World After Capital
 Part One: Laying a Foundation
In an earlier version of this book I attempted to skip any philosophical exposition and jump right into the impact of digital technology. While that may make for more gripping reading, it resulted in the verbal equivalent of building a skyscraper without a foundation: rapid initial progress followed by total collapse.
With digital technology inflating the space of the possible, we need to establish some principles. Otherwise we will misread the trends and phenomena that are already happening today. Instead of exploring the new space of the possible for the benefit of all of humanity, we will instead try to bend it to fit existing economic and social systems.
What follows is my attempt to establish a firm foundation for building a future grounded in optimism and humanism. I explain why the power of knowledge is the source of optimism as a principle, and why the existence of knowledge provides an objective basis for humanism. Much of my thinking about this has been deeply influenced by the writing of David Deutsch, in particular his book “The Beginning of Infinity” [13].
Furthermore, to argue that capital is no longer scarce and that attention now is, I provide a definition and an analysis of scarcity that are not based on money and prices, but rather on needs. Finally, to support this argument, I propose a catalog of our individual and collective basic needs as humans.
With these foundations in place, we can then fully appreciate how the power of digital technology enables the Knowledge Age.
 Optimism
When I started my blog a decade ago, I called myself a “Technology Optimist” in my first post. I wrote that
I am excited to be living in a time when we are making tremendous progress on understanding aging, fighting cancer, developing clean technologies, and so much more. This is not to say that I automatically assume that technology by itself will solve all our problems (I guess that would be a “technology pollyanna”). Instead I believe that—over time—we as a society figure out how to use technology to actually improve our standard of living. I for one am sure glad I am not living in the Middle Ages.
The fundamental tenor of this book is one of optimism. This is in part a reflection of my personality. I am pretty sure it would be impossible to be a VC as a pessimist. You would focus only on the many reasons why a particular startup won't succeed and never make an investment.
Optimism is a theme that I will return to many times in this book and so it is a good idea to make this apparent bias of mine clear upfront. It is more than a personal bias though. Optimism has a profound role in human affairs and its source is the power of knowledge. Knowledge has given us vaccines and cures to many diseases. Knowledge lets us travel long distances at high speeds in trains and planes. Knowledge lets us read Aristotle and listen to Mozart. Knowledge is what makes us humans human (in a way I will make more precise shortly).
I am optimistic about what humanity can ultimately accomplish with digital technology. Using the Internet and advances in machine intelligence we can dramatically accelerate the creation and distribution of knowledge. This will be essential for progress.
Progress has become a loaded word. Is there such a thing as true progress and what does it look like? Aren't we humans responsible not only for the many diseases of civilization but also for the downright extinction of countless species and potentially our own demise through climate change?
Yes, we do have problems. And one might, as a pessimist, focus on these problems and conclude they cannot be solved. This is like looking at a startup and concluding there is no point in even getting going—or funding it—because, well, there will be problems.

 The beauty of problems, though, is that they can be overcome by human knowledge. Is that true for all problems? Well it has been true so far, as we are still here.
This is in and of itself quite remarkable: we are slower and weaker than many other species, but humans alone have developed the capacity for knowledge. And knowledge turns out to be extraordinarily powerful. It allowed us to figure out, for instance, how to make fire. We may take this for granted today, but no other species has managed to do this and to record its knowledge of fire making in a way that can be shared across space and time (I will shortly provide a more precise definition of knowledge and why it is quite so powerful).
There is an extreme position that would suggest we would have been better off never developing knowledge [14]. That we would still live in a state of paradise had we not tasted the forbidden fruit. Not only is it hard to see how we would go back there now, but more importantly, I for one prefer not to be consumed by wild animals.
Will all future problems be solvable, including say climate change? There is, of course, no guarantee. We might wind up with a problem we cannot solve and that might cause our extinction. But what is certain is that assuming that problems cannot be solved guarantees that they will not be solved. Pessimism is a self-defeating attitude, as it leads to inaction.
Yes, digital technologies including the Internet and advances in automation have brought with them a new set of problems. We will encounter many in this book, including immense pressure on people's ability to earn a living and the conflicts arising from being exposed to content that runs counter to one's upbringing or deeply held cultural or religious beliefs.
And yet this expanded space of the possible also includes amazing progress, such as zero marginal cost diagnosis of disease for anyone anywhere in the world, the example we encountered at the end of the previous chapter.
Believing in the potential for real progress though is not the same as being a Pollyanna. Progress does not happen by itself as a deterministic function of technology. Contrary to Kevin Kelly's claims in his book “What Technology Wants”, technology doesn't want anything by itself and certainly not a better world for humanity. It simply makes such a world possible.
Economics also doesn't want anything. It is not normative. Nothing in economics, for instance, says that a new technology cannot make some people or possibly a great many
 people worse off. Economics gives us tools for analyzing markets and designing regulations to address some of their failures. But we still need to make choices about what we want markets and regulations to accomplish for humanity.
And contrary to Karl Marx, history too doesn't want anything. Nor is there, as political economist Francis Fukuyama would have it, an end of history with a final social, economic and political system. History is the result of human choices; it doesn't make its own choices. And as long as we make technological progress there will be new choices to make.
It is our responsibility, both individually and collectively, to make choices about which of the many worlds made possible by digital technology we want to live in. We need to choose rules for society (regulation) and behaviors for ourselves (self-regulation). And the choices we make now are especially important because the latest expansion of the space of the possible includes machines that have knowledge and can make choices.
 Regulation
There are many people who work in technology and investing who are optimists and believe in progress. Among those there is a subset, myself included, who also believe in the need for regulation. There is another group though that has a decidedly libertarian streak and would like for government to just get out of the way.
The history of technological progress is one of changes in social norms and political regulations. For instance, at the moment much of the world gets around by driving cars. The car was an important technological innovation in that it allowed for individual mobility. But it would have been impossible to have widespread adoption of cars without regulation. We needed to agree on rules of the road and we also needed to build roads. Neither of these could have been accomplished based solely on individual choices. Roads and their rules are examples of natural monopolies: you don't want to have multiple disjointed road networks or different sets of rules of the road (imagine some people driving on the left side and others on the right). Natural monopolies are classic examples of market failure that require regulation. The car would also not have made much sense as individual transport without changes in social norms, such as making it acceptable for women to operate a car (a change that did not take place in Saudi Arabia until the end of 2017 [15]).
 Not all regulation will be good regulation. In fact, the earliest regulation of automotive vehicles was aimed at delaying their adoption by limiting their speed to that of a horse drawn carriage and in some cases even requiring them to be preceded by someone carrying a flag [16].
Similarly, not all regulation of digital technology will be good regulation. Much of it will initially aim to protect the status quo and help incumbent enterprises, such as the recently enacted changes to net neutrality rules [17]. But that is no reason to call for an absence of regulation. It should be seen, instead, as a challenge to come up with the right regulation as we did eventually in the case of cars.
My proposals for regulation later in the book are aimed at being pro-innovation by giving more economic freedom to individuals and by giving them better access to information (informational freedom). These regulations are choices we need to make collectively. They represent a big departure from the past aimed at letting us explore the space of the possible opened up by digital technologies so that we can transition from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age.
 Self-Regulation
There is another set of choices we need to make individually. These have to do with how we react to the massive acceleration of information dissemination and knowledge creation made possible by digital technology. These are not rules society can or should impose because they relate to our inner mental states.
For instance, there are a lot of people at the moment who feel offended by content that is available on the Internet. People are yelling, insulting and even threatening in comment threads and forums. Others spend all their time in polarized online communities being fed algorithmically curated information which confirms only their existing biases, in a phenomenon that has become known as a “filter bubble”. Even though some technology and regulation can help here, fundamentally overcoming these problems requires internal changes which I later describe in a section called psychological freedom.
Changing ourselves requires self-regulation. By this I mean training our capacity as individuals to use our rationality. From Eastern religions including Hinduism and Buddhism,
 to the Stoics in ancient Greece, there is a long tradition of understanding how we can get past our immediate emotional and heuristic brain responses. Much of this lines up well with what we have uncovered more recently about the workings of the human brain.
If we want to have true progress leveraging digital technologies, we need to get past our initial emotional responses and figure out how to maintain a rational dialog. Only then will our choices on where to go in the dramatically enlarged space of the possible be based on our critical thinking abilities.
Much of what I have been saying here about optimism, the potential for progress and the need for regulation and self-regulation could immediately be attacked as coming from the perspective of a white male venture investor living in the United States. As such it might be deemed a privileged view that I am attempting to impose on others.
The next chapter will argue instead that Humanism provides an objective foundation of values for this perspective that applies to all of humanity.
 Humanism
What then are the values that I am basing all of this on? Where do those come from?
In his book Sapiens, historian Yuval Harari claims that all value systems are simply narratives that are equally valid. He specifically denies the existence of an objective basis for humanism that would support a privileged position for humanity as a species [18]. I will try to convince you that this is not so. If the power of knowledge is the source of optimism, then its existence alone provides the basis for humanism.
Knowledge, as I use the term in this book, is the externalized — recorded in a medium — information that allows humans to share insights and art with each other.
We are the only species on Earth that generates this kind of knowledge and it can be shared over space and time. For instance, I can read a book today that was written by someone else, a long time ago and in a completely different part of the world. This does give humanity a privileged position among the species because knowledge turns out to be extraordinarily powerful. And to quote from a great tract of philosophy, “Spiderman,” with great power comes great responsibility (which gets its own section later in the book). Because we have knowledge, humans are responsible for dolphins, not the other way round.
Since the work of Alan Turing we know that there is a mathematically precise way in which knowledge gives humans this privileged position. Human brains are more complex than animal brains but they are still only finite state machines, admittedly with a huge number of states. The computational capabilities of finite state machines are quite narrow. For instance, one cannot build a finite state machine that recognizes palindromes of arbitrary length [19]. To get a feel for the limitations of the brain by itself, think about the times you simply cannot remember something and wind up looking it up online.
In addition to our brains though, humans also have universal alphabets and the technology for recording and disseminating information encoded in those alphabets (universal in the sense that once you have an alphabet with at least two letters you can in principle write down anything). This gives humans the same computational capability as the so-called Turing machine which I introduced earlier in the Universality section of the Digital Technology chapter. As Turing showed, that means humanity can compute anything that can be computed in the universe. The computational capability of other species is
 dramatically limited by comparison. Because they do not have knowledge they are constrained to the equivalent of finite state machines.
Now even if you do not buy into this argument based on a mathematical proof, consider the ability to make progress as a species. Without knowledge (as defined above) other species are reduced to only two methods of sharing something they have learned: communication and evolution. Communication is limited because it is both local and ephemeral and evolution is extremely slow. In contrast, humans can share knowledge across space and time and can rapidly refine knowledge through the process of critical inquiry. What evolution is to DNA, critical inquiry is to knowledge: a process of mutation and selection that over time separates good ideas and good art from bad ones.
Progress and knowledge are inherently tied together through critical inquiry. We make progress only if we are capable of (over time) identifying some ideas as better than others. Some art as more important. Critical inquiry is by no means linear, as new ideas and new art are not always better. Sometimes we go off in wrong directions in science or fads in art. But given enough time, a sorting takes place. For instance, we no longer believe in the geocentric view of our solar system. And only a small fraction of the art that has ever been created is still considered important today. While this process may take decades (and sometimes hundreds of years), critical inquiry is blindingly fast compared to evolution.
My use of words such as “better” implies the existence of values. But where do those come from? They all flow from one central value of a humanism based on knowledge and that is critical inquiry itself. We must at all times guard the freedom to point out flaws in existing knowledge and to propose alternatives. Imagine how limited our available music would be today if we had banned new compositions after Beethoven.
We should therefore seek regulation and self-regulation that supports critical inquiry. In business for instance, critical inquiry often takes the form of competition in the market, which is why regulations that support the functioning of competitive markets are so important. Both the sections on Economic Freedom and on Informational Freedom will introduce examples of regulation that are aimed at increasing competition in the age of digital technology. Individually, critical inquiry requires our ability to be open to feedback in the face of our deeply rooted confirmation bias. This will be addressed in the section on Psychological Freedom. In politics and government critical inquiry is enabled by democracy which gets its own chapter.
 Freedom of speech in this view is not a value in and of itself. It is a crucial enabler of critical inquiry. But we can also see how some limits on free speech — which are part of such regulation — flow from the same value. If you can use speech to call for violence against individuals or minority groups then you can use speech to suppress critical inquiry.
Digital technologies, which include a global information network and general purpose computing which is bringing us machine intelligence, are dramatically accelerating the rate at which humanity can accumulate and share knowledge. But these same technologies allow for individually targeted manipulation and for propaganda at global scale as well as constant distraction.
Put differently, digital technology massively raises the importance of critical inquiry, the central value of knowledge based humanism.
 Scarcity
Scarcity
In this book I will be arguing that capital is no longer scarce but that attention now is. Furthermore this constitutes the third major shift in scarcity in the history of humanity. The first shift was from food to land when we went from the Forager Age to the Agrarian Age. The second was from land to capital when we went from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age.
The words scarce and scarcity have come to take on a meaning that is derived from modern economics. Many people now think of something as scarce if its price is greater than zero. By this definition land is obviously still scarce as it costs a lot of money to buy a piece of land. And financial capital is still scarce because even in our current low interest rate environment, there is a price for borrowing money or raising equity financing (which makes it possible for me to make money from being a venture capital investor).
There is a fundamental problem with this price based definition of scarcity though: anything can be made scarce by assigning property rights. Imagine for a moment that ownership of the world's atmosphere belonged to Global Air Ltd (GAL). Now GAL could charge anyone who breathes air a usage fee. Air would suddenly be scarce. That may seem like an extreme example at first. Yet, some have argued that the solution to the problem of air pollution is to assign ownership rights to the atmosphere, on the theory that this will result in the owners having an economic incentive to maintain an unpolluted atmosphere.
I will use a different meaning of scarcity that is not based on price. Something is scarce when there is less of it than we need to meet our basic needs. If people are starving then food is scarce.
One can think of this as technological scarcity (as opposed to economic scarcity). The point is that technological progress makes things less scarce over time. The 18th century scholar Thomas Malthus was not wrong about global population growth, which he predicted could be exponential (and thus, he argued, would outpace growth in the food supply leading to hunger) [20]. He turned out to be wrong about the potential for technological progress to exponentially increase the amount of food we could produce. We
 have in fact gotten so good at agriculture that the amount of land needed for food production has started to decline even as the global population is still growing.
But what about wants? If people are not starving but want more food doesn't that mean food is still scarce? Is it possible to make a distinction between needs and wants? Modern economics has thoroughly equated the two, but intuitively we know that this is not the case. You need to drink water, but you want to drink champagne. You need to provide your body with calories, but you want to eat caviar. There is no bright line as the use of “starvation” above might suggest—we know that some food is healthier for the human body than other (although we are a surprisingly long way from understanding nutrition well). Still, the distinction is clear enough for this definition of scarcity to make sense. One may argue about degrees but not about the principle.
Just because something is no longer scarce doesn't mean that it is abundant. Instead there is an intermediate stage which I will call sufficient. For instance, there is sufficient land to meet everyone's needs for housing and food. For something to be abundant there has to be enough for everyone's needs to be met at zero marginal cost. Building housing and growing food still incurs significant marginal cost and hence these are not abundant. I am saying “still” because technological progress could make land and food abundant (imagine how much land we'll have if we can figure out how to live in space and make other planets habitable).
Is anything abundant? Yes, digital information is already abundant. We can make copies of it and distribute it at zero marginal cost. We can meet everyone's information needs at zero marginal cost.
Is anything scarce? Well, I will endeavor to show that human attention is scarce. It turns out to be scarce, in part, because digital information is abundant.
 A Brief History of Scarcity
Food was the original scarcity for humans. We started out as hunter gatherers (foragers). And bad hunters at that. Before the development of weapons and tactics we were mostly hunting small animals and scavenging otherwise. There was one relatively simple solution to food scarcity: migrate elsewhere. And that's why humanity spread across the globe at a
 relatively decent speed. But once the human population grew past a certain density and migration was not an option, then food scarcity was the source of much violence both among and within tribes. It is important to note that tribes that were not in direct competition with others for food and had no systems for food surplus (no storage, so called “immediate return” societies) tended not to be violent [21].
Eventually, as far back as 10,000 BCE, we happened upon a series of technological advances including growing crops, irrigation and domesticating animals, that together gave us agriculture [22]. With agriculture, scarcity shifted from food to land (of course land had been a proxy for food to some degree but now the scarcity was land directly). Agriculture increased the food density of land by at least an order of magnitude [NEED CITATION]. That was enough for a meaningful surplus to be produced, which meant that a social hierarchy could be created. Rulers commanded armies. The more land a ruler controlled the bigger an army the ruler could afford, which brought us several thousand years of empire building among agricultural societies. The transition into the Agricultural Age was extremely violent with most forager societies wiped out altogether.
Then sometime in the 18th century a new set of technological advances began to emerge that together gave us industry, including steam/electrical power, chemistry, and mechanical machines. With these, scarcity shifted from land to capital. Why was land no longer scarce? Because the use of machines in harvesting and the increasing knowledge of fertilizers dramatically increased crop yields. The transition from the Agricultural Age into the Industrial Age wound up being incredibly violent with numerous revolutions and culminating in World War I and II.
At the end of the Agrarian Age, the ruling elites all came from controlling land. They still believed land to be the critical scarcity and saw industry as a means of building and equipping more powerful armies. For them industry did not mean a new age had started, instead it meant tanks and battleships. Even World War II was still about land, as Hitler and the Nazis pursued “Lebensraum” (literally: room to live). Once again the transition from one age to the next was brought about through extreme violence. It was only at the end of World War II that we truly exited the Agrarian Age.
We now live in the Industrial Age. Eventually we added service jobs to manufacturing but that did not shift the dominant scarcity which was capital. The success of the market based economy over the planned economy is the result of more effective capital formation.
 Competitive markets combined with entrepreneurial activity were better at allocating and accumulating capital.
Capital these days is frequently mistaken for wealth or financial capital, but what really matters is productive capital in the form of machines, inventories of goods, buildings. Financial capital is an intermediary step that allows for the formation of physical capital but it does not add to the production of goods and services directly (machines are not made of dollar bills). Companies only require financial capital because of their working capital needs, which arise when they have to pay for machines, supplies and labor before they receive payment for their product or service.
Much like the ruling elites at the end of the Agrarian Age came from land, the ruling elites today come from capital. They often don't take up political roles themselves, as we have devised ways of influencing policy indirectly, which exposes the owners of capital to less personal risk. A good example of this recently is the role of the Mercer Family in financing and supporting groups, such as Breitbart news, that influenced the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election [23].
The first major claim of this book is that capital is no longer scarce (in the technological sense defined above). We have sufficient productive capital to meet our needs for housing, clothing, transportation, education and healthcare. This is not a claim that productive capital or access to it are adequately distributed around the world. It is also not a claim that we cannot substantially further improve productive capital by making more of it and creating better versions. It is not even a claim that financial capital is currently being allocated properly for the creation of global productive capital (it is not). It is simply the claim that productive capital is sufficient for meeting humanity's basic needs.
At the same time, digital technology has massively expanded the space of the possible. Digital technology gives us a global network connecting all of humanity to each other and to information at zero marginal cost. Powerful general purpose computing is making artificial intelligence a reality for the first time. This combination of zero marginal cost and universality of computation can dramatically accelerate the creation of knowledge in the world.
Human attention, however, is fundamentally limited. We have 24 hours in the day. We need some of that time to eat and sleep. So that puts a hard limit on how much attention we
 have both individually and collectively (with population growth slowing down as a result of economic progress).
But why does that make attention scarce? How do we not have enough attention to meet our needs? This is the second major claim of the book. Individually, it is so because most of us are not spending nearly enough of our attention on the fundamental question of our purpose in life. Collectively, it is so because we are not spending enough of our attention on species level risks, such as climate change, asteroid strikes, infectious diseases and opportunities such as space travel, quantum computing, genetic engineering. We are also not paying nearly enough attention to democracy, to our communities, and to each other, including our friends and families.
Therefore the goals of this book are to convince readers, first, that scarcity is, in fact, shifting from capital to attention and, second, that we need new regulation and self- regulation in response to this shift.
Ideally, World After Capital contributes to a dialog that helps avoid another terrible transition. To enter the Knowledge Age we need a lot of changes that are not in the direct interest of the owners of capital who largely control policies at the end of the Industrial Age. This is a direct parallel to the end of the Agrarian Age, and we must learn from that transition, if we do not want to repeat its horrors.
Historians will have a lot of bones to pick with the preceding highly abstracted account. The periods didn't unfold as neatly and there were regional differences. Nonetheless, I think the overall pattern of scarcity shifting from food to land, from land to capital, and finally from capital to attention holds.
 Needs
The definition of scarcity that I just introduced is based on the notion of needs. To argue that there is a shift in scarcity from capital to attention thus requires an agreed upon set of needs to show that we indeed have sufficient capital. Can we make progress in defining what constitutes a set of basic human needs?
I am not proposing that this is a simple task. What follows should be considered a way of starting a dialogue. A list of basic needs is a piece of knowledge. As such it can be improved over time through the process of critical inquiry. You can critique my list by pointing out flaws, you can also propose changes to my list, or you can publish your own list altogether.
One of the benefits of my approach to writing World After Capital out in the open, and with revisions tracked, is that you can see how my thinking on needs has evolved over time. In an earlier version I tried to group needs into categories such as biological, physical, and social. But the boundaries between those seemed rather arbitrary upon further examination. So in the current version I am distinguishing only between individual and collective needs, where the former will apply to a single human wherever and the latter are the needs of humanity as a whole.
Another challenge in putting together a list of needs is that it is all too easy to confuse a need with a strategy for meeting this need. For instance, eating meat is one strategy for addressing the need for calories, but humans can acquire calories from many other sources.
 Individual Needs
These are the basic needs of the human body and mind. Without them individual survival and flourishing is impossible. A single individual has these needs even when isolated, such as traveling alone in a spaceship.
The first set of individual needs comes from keeping our bodies powered, these include:
 Oxygen. Humans need on average about 550 liters (0.55 cubic meters) of oxygen per day [24]. The exact need of course varies with factors such as the size of our respective body and the degree of physical exertion. Our most common solution to this need is breathing air.
Water. We need to drink on average between 2-3 liters of water per day to stay hydrated [25]. Again various factors such as body size, exertion and temperature will affect the exact need.
Calories. To power our bodies we generally require between 1,500 and 3,000 calories per day, again depending on body size, activity level etc [26]. We solve this need by consuming food. The best way to do this, however, is surprisingly controversial and poorly understood for such a basic need. In particular, the mix between proteins, lipids and carbohydrates is subject to ongoing debate.
Nutrients. The body cannot synthesize all the materials it requires, including certain amino acids, vitamins and minerals. Therefore these must be obtained directly as part of our nutrition. This too is an area that is surprisingly poorly understood, meaning which nutrients exactly we really need to acquire externally seems unsettled. There is a wide range of food consumption strategies that seem to support the human body.
Discharge. So this may be a bit gross but we also need to get things out of our bodies again, including expelling processed food, radiating heat and exhaling carbon dioxide. A lot of human progress has come from better strategies for solving our discharge needs, such as public sanitation. For fans of science fiction, like myself, dealing with the problems of discharge is an interesting limit on our ability to cloak ourselves.
The second set of individual needs relates to the operating environment for humans. From a cosmic perspective, humans have an incredibly narrow operating range, which is provided for, without technological assistance, only in a few places even right here on Earth. Here are some of our basic operating needs:
Temperature. Our bodies can self-regulate their temperature within a limited range. We have a need to control our environment to help our bodies with temperature regulation. Common strategies to meet our temperature needs include shelter and clothing.
 Pressure. Anybody who has gone diving knows that our bodies do not handle increased pressure around us very well. The same goes for decreased pressure (one of the reasons air travel is exhausting is that planes do not retain sea level pressure).
Light. Most humans would be hard pressed to do much of anything in complete darkness. The Bible introduces light right away with “Let there be light” in the third verse for the Book of Genesis. For the longest time the solution to our need for light was simply sunlight, but much of human ingenuity has gone into the creation of artificial light sources.
The third set of individual needs arises from dealing with a complex and ever changing environment. As we go through life we encounter challenges that we need to overcome. This results in three fundamental individual needs:
Healing. When we damage our body in some fashion it needs to heal. The human body comes equipped with extensive systems for self-healing including combating many foreign substances (including vomiting, diarrhea, antibodies). Beyond a certain range, the body needs external assistance to heal. Here too we have developed many solutions, and often group them under the term healthcare.
Learning. We are born quite, well, stupid. We even have to learn relatively basic skills such as walking and the use of tools. When we encounter a new situation, we need to learn how to deal with it. We group many of the strategies for solving the need for learning under the heading education, but other solutions include self study, experimenting (gaining experience) and parenting.
Meaning. As humans we have a profound psychological need for meaning in our lives. It is what keeps us going. Religion and religious beliefs have long been a key strategy for solving this need. As I have argued in the section on Humanism, there is an objective basis for human meaning rooted in knowledge. Another key strategy to solve this need comes from our interactions with other humans, including having others acknowledge our contributions to a project or simply our existence.
This last set of needs may strike you as being at a much higher level than the earlier needs. It is tempting to try and sort individual needs into a hierarchy, as Maslov did. That seems intuitively appealing but is misleading. All of these needs are essential. As a thought exercise, picture yourself in a spaceship and try to remove any of the above.

 Collective Needs
Our collective needs by contrast arise from living together in societies and sharing space and resources. Meeting these needs is what allows human societies to survive and advance.
Reproduction. Individuals can survive without sex, but reproduction is a need for societies as a whole. As humanity we have already learned how to solve the need for reproduction without sex. In the future there may be altogether different solutions for reproduction in the sense of the continuation of a human society (whether here on Earth or elsewhere).
Allocation. Despite abundance in the digital realm, access to physical objects and resources has to be allocated. Take a chair as an example. Only one person can sit in a chair (comfortably) at a time. When there are multiple people we need a solution for allocating the chair between them. That's why allocation is a collective need. If you are by yourself you can sit on a chair whenever you want to as there is nobody else to take it up.
Motivation. This may seem like an individual concept but it exists as a collective need in the following sense: Societies need to motivate their members to carry out tasks and follow rules. Even the most primitive societies have solutions for this problem often in the form of rewards and punishments.
Coordination. Whenever there is more than a single human involved in any activity, there is a need for coordination among the participating humans. Take a simple meeting among two people as an example. In order for the meeting to take place they need to show up at the same place at the same time. We have developed many different communication and governance mechanisms to address this need.
Knowledge. As I have argued in the prior sections on Optimism and Humanism, this is the central collective human need. Without increased knowledge a society will encounter problems that it cannot solve and will be decimated as a result. History is full of examples of societies not having enough knowledge, such as the Easter Islanders or the Mayans. This is not about what any one individual has learned but rather about the body of knowledge that is accessible to society as a whole. Much of the later parts of World After Capital are about solutions for generating more knowledge faster.
 These collective needs may strike you as overly abstract. But this is the logical result of identifying needs, instead of solutions. Governments and laws, for instance, are examples of solutions to some of these collective needs. But so are markets and firms and more recently networks and platforms.
 Enablers
Now you might ask, what about energy? Don't we have a need for energy both individually and collectively? It would seem that individually we need energy to maintain the temperature of a house. Or that collectively we need energy to power our communications infrastructure. But as those two examples show, energy is not a direct human need (either individually or collectively). Instead it is an enabler of specific solutions to our needs. Some solutions will require more energy than others.
Here are four foundational enablers. I am listing them in the Needs section, as readers have at times proposed these as additional needs and I had in a prior versions included them among Collective Needs.
Energy. For the longest time humanity relied on direct sunlight as the primary source of energy. Since then we have developed many ways of generating energy, including better ways of capturing sunlight. Producing more energy and having it available in concentrated and highly regulated form via electricity has made many new solutions for human needs possible.
Resources. In early human history all resources were simply found in nature. Later we started both growing and extracting resources. Many modern solutions have been made possible by access to new kinds of resources. For instance, mobile phones give us new solutions to individual and collective needs. Building mobile phones is enabled in part by some esoteric raw materials, such as so-called rare-earth elements.
Transformation. Energy and resources alone are not enough though. To enable most solutions we need to figure out how to use energy to transform resources. This involves chemical and physical processes. Capital, as in physical capital such as machines, has been a crucial enabler for many new solutions to human needs. For instance, a knitting
 machine can transform yarns into clothing at high velocity. Clothing is one of our key solutions for maintaining the human operating environment.
Transportation. The final foundational enabler is the ability to move stuff (using stuff broadly to include people). This is another area in which we have made great progress over time, going from human powered transportation to animal powered to machine powered, including planes, trains and automobiles.
Again I have chosen these enablers at a high degree of abstraction on purpose. Coal-fired power plants provide energy (in the form of electricity) and so do solar panels today and nuclear fusion at some point in the future. These three examples have dramatically different characteristics but they all are fundamentally energy enablers.
This is my current working version of needs (and enablers). I have now revised this section fairly substantially for a second time. And while I fully expect further changes, I believe it now properly sets up my argument that there is sufficient productive capital in the world for meeting our individual and collective needs, including further development of the four enablers.