Count Your Blessings

From a speech given by Sir John Templeton to the Financial Analysts Federation in 1984.

In 208 years of relative freedom, the yearly output of goods and services worldwide has increased more than a hundredfold. This is a hundredfold increase in real goods and services consumed, net after eliminating inflation

In the days of Adam Smith, 85 percent of the people were needed on the farm, but now less than 4 percent on the farms in America produce a surplus of food.

In America alone this year, over $100 billion will be dedicated to research and development — more in one year in one nation than the total research for all the world's history before I was born.

Awesome new blessings are visible also in health, entertainment, spiritual growth and charity. In America alone, over $50 billion will be donated to churches and charities this year. Each year the generous and voluntary giving by Americans alone exceeds the total income of all the world's people in any year before Adam Smith.

More than half of the scientists who ever lived are alive today. More than half of the discoveries in the natural sciences have been made in this century.

More than half of the goods produced since the Earth was born have been produced in the two centuries since Adam Smith. Over half the books ever written were written in the last half-century. More new books are published each month than were written in the entire historical period before the birth of Columbus.

If you do not fall down on your knees each day with overwhelming gratitude for your blessings — your multiplying multitudes of blessings — then you just have not yet seen the big picture.

via The Seattle Times