Summary – Acknowledgement – Introduction – Why Should We Help? – The Benefits – The Venture Itself – How to Avoid the Marie Antoinette Syndrome – The Action Plan – Conclusion – Selected Bibliography

It’s enormously easy from our vantage point to feel that we deserve our wealth, success, and privilege. We all work hard, and some of us have struggled with serious health, family, financial, and other problems that set us at a disadvantage. So we can be justly proud of what we accomplish.

We rarely think, however, about how our success is built on the successes of those who came before us. We have access to virtually unlimited supplies of food and water; economic, political, and social systems that (on the whole) work fairly well; access to health care that uses state-of-the-art techniques; infrastructure that is superbly designed and functioning; freedom of speech and religion; etc.; all a result of the courage, creativity, and hard work of our predecessors for centuries and centuries before us. We can be grateful to them for our affluent present-day lives.

But what is even less commonly known is the fact that our luxurious and bountiful civilization in the developed world is based less on human endeavour and more on a stunning sequence of good luck.