Imagine this. You pay literally half as much in the only currency that truly matters for your weekly groceries, for the fuel in your tank, for the car in your driveway, or even for the home that shelters your family. All of this becomes possible precisely because four billion additional human minds have entered the planetary conversation since the late twentieth century. It sounds completely insane. It feels as if it defies physics itself. For our entire lives we have been steeped in a narrative of inevitable scarcity. The Earth is running out of space, running out of resources, running out of time. Every new person is portrayed as just another mouth taking a larger bite out of an ever shrinking pie. The whole cultural atmosphere has conditioned us to see population growth as a threat, innovation as a temporary fix, and the future as a narrowing  ...