Andrew McAfee - More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next

More Praise for

MORE FROM LESS

Ive always believed that technological progress and entrepreneurship make our lives better. Here, Andrew McAfee shows how these powerful forces are helping us make our planet better, too, instead of degrading it. For anyone who wants to help create a future that is both sustainable and abundant, this book is essential reading.

Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn and coauthor of Blitzscaling

Andrew McAfees optimistic and humane book documents a profoundly important and under-appreciated megatrendthe dematerialization of our economy. In a world where there is much to worry about, his analytical optimism is very welcome. Anyone who worries about the future will have their fears allayed and hopes raised by reading this important book.

Lawrence H. Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and director of the National Economic Council

In More from Less Andrew McAfee conclusively demonstrates how environmentalism requires more technology and capitalism, not less. Our modern technologies actually dematerialize our consumption, giving us higher human welfare with lower material inputs. This is an urgently needed and clear-eyed view of how to have our technological cake and eat it too.

Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz

In More from Less Andrew McAfee lays out a compelling blueprint showing how we can support human life using fewer natural resources, improve the state of the world, and replenish the planet for centuries to come.

Marc Benioff, chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce

A must-readtimely and refreshing! Amid the din of voices insisting that the ravages of climate change are unstoppable, McAffee offers a desperately needed nuanced perspective on what governments and society have got right, and he compellingly argues that commendable progress has already been made. His book is not a call for complacency; rather, its a welcome and thoughtful recognition of where weve succeeded and a practical path for what more can be achieved in the efficient use of natural resources. A gem of a book!

Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid, How the West Was Lost, Winner Take All, and Edge of Chaos

Andrew McAfees new book addresses an urgent need in our world today: defining a framework for addressing big global challenges. His proposals are based on a thorough analysis of the state of the world, combined with a refreshing can-do attitude.

Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum

Yet another magnificent contribution from Andrew McAfee. Along with his prior works, More from Less will help us navigate societys future in profound ways.

Clayton M. Christensen, Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School

First published in the United States by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2019

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK, Ltd, 2019

A CBS COMPANY

Copyright 2019 by Andrew McAfee

The right of Andrew McAfee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyrightholders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-8033-0

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4711-8034-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-8035-4(ebook)

Interior design by Kyle Kabel

To my mother, Nancy, who showed her children the world and taught them to love it

We are as gods and might as well get good at it.

Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, 1968

Listen! I will be honest with you,

I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes

Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road, 1856

W e have finally learned how to tread more lightly on our planet. Its about time.

For just about all of human history our prosperity has been tightly coupled to our ability to take resources from the earth. So as we became more numerous and prosperous, we inevitably took more: more minerals, more fossil fuels, more land for crops, more trees, more water, and so on.

But not anymore. In recent years weve seen a different pattern emerge: the pattern of more from less. In Americaa large, rich country that accounts for about 25 percent of the global economywere now generally using less of most resources year after year, even as our economy and population continue to grow. Whats more, were also polluting the air and water less, emitting fewer greenhouse gases, and seeing population increases in many animals that had almost vanished. America, in short, is post-peak in its exploitation of the earth. The situation is similar in many other rich countries, and even developing countries such as China are now taking better care of the planet in important ways.

This book is about how we turned the corner and started getting more from less, and what happens from here forward.

I want to make one thing clear at the start: my argument is not that things are good enough now, or that theres nothing to be concerned about. Those claims would be absurd. Human-caused global warming is both real and bad, and we urgently need to take action to deal with it. We also need to reduce pollution levels around the world and bring back the species weve pushed to the brink of extinction. And we have to keep fighting poverty, disease, malnutrition, fraying communities, and other roadblocks to human flourishing.

So we have plenty of work ahead. The broad point I want to make is that we know how to succeed with this work. In large parts of the world weve already turned the corner and are now improving both the human condition and the state of nature. The trade-off between the two has ended, and Im confident its never going to reappear if we play our cards right. In these pages Ill explain where this confidence comes from and try to get you to share it.

This book shows that weve started getting more from less and tells how we reached this critical milestone. The strangest aspect of the story is that we didnt make many radical course changes to eliminate the trade-off between human prosperity and planetary health. Instead, we just got a lot better at doing the things wed already been doing.

In particular, we got better at combining technological progress with capitalism to satisfy human wants and needs. That conclusion will strike many people as bizarre, and for good reason. After all, its exactly this combination that caused us to massively increase our resource use and environmental harms starting with the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. The Industrial Era was a time of startlingly large and fast improvements in human prosperity, but these improvements came at the expense of our planet. We dug out resources, chopped down forests, killed animals, fouled the air and water with pollution, and committed countless other offenses against the earth. We committed more and more of them year after year, apparently without end.