“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 Wealth and Poverty, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World, and Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
ABOUT SUPERABUNDANCE
Winner of the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award in 2023 and the Leonard E. Read Book Award in 2024.
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.
PRAISE FOR SUPERABUNDANCE
BOOK SUMMARY
In the first part of this book, the human propensity toward the negative is contrasted with the generally improving state of the world. Instead of the apocalypse that humanity has been expecting since the dawn of time, the world has seen great progress. One of the persistent sources of concern about the present state of the world and the future of humanity is population growth. Some people fear this might lead to the exhaustion of resources, thus ending in a calamity for the planet and the species that inhabit it. But there are many reasons why that need not be the case. Continue reading →
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
GALE POOLEY is an associate professor of business management at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, coauthor of the Simon Abundance Index, and a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute.
MARIAN L. TUPY is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, coauthor of Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting, coauthor of the Simon Abundance Index, and editor of the website HumanProgress.org.
READ THE INTRODUCTION
Start with a brain teaser. It is 1980, and you are getting married. Your parents invite 100 guests to the wedding reception. The reception costs them $100 per person, or $10,000 in total. Fast-forward to 2018. Now it is your turn to throw a wedding reception for your child. The guest list has increased by 72 percent. Some of the old folks are no longer around, but the cousins have grown in number. That means that you are now catering for 172 people. If the price per guest had remained the same, your bill would amount to $17,200. Instead, the bill comes to $4,816, which is less than half of what your parents paid for you. You ask the caterer: How is this possible? The caterer responds that for every 1 percent increase in attendance, the bill fell by 1 percent. While the number of guests rose by 72 percent, then, your bill has declined by 72 percent. Surely, things like that don’t happen in real life. Continue reading →
In The Economics of Human Flourishing, an eight-hour course, Dr. Tupy and Dr. Pooley explore the new economics of resources and knowledge, challenging the notion that population growth inevitably leads to resource scarcity.
In their 2022 book Superabundance, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley observed that “for every increment of population growth, global resources have grown by a factor of eight.” On its very face, this shouldn’t surprise us.
The Hayek Lecture is delivered by the recipient of the Hayek Prize, which honors the book published within the past two years that best reflects Hayek’s vision of economic and individual liberty.
When Earth’s eight billionth baby is born, we should kick up our heels in celebration.
Evidence for the case that a future of almost unlimited plenty can await our descendants—all human descendants, in fact—is marshalled elegantly and compellingly in Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.
Like The Ultimate Resource, [Superabundance] demonstrates that Malthusian worries about humanity running out of resources are unfounded and argues that rising population will bring even more prosperity and abundance.
To sum up, I recommend “Superabundance” as a corrective to degrowth pessimism, but I wouldn’t want Tupy or Pooley to be the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
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This year an excellent book has appeared in Spanish against Malthus's fundamental proposition, namely, that population growth puts so much pressure on scarce resources that we are doomed to a catastrophe if we do not stop the population explosion.
To honor Simon’s achievements, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) established the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award in 2001. The recipient of the prize is an individual whose work continues to promote the vision of man as the ultimate resource.
George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs.
ECONOMIST WRITING EVERY DAY
"It’s the superior method when you are looking at the price of a particular good or service over time, compared with a naïve inflation adjustment."
DAN MITCHELL
"The book is filled with an immense amount of data and analysis, all of which shows that life is getting better."
RYAN BOURNE
"I can’t recommend the weighty tome enough. It deserves a full review when time allows, but for now just know that you should order your copy and absorb its wisdom."
WASHINGTON TIMES
"The authors correctly argue that the capitalist system will result in most everything becoming less expensive and better if destructive know-nothing political actors do not destroy it."
THE REMNANT
Cato Institute uberwonk Marian Tupy returns to the Remnant to discuss his new book,
Superabundance, with Jonah Goldberg.
THE ECONOMIST
So a rising population can solve many of the problems it causes, argues “Superabundance.”
TOWN HALL
What matters is not the physical limits of our planet, but human ability to reimagine the use of resources that we already have.
FORBES
On that score, it’s worth pondering a new book which should inform how we teach the “whole truth.”