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Abundance & Growth
We Chose Stagnation. We Can Choose Growth.
Global growth cut extreme poverty by two-thirds in a generation, then we let funding, red tape, and complacency slow it to a crawl.
Key numbers
People lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990
People lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990
~1.5 billion
Estimated annual return on R&D investment
67%
Live counter
Estimated so far this year.
people lifted from extreme poverty (historic pace since 1990)
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The evidence
The Greatest Anti-Poverty Program Ever Was Growth
Extreme poverty fell from roughly 38% of humanity in 1990 to under 9% today, a decline of approximately 1.5 billion people (World Bank, Our World in Data). That collapse was not driven by aid or redistribution alone, it was driven overwhelmingly by fast economic growth in China, Indonesia, and other developing economies that opened markets and industrialized.
We're Only Investing a Fraction of What R&D Is Worth
Economists Chad Jones and Larry Summers estimate a gross annual return of roughly 67% on aggregate R&D spending, once spillover benefits to other firms and future generations are counted (Jones and Summers, 2022). Optimal research investment is estimated at more than four times what governments and firms actually spend.
Ideas Are Getting Harder to Find, and We're Not Compensating
Research productivity is falling sharply across nearly every field studied. It now takes more than 18 times as many researchers to sustain Moore's Law's historic doubling of chip density as it did in the early 1970s (Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen and Webb, NBER/American Economic Review, 2020).
Public Science Funding Has Quietly Collapsed
Federal R&D funding peaked at 1.86% of U.S. GDP in 1964, covering 67% of all domestic research spending. By 2022 it had fallen to just 0.63% of GDP and 18% of the national total (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, NSF).
We Made It Illegal to Build Our Way to Abundance
The United States is short an estimated 2 million or more homes, and the median home price has climbed from roughly 2.2 times average annual income in 1950 to about 6 times income by 2020 (Klein and Thompson, Abundance, 2025). Zoning, environmental review, and permitting delays function as a hidden tax on growth.
One Scientist Saved More Lives Than Any War Has Taken
Norman Borlaug's high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties are credited with saving an estimated 1 billion people from starvation during the Green Revolution (World Food Prize Foundation). A single, well-funded technological breakthrough outperformed generations of incremental famine relief.
What we can do
Phase 1: restore public R&D funding toward its historic 1960s share of GDP, with dedicated pools for high-risk metascience and ARPA-style moonshots that private markets underfund. Phase 2: strip away the zoning, permitting, and environmental-review layers that make housing, energy, and infrastructure artificially scarce. Phase 3: direct growth-focused philanthropic capital toward low- and middle-income countries, where each dollar of growth still lifts the most people out of poverty.
Sources: Our World in Data, World Bank, Open Philanthropy, NBER, Jones and Summers (2022), National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Klein and Thompson Abundance (2025), World Food Prize Foundation
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