets not on power but on knowledge, not on materials but on human minds. The decisive scarcities are not infinite and eternal atoms but scarce and precious minds and minutes. Regards, 
George Gilder
Editor, Gilder's Daily Prophecy P.S. Is it really possible to profit from a strategy that uses algorithmic trading? This is a question that keeps popping up, and my colleague James Altucher has that answer for you. He placed his own bets using his knowledge and creativity. (Hats off to him.) He recorded a short demonstration video you will be able to check out by clicking here. This system is giving everyone who follows along with it a chance to make extensively back-tested profits that showed the potential for up to $4,946 each and every week. Check out the video by clicking here. | 
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