The planet's bounty is for all practical purposes unlimited, but it yields this bounty stubbornly, at a pace determined by the intellectual resources of mankind. The past decade of inflation and contraction have made it seem that the planet has shriveled in its resources. A reconstruction of a world monetary system tied to the planet through gold or silver or oil or something real, matched by an understanding of the Laffer Curve that did not exist at Bretton Woods, would enable the world to grow without straining the planet. Nor will the world's population continue to expand as rapidly, given these economic developments, for as individuals can more easily develop their intellectual potential and increase the quality of human capital, they will independently choose to reduce the quantity of human capital they are now forming. The exponential population growth the Malthusians fear will not occur where there is real economic growth.
Conflict is more likely to come as a result of uneven advance.
If all members of a family unit save one are developing, the one left behind will cause trouble, drain the resources of those who have been advancing, and create tensions and strife that will block the advance of the unit as a whole. If the West, China and the Third World manage a major economic advance in the 1980s as the result of simultaneous moves down the Laffer Curve, but the Soviet Union is unable to break through the crusts of ideological dogma that would enable it to advance as well, one would expect an increase in the potential for conflict. A happier outcome would be general global advance, with the fresh economic and political impulses of Eastern Europe spreading into the heartland of Russia. More important than the Laffer Curve, after all, is the persistence of the global electorate in pushing toward concord. It will not for long permit the smallest part of its membership from being left behind, economically or politically, in this historic trek.