May 2, 2007

An Economics of Abundance

“The natural world has this principle of abundance, you know, life is kind of an abundant thing and in the material world we'd have double entry book keeping which says if I give you something then it's gone. But the world of ideas in the natural world doesn’t really quite operate in the same way that the warehouse with the ledger book operates. And, also, the nature of information in the nature of these complex systems causes us to have to re-examine our economics because we have an economics of abundance instead of an economics of scarcity”

- Bill Joy, Co-founder, Sun Micro Systems in a BBC Global Business interview in the 6 part series titled “Future Perfect”

Reminds me of a Sanskrit saying, "Throw one grain of rice at the Earth, and you get one hundred grains back."

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