| In the end, they feel anxious, depressed, bitter and angry. Millions of Americans are addicted to feeling outraged. This damages their work relationships, their friendships, even their relationships with their romantic partners. Worse still, the "news" they consume is not even factual. Let me give you just one obvious example. Polls show that most Americans believe that global population growth is a serious problem, that we are rapidly depleting our planet's mineral wealth. They wrong on both counts. A recent column by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley explains why. "[It is a mistake] to think that natural resources are fixed gifts of nature and that economic life is therefore a grim contest over a pile that can only shrink as population grows. That view sounds sober. It is, in fact, blind to the central truth of human progress. Resources are not simply things lying in the ground. Resources are matter plus knowledge. Oil was once a nuisance that seeped into farmland and polluted water. A barrel of oil in the Stone Age was worthless. A barrel of oil in an industrial civilization could heat homes, move trucks, power factories, and feed chemical industries. Nature gives us atoms. Human beings give those atoms value. The ultimate resource is not copper or farmland. It is the human mind. More precisely, it is the human mind set free to experiment, trade, specialize, and innovate. Freedom matters here. People do not solve problems automatically. They solve them when they are allowed to respond to scarcity with invention and enterprise. High prices invite substitution. Competition rewards efficiency. Property rights encourage investment. Markets spread information no planner can gather. Free people learn to do more with less. This is not a fairy tale in which every problem solves itself. Pollution is real. Bad policy is real. Governments can strangle innovation, distort prices, and lock societies into waste and stagnation. Progress, in other words, is not guaranteed. [Yet] the burden of proof belongs to the prophets of permanent scarcity. Time and again, they have underestimated human creativity and overestimated the world's physical limits. We hear that energy is running out, that growth must stop, that the planet cannot support prosperity for billions, and that human wants must be cut down to fit a closed and exhausted world. This language changes with the decade, but the instinct behind it is old. It treats people as liabilities. It imagines the future as a rationing exercise. [However], human beings are not just consumers of resources. They are producers of ideas. They are creators of substitutes, technologies, and entirely new forms of wealth. They do not merely divide a pie. They learn how to bake bigger pies from ingredients earlier generations did not know they had. The real contest, then, is not between population and resources. It is between two ways of seeing humanity. One view sees every additional person as another claimant on scarcity. The other sees every additional person as a possible problem-solver, inventor, entrepreneur, scientist, or worker whose efforts can make life better for everyone else. Don't bet against human beings, especially when they are free." Rarely is so much wisdom conveyed in so few words. Moreover, this sensibility about how the world works is at the foundation of everything the Oxford Club does. That's why I encourage readers to subscribe - as I do - to the writers' free, non-profit e-letter: Doomslayer. You can do so by clicking here. I also encourage you to check out their superb book, Superabundance. While millions of investors cringe at the state of the world and fear a dystopian future, Oxfordians embrace a much more realistic picture of the state of the world. One where problems, setbacks and challenges exist, but in a world where people are living longer, heathier, safer, richer, freer lives than ever before. It's the difference between shrinking from the risk in every opportunity... and capitalizing on the opportunity in every risk. Good investing, Alex | 
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