God Wants You to Be Rich by Paul Zane Pilzer

Pilzer, Paul Zane. God Wants You to Be Rich. New York: Touchstone Faith, 1995.

Pilzer believes we can all have an abundance of what we need to live well. His belief is based on two concepts, one theological and the other technological.

The theological concept is that God is good. God is a generous creator who supplied all the materials we need and a wise parent who leads us to learn to use these resources.

The technological concept is that our inventiveness has and will continue to make more and better things available to us to meet our needs for less cost. We are able to use more of the resources we have and more efficiently use those resources that have long been available to us.

Based on these concepts, Pilzer imagines and economic theory based on abundance instead of scarcity. He calls this theory economic alchemy and lays out the principles and laws that define his viewpoint.

The principles of economic alchemy rest transformational quality of technology. Technology defines supply because it determines the resources available to us. Advancement in technology depends on our ability to process information, which has greatly increased in recent decades. Economic growth is possible in those areas where better technology is available, but not widely used.

While Pilzer deals largely with supply, and how the supply of almost everything we need is expanded greatly and rapidly by technology, he also deals with demand. Human demand of goods and services is similarly unlimited. Unlimited demand is not a bad thing because we don’t just want more and more of what we have. We want better. Much of what we want now didn’t exist 50 years ago, and new technology will similarly change the demands of future decades.



Pilzer doesn’t throw out the old theories. He sees himself as harkening back to theories as old as the Bible and updating more recent theories with something economist couldn’t have foreseen a century ago, the rapid development of new technologies.

This isn’t just an abstract book of theoretical and alchemical obscurities. Pilzer presents the economic trends of the last century in terms of how they are explained by economic alchemy and how they are generally better for societal wealth than politicians and the media may have represented them.