Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper
Book

Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper

How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong

Robert Bryce
Public Affairs, 2014
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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Engaging
  • Inspiring

Recommendation

Manhattan Institute fellow Robert Bryce’s personal, idiosyncratic style fuels an important argument. He celebrates innovation, technology and freedom as the answers to environmental concerns, repeatedly illustrating potential solutions that many of those forecasting climate calamity don’t mention, while suggesting what humanity’s future could and should be. In this urgent if reductive treatise, he proves an eccentric contrarian. His sort of random capitalization – things aren’t faster, they are Faster – can irritate, and rather than answer objections or counterarguments, Bryce tends to just elude them, but he consistently remains intriguing. While always neutral politically, getAbstract suggests Bryce’s optimistic look ahead to all those interested in the environment, the future and how innovation builds on itself.

Summary

“Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper”

When you watch the news, you see threats abounding, from debt crises and pandemics to terrorism, war and severe weather. A broader assumption rests behind these warnings: You live in a world of “scarcity and shortage.” Resources will run out. People will starve. Contemporary “neo-Malthusians” claim that people endanger the world, that current civilization is self-destructive, and that humankind must choose “degrowth” to return to a saner, safer, happier time.

This pessimistic chorus “ignores an undeniable truth”: People today live longer than ever. Their lives are “healthier, freer” and “more peaceful” than their ancestors’ lives. Innovation drives this improvement, and enables people to “do more with less.” Every day, innovators make things “smaller, faster, lighter, denser and cheaper.” These qualities make everyone richer. The world faces many challenges – including some that are the byproducts of human technology. But society won’t solve its problems by going backward. Civilization can’t give up contemporary architecture and “modern energy sources” to get by on renewable energy “and organic food.” Society must embrace “humanism...

About the Author

Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, also wrote Power Hungry, Gusher of Lies, Pipe Dreams and other works on the energy industry.

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