Chapter 1: Abundance as a Design Problem

I begin this inquiry with a sense of responsibility.

In November 1982, as a young journalist, I interviewed Buckminster Fuller for the tenth anniversary issue of JD Journal, the corporate magazine of John Deere that I edited at the time. I was honored when he agreed to the conversation. Only later did I realize its significance. It would be his last interview. Fuller died on July 1, 1983. It has taken decades to fully absorb what he was trying to say. At the time, I may have been too skeptical. Or too busy. Or simply living in a world not yet ready to confront the implications of his ideas. Career, family, and the steady momentum of everyday life made it easy to set them aside.

That distance no longer feels defensible.

Fuller was a slight, warm, intellectually restless man who spoke with an intensity that suggested both urgency and conviction. During the interview, he made a series of claims that have echoed ever since:
“We could all be billionaires. Politics are all invalid. War is obsolete.”

These were not rhetorical flourishes or utopian abstractions. Fuller believed they were achievable outcomes, contingent on the intelligent application of design and technology. He argued that the Earth already possessed sufficient resources to support all of humanity at a high standard of living, and that persistent scarcity was not a failure of nature, but of systems.

Fuller was not merely a designer of objects, though his record there was formidable. The geodesic dome. The Dymaxion House. The Dymaxion Car. He was, more fundamentally, a designer of ideas. He rejected the assumption that competition and conflict were inevitable. He believed collaboration was not naïve, but necessary for survival. And he saw technology as a tool for liberation, provided it was guided by coherent design rather than short-term power or profit.

Today, his claims return with new force.

Artificial intelligence and automation are reshaping production, coordination, and decision-making at a pace Fuller could only anticipate. Systems capable of optimizing supply chains, designing infrastructure, and managing complexity at scale are no longer theoretical. If abundance is technically possible, the question is no longer whether we can design for it, but why we have not.

This chapter examines Fuller’s claim that abundance is a design problem rather than a moral one. It asks why that idea has been so difficult to accept, where it may overreach, and what has changed since it was first articulated. It does not assume Fuller was right. It takes him seriously enough to test the claim rather than dismiss it.

This inquiry is not a tribute. It is not a manifesto. And it is not a solution in search of applause. It is an attempt to understand whether a model proposed decades ago still holds under contemporary conditions, and what follows if it does.

Fuller once said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

This chapter offers a position, not a conclusion. It invites scrutiny, counterargument, and revision as the inquiry unfolds.

The questions below are intentionally unresolved.

Open Questions — Chapter 1

The questions below are intentionally interconnected.

1. If abundance is technically possible, what specifically prevents its realization today?

Is the primary barrier economic incentives, political power structures, cultural beliefs about scarcity, human psychology, technological limits, or some interaction among them?

Which of these is most resistant to design intervention, and why?

2. Where did Fuller underestimate human behavior?

Fuller assumed rational cooperation would emerge once scarcity was removed. What evidence suggests that abundance alone does not dissolve competition, hoarding, or conflict?

Are there historical or contemporary examples that contradict his assumption?

3. How does AI change the abundance equation in practice, not theory?

Beyond automation and efficiency, what new forms of coordination does AI enable that were previously impossible?

Conversely, where does AI introduce new scarcities, risks, or asymmetries that Fuller could not have anticipated?

4. What would it mean to treat scarcity as a design problem rather than a moral one?

How would this shift change public policy, economic models, education, and individual responsibility?

What is gained by this framing, and what is potentially lost?

5. What evidence would falsify Fuller’s claim?

What conditions, data, or outcomes would demonstrate that global abundance is not achievable through design and technology alone?

What would it take to conclude that scarcity is not a failure of design, but an unavoidable feature of human systems?

Responses and counterarguments are part of this inquiry.

Open Questions — Chapter 1

The questions below are intentionally interconnected.

1. If abundance is technically possible, what specifically prevents its realization today?

Is the primary barrier economic incentives, political power structures, cultural beliefs about scarcity, human psychology, technological limits, or some interaction among them?

Which of these is most resistant to design intervention, and why?

2. Where did Fuller underestimate human behavior?

Fuller assumed rational cooperation would emerge once scarcity was removed. What evidence suggests that abundance alone does not dissolve competition, hoarding, or conflict?

Are there historical or contemporary examples that contradict his assumption?

3. How does AI change the abundance equation in practice, not theory?

Beyond automation and efficiency, what new forms of coordination does AI enable that were previously impossible?

Conversely, where does AI introduce new scarcities, risks, or asymmetries that Fuller could not have anticipated?

4. What would it mean to treat scarcity as a design problem rather than a moral one?

How would this shift change public policy, economic models, education, and individual responsibility?

What is gained by this framing, and what is potentially lost?

5. What evidence would falsify Fuller’s claim?

What conditions, data, or outcomes would demonstrate that global abundance is not achievable through design and technology alone?

What would it take to conclude that scarcity is not a failure of design, but an unavoidable feature of human systems?

This inquiry is being led by John Gerstner, a writer and former communications executive whose work has explored technology, organizations, and meaning over several decades.

Join the Conversation

Responses, counterarguments, and alternative framings are part of this inquiry. Thoughtful disagreement is encouraged.

To contribute, please leave a comment below.