A measure of what no current global metric measures: the degree to which our civilization is allocating abundance toward the reduction of scarcity — or accelerating its amplification.
Ending hunger and extreme poverty together costs 14.2% of military spending. We wager more on chance ($575B) than it would cost to eliminate both. We spend a trillion dollars a year persuading ourselves to buy things. Luxury goods alone — $1.66 trillion — could end both five times over. For a median US earner, their share of ending extreme poverty is $135/year.
What the index measures — click to expand.
Six principles for allocating abundance to reduce scarcity.
If the global AI industry generates ~$500B in annual revenue, what percentage diverted would fund abundance?
A surcharge on gambling, advertising, and luxury goods — three industries whose entire business model is the amplification of appetite — plus a token contribution from military budgets. No income taxes. No sacrifice. A surcharge on wanting what you do not need, to feed those who do not have what they need to survive.
At a 12.7% surcharge on three discretionary industries plus a 0.01% military contribution — a rounding error in the defense budget — hunger and extreme poverty are eliminated worldwide. No income taxes. No austerity. A surcharge on appetite to fund survival.
How to Distribute Without Diminishing
Even if by some miracle there is agreement to spend $411 billion to eliminate hunger and poverty, the hardest question remains: how to do it without suspicion, without corruption, and without injuring the integrity and honor of the recipients. The history of aid is the history of good intentions destroying dignity.
The Dignity Floor: no mechanism for allocating abundance may diminish the dignity of its recipients. The intervention must leave the recipient with more dignity than they had before it — not less. If the mechanism requires the performance of compliance, submission to surveillance, repeated proof of poverty, or the display of gratitude — it has failed regardless of how many people it feeds.
Dignity is not a luxury to be restored after survival is secured. Dignity is the condition under which survival becomes life.
The Quantum Possibility
This algorithm is binary — rules, thresholds, ratios. It is the small reason's approach to a great reason's problem. Necessary but insufficient.
Can a machine be built that holds the child test, the environmental test, the evolutionary obligation, the long-term view, and the immediate human need in superposition — resolving them contextually, the way the body resolves its billions of simultaneous processes? That machine does not yet exist. Naming it is the first act of making it thinkable.
What This Framework Does Not Claim to Solve
The framework above names the resources, the mechanism, and the principles for distribution with dignity. It does not pretend to have solved the operational problem.
Distributing $411 billion to 533 million people across dozens of countries with varying institutional capacity is genuinely harder than the Marshall Plan, which distributed roughly $14 billion (in 1948 dollars) to sixteen relatively functional European states. The institutional design that would translate the principles into operating programs at global scale is real work that is not done here and was never going to be.
Coordinating a uniform surcharge across three transnational industries — gambling, advertising, luxury goods — that operate across borders, are domiciled in tax havens, and command sophisticated political defenses requires international agreement of a kind that does not currently exist. Reaching such agreement is political work, and the framework does not pretend the political work is somewhere already done.
Naming what the framework claims and does not claim is part of the argument. The framework claims that the resources exist, that the mechanism is mathematically sound, that the dignity floor is the right principle for distribution, and that the moral argument is unavoidable once the visibility is established. It does not claim to have written the operational programs, secured the international agreements, or solved the institutional design challenges.
Every transformative reform in modern history has begun with a moral argument and an implementation sketch. The Beveridge Report sketched the British NHS in 1942 without solving the operational problems — those were solved by others over the following decade. The Marshall Plan was outlined in a Harvard commencement address in 1947 and operationalized by institutions that did not yet exist when the speech was given. This framework is in that tradition.
There is a connection between this acknowledgment and the larger argument of the book. The operational problem the framework does not solve — distributing $411 billion to 533 million people with dignity preserved, corruption prevented, and accountability transparent — is precisely the kind of problem that augmented intelligence, properly directed, is suited to address.
The infrastructure already exists in fragmented form. Mobile money systems reach hundreds of millions of people who never had bank accounts — M-Pesa in Kenya, similar systems across Tanzania, Uganda, the Philippines. GiveDirectly has demonstrated since 2009 that recipients use direct cash transfers exactly as effective recipients of any income do: food, school fees, small business investment, medical care. India's Aadhaar system has shown that biometric identity at the scale of 1.4 billion people is technically feasible. Pakistan's Ehsaas program uses similar infrastructure for direct cash transfers. The World Food Programme's Building Blocks project has used blockchain-based distribution for refugee aid since 2017, allowing transparent tracking of where every dollar goes without passing through institutional intermediaries that historically captured significant percentages.
Augmented intelligence built from the abundance orientation could do what no human bureaucracy has been able to do at this scale: targeting accuracy through satellite and transaction analysis, corruption resistance through transparent distributed ledgers, dignity preservation through direct delivery without compliance performance, and outcome measurement through anonymized aggregate data. Every component exists somewhere, operating now, at meaningful scale.
What is missing is not the technology. What is missing is the institution that uses the technology for abundance allocation, and the political agreement that authorizes the institution. Technology handles distribution at scale once the agreement is reached. Politics handles the agreement.
The book this index accompanies argues that augmented intelligence will reflect what we are. It can be built from the surface to accelerate the cycle, or from the depth to close it. The operational work the framework hands off is exactly the work where this choice becomes consequential. The instrument is being built right now, in real time, by people whose decisions will determine which version of the future arrives.
The framework's job is to make the gap between what we spend and what it would cost to choose life unmissable. That work is complete. The next work belongs to others.