Steven G. Burgess
KurzweilAI.net reported in the article The (Needed) New Economics of Abundance that
For centuries, we have built cultures and economies around scarcity. Economics is the “study of how human beings allocate scarce resources” in the most efficient way and conventional wisdom agrees that regulated capitalism results in the most efficient allocation of those scarce resources.
But what happens if resources are not scarce? What economic system would we use to allocate plentiful resources? Is there even a point to talking about the “economics of abundance” in a culture where economic equations are entirely oriented around scarcity? As Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine says, “My college textbook, Gregory Mankiw’s otherwise excellent Principles of Economics, doesn’t mention the word abundance. And for good reason: If you let the scarcity term in most economic equations go to nothing, you get all sorts of divide-by-zero problems. They basically blow up.”
Steven Gary Burgess was the author of this article and is a
nanotechnology activist and writer and was a
founder of the data recovery industry in 1984. He began a floppy
disk drive repair business but soon after developed a methodology for
recovering data that has become industry standard practice.
In 2000, Steve launched the pioneering
online file
storage and backup company,
Committed
To Memory. In the early 1990s, he was also a pioneer in the
now-burgeoning computer forensics and electronic discovery industry
and is the principal of Burgess
Consulting & Forensics. He also founded another data recovery
company,
Data Recovery
Worldwide.
He co-chaired
Redwood City School District’s EEOEE (Equal
Educational Opportunity for Excellence in Education) Committee with
future Superintendent Judy Daher, designing the District’s first
magnet schools and first charter school. In the process, 5.6 million
dollars was restored to the District’s coffers through the California
Governor’s budget reserved for desegregation projects.
Steve wrote one of the earliest American reports entitled
“Japan, a New Face in Space” on the Japanese Space programs ISAS and
NASDA (now both part of the Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency – or
JAXA), for Carl Sagan’s
Planetary Report.
He also participates as a Senior Associate in K. Eric
Drexler’s
Foresight Nanotech Institute. As a writer, he has
contributed to the
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and
Nanotech-Now’s Nanotech Glossary, and is a participant in CRN’s
Global Task Force on Implications and Policy.
Steve also recently contributed the Computer Forensics section
to the upcoming 5th edition of
Scientific Evidence in Civil and Criminal Cases by Andre A.
Moenssens,
James E. Starrs, and Carol E.
Henderson.