There is enough for everyone
A lot of what I believe about the world, I learned from music before I had the language to explain it.
I’m not sure exactly when this started. Probably sometime in my early teens, when albums stopped being background noise and started doing something more like ideology formation. Diesel and Dust was one of the records doing that work - Midnight Oil’s sixth album, released in 1987, the one “Beds Are Burning” is on if you only know them from one song. It’s a sustained argument about land, dispossession, and the specific moral failure of a wealthy country built on colonial theft. Not subtle. I loved it the first time I heard it.
The track “Warakurna” is named for a remote Aboriginal community in Western Australia, and it grew directly out of the band’s 1986 Blackfella/Whitefella tour - shows in remote central Australian settlements with the Warumpi Band, playing for and with Indigenous communities far from any concert venue Midnight Oil would normally call home. They came back having seen, up close, the poverty of those communities in one of the wealthiest countries on earth. The song’s refrain is simple: there is enough for everyone.
They recorded that in 1987. Nearly 40 years later, I decided to check.
The short answer is: yes.
The world produces roughly 2,985 calories per person per day - well above what anyone needs to survive. That’s enough to feed about 1.5 times the current global population, something like 10 billion people. About 673 million of them went hungry in 2024 anyway. Not because we didn’t grow enough food - because roughly a third of everything we produce gets lost or wasted before anyone eats it, and because hungry people can’t afford to buy food that physically exists nearby.
The wealth picture is starker. A 2025 NBER working paper found that lifting every person on earth above $2.15 a day - effectively ending extreme poverty - would cost about $318 billion per year, roughly 0.3% of global GDP. Less than most rich countries have already pledged in foreign aid. Dwarfed by what the world spends on alcohol. Meanwhile, the richest 1% of people own more wealth than the bottom 95% of humanity combined. Three days ago, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. There is no ethical way to become a trillionaire.
We’ve built systems that use wealth records as a proxy for prosperity. A record stock market. A new billionaire. The world’s first trillionaire. These are measures of how well the top is doing - nothing more. The health of a society shouldn’t be measured by its peaks. It should be measured by its floor: how many people are going without things that exist in abundance. That’s the only measure that actually tells you whether there’s enough for everyone.
The pattern holds everywhere you look. About 2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water - not because the water doesn’t exist, but because of infrastructure and governance failures. Enough sunlight reaches Earth in approximately 90 minutes to power human civilization for an entire year. Around 300 million people are homeless and nearly 2.8 billion lack adequate shelter - in a world with millions of vacant homes, where two thirds of wealthy Americans own more than one.
The economist Amartya Sen spent decades making this case rigorously: famines aren’t caused by food running out. They’re caused by people losing the ability to access food that exists. What’s missing isn’t the stuff. What’s missing is the political and economic arrangement that would let people get to it. More intelligence won’t fix that - artificial or otherwise.
Unfortunately it’s not quite that simple.
We are currently consuming resources as if we had 1.8 Earths. Scientists have documented that humanity has crossed six of nine planetary boundaries - the thresholds that define a safe operating space for civilization. The rich world has done most of the boundary-crossing. There is enough for everyone to live a dignified life; there is not enough for everyone to live the way the average American currently does.
That ecological ceiling is real, and anyone who wants to tell a clean version of the “there’s enough” story has to reckon with it. What Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics framework makes clear is that meeting both constraints simultaneously is actually the point - a social floor below which no person should fall, and an ecological ceiling above which no system should push. The problem we have is not that we’re bumping up against natural limits because we’re trying to meet everyone’s needs. The problem is that a small number of people are burning through resources at rates that make the math look catastrophic, while billions go without.
The Blackfella/Whitefella tour mattered because Midnight Oil chose to go where bands don’t go, and paid attention to what they found. They found communities living in poverty in a country that was not poor - a country whose wealth had been extracted from the land beneath those same communities’ feet. They wrote a song that said, plainly: it doesn’t need to be this way. This isn’t inevitable. There is enough. The people going without aren’t going without because the world ran out of anything. They’re going without because someone decided they should.
The song doesn’t promise more. It promises enough. That’s a more radical idea than it sounds. More is infinite - there’s always another billion, another record to break, another zero to add. Enough has a stopping point. Enough means: once everyone has what they need, you stop.
We’ve built everything around more. I’m interested in enough.