Short description:

This controversial and counterintuitive new book examines why population growth and freedom to innovate make Earth's resources more, not less, abundant.

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Long description:

?For centuries, the ivory towers of academia have echoed this sentiment of multitudinous ends and limited means. In this supremely contrarian book, Tupy and Pooley overturn the tables in the temple of conventional thinking. They deploy rigorous and original data and analysis to proclaim a gospel of abundance. Economics?and ultimately, politics?will be enduringly transformed.? ?George Gilder, author of Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

Generations of people have been taught that population growth makes resources scarcer. In 2021, for example, one widely publicized report argued, ?The world's rapidly growing population is consuming the planet's natural resources at an alarming rate . . . the world currently needs 1.6 Earths to satisfy the demand for natural resources . . . [a figure that] could rise to 2 planets by 2030.? But is that true?

After analyzing the prices of hundreds of commodities, goods, and services spanning two centuries, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley found that resources became more abundant as the population grew. That was especially true when they looked at ?time prices,? which represent the length of time that people must work to buy something.

To their surprise, the authors also found that resource abundance increased faster than the population?a relationship that they call ?superabundance.? On average, every additional human being created more value than he or she consumed. This relationship between population growth and abundance is deeply counterintuitive, yet it is true.

Why? More people produce more ideas, which lead to more inventions. People then test those inventions in the marketplace to separate the useful from the useless. At the end of that process of discovery, people are left with innovations that overcome shortages, spur economic growth, and raise standards of living.

But large populations are not enough to sustain superabundance?just think of the poverty in China and India before their respective economic reforms. To innovate, people must be allowed to think, speak, publish, associate, and disagree. They must be allowed to save, invest, trade, and profit. In a word, they must be free.

?With great writing and a mountain of good evidence, Tupy and Pooley remind us that we are immeasurably better-off than our ancestors. In this day of pestilence, war, and climate change, we need that reminder, and we can hope that the doom-mongers will be wrong about the future, just as they have always been wrong about the past.?

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Table of Contents:

contents

Foreword by George Gilder

Introduction

part one

Thanos's deadly idea: from antiquity to the present and beyond

Chapter 1: Are we in the midst of progress, or are we facing the apocalypse?

Chapter 2: Thanos's intellectual and practical progenitors

Chapter 3: Julian Simon and the bet that made him famous

part two

Measuring abundance: new methodology, empirical evidence, and in-depth analysis

Chapter 4: Introduction to the Simon Abundance Framework

Chapter 5: Personal resource abundance: empirical evidence and analysis

Chapter 6: Population resource abundance: methodology, evidence, and analysis

part three

Human flourishing and its enemies

Chapter 7: Humanity's 7-million-year journey from the African rainforest to the Industrial Revolution

Chapter 8: The Age of Innovation and the Great Enrichment

Chapter 9: Where do innovations come from? The crucial roles played by population growth and freedom

Chapter 10: The enemies of progress from the Romantics to the extreme environmentalists

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendixes

Notes

Index

About the Authors

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