Science and technology have clearly transformed human civilization and will continue to do so in the future. In reviewing the advances that have brought us to where we are, an exciting reality has come into focus for me—the future is now. We are already living in the future, one that exceeds the exuberant imaginations of past futurists in many ways.

This is my long-run forecast in brief:
The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards.
I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.
Julian Simon, 1997

Julian Simon, 1997
in Meadows, Donella Hager. I nuovi limiti dello sviluppo: la salute del pianeta nel terzo millennio. Milano: Oscar Mondadori, 2006.

The most poignant exemplar of this addictive behaviour today is the social response to climate change, in which enormous scientific, intellectual, political, diplomatic, and emotional resources have been mobilized to violate all our precepts on a magnificent scale in a top-down, knowledge-based control fantasy aimed at modifying the evolution of the coupled human-Earth system in particular ways.