If there is a single thread running through the preceding chapters, it is this: many of the tensions we experience today may be less the result of absolute limits than of systems designed for conditions that are fundamentally changing. The modern world is still organized, in many critical ways, around the increasingly questionable management of scarcity, even as productive capacity — technologically led — unevenly but unmistakably allows for abundance.

This realization didn’t arrive for me in a policy paper or an economic model. It crystallized, unexpectedly, in the desert. At Burning Man — the temporary city assembled and dismantled each year under extreme environmental constraint — I witnessed a functioning micro-society built not on transaction but on contribution. For a brief moment, the usual signals of scarcity were suspended. People built, shared, repaired, created, and coordinated at scale without relying on transaction as the organizing mechanism. The experience didn’t prove that the world can (or even should) operate that way permanently. But it demonstrated, vividly, that different incentive structures produce different human behavior. It changed how I think about what is “fixed” and what is simply designed.

This epilogue does not claim that abundance is inevitable. Nor does it suggest that technology alone will deliver it. History offers no shortage of examples where increased productive capacity failed to translate into broadly shared prosperity. One could easily argue that inequality and the forces that drive it are the rule, not the exception. Systems matter. Incentives matter. Timing matters.

Intent matters most of all.

But the possibility now visible at the edge of the horizon is worth taking seriously. In energy, in information, in certain forms of production and agriculture, the cost curves are bending in ways that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. If institutional architectures evolve in parallel — and that is a significant if — the material foundation for a more stable and widely prosperous human future may be closer than current narratives assume.

The path to abundance, as it exists, will not arrive fully formed. It will only emerge through incremental redesign, through policy experimentation, through technological iteration, and through the slow, often frustrating process of institutional adaptation. Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations framework illustrates this beautifully. There will be false starts. There will be unintended consequences. There will be domains where scarcity remains stubbornly real, and where those with the greatest capacity to operationalize abundance will do everything in their power to prevent it from undermining their power base.

Yet one conclusion appears increasingly difficult to avoid: the question facing advanced societies may no longer be how to produce more under constraint, but how to manage increasing productive power without allowing legacy structures to convert potential abundance into artificial scarcity.

The work ahead is therefore less about invention than about alignment. About ensuring that the systems we inherit — economic, educational, urban, and social — are recalibrated for the realities that are already beginning to take shape.

Whether we succeed is not predetermined. But for the first time in human history, the material preconditions for a more abundant baseline appear, in an increasing number of domains, technically plausible.

What happens next is a design choice.