In the first part of this book, the human propensity toward the negative is contrasted with the generally improving state of the world. Instead of the apocalypse that humanity has been expecting since the dawn of time, the world has seen great progress. One of the persistent sources of concern about the present state of the world and the future of humanity is population growth. Some people fear this might lead to the exhaustion of resources, thus ending in a calamity for the planet and the species that inhabit it. But there are many reasons why that need not be the case.

In the second part of the book, the concern over population growth and resource abundance is put to an empirical test using the Tupy-Pooley Resource Abundance Framework (see below). The framework uses a new methodology to measure the change in abundance relative to the change in wages. It includes two levels of analysis: a personal level and a population level. To use a pizza analogy, personal resource abundance measures the size of a slice of pizza per person. Population resource abundance measures the size of the entire pizza pie.