"Unlimited Wealth," by Paul Zane Pilzer with introduction by Bob Meyer, Barter News, Sept 1992.

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Pilzer is a Paradigm-Buster
Education Must Never Stop

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Unlimited Wealth

"Unlimited Wealth: Paul Pilzer Tells Where to Find the New Prosperity," by Duncan Maxwell Anderson, Success Magazine, October 1993.

     (2) Technology determines our supply of existing physical resources by determining both the efficiency with which we use resources and our ability to find, obtain, distribute, and store them.

     To increase the supply of a physical resource we can (1) improve our ability to find, obtain, distribute, and store it (supply technology); and we can (2) improve the efficiency with which we use it (use technology).
     Supply technology has the more direct impact on our resource base.  Consider the supply of oil.  Over the past two or three decades, advances in geology led to the discovery of the huge Alaskan oil field.  Improved drilling techniques allowed producers to delve into the earth's crust to a depth of six miles instead of a mere five to ten thousand feet.  Development of the super-tanker and advanced pipeline construction provided for more rapid distribution.  Last, storage tanks made it possible to store heating oil in our homes and put gas stations on many street corners.
     But use technology can also expand the resource base by improving the efficiency with which we employ a particular resource.  For example, in response to the so-called fuel shortages of the early 1970s, auto manufacturers replaced $300 carburetors with $25 computerized fuel injectors.  By doing so, they doubled the fuel efficiency of new cars in less than a decade and increased the effective supply of gasoline by well over a third.
     As a result of the advances in technology use that were achieved in the 1980s, the world's effective supply of energy resources will be a full 50 

percent larger in 2000 than it was in 1980.

     (3) The rate at which a society's technology advances is determined by the relative level of its ability to process information.

     Former U.S. Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal regards information as "the key to modern economic activity--a basic resource as important today as capital, land, and labor have been in the past."  But developing new information is only half the battle; information is useful only to the extent that it can be efficiently distributed.
     Following the invention and development of writing five thousand years ago and the printing press only six hundred years ago, the third major advance in information processing is the computer.  While its speed is an important factor, the computer's true value lies in its ability to sort through and collate data, to link different sectors of society through communications networks, and to transmit the information through these networks.
     Even with this technological advancement, the main constraint on innovation today is the ability of engineers and entrepreneurs to make use of all the new developments.  To increase the size of the pie, we must continue to improve our ability to process information so that technology will advance at a faster rate.  The result will be an increase in the effective supply of existing physical resources and the definition of entirely new ones--increased, unlimited wealth for everyone.
     As a result of modern technology, we effectively have access to an unlimited supply of resources.  What, in practical terms, does that really mean?  For one thing, the key to achieving wealth is no longer the accumulation of resources.  Many who attempted to exploit the fear of resource scarcity have already learned that lesson.
     In the 1970s, various cartels tried to corner markets by dictating the
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