Ideas and Society

Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley’s groundbreaking volume, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2022), a data-based testament to the hope we should have for the future, was introduced in Part 1 of this series. The many forms of good news from Tupy and Pooley’s detailed study discussed in Part 1 have roots in an unusual 1980 wager between an optimistic economist and a doomsaying biologist.

Setting the Stage: The Simon-Ehrlich Bet and Simon’s Insights

A key event that Tupy and Pooley introduce early in their book and build on in many ways was a 1980 wager between University of Maryland economist Julian Simon and Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich was one of the most influential “doomsday” authors in my lifetime, especially after the intense publicity and media praise Ehrlich received for his 1968 book, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books).

The public adoration included an unprecedented hour-long interview of a book’s author on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, the first of what would be twenty appearances with the fawning host. Ehrlich’s book warned that many millions would die soon unless the world adopted strict population controls to fight the “cancer” of human population growth. In contrast, Julian Simon saw humanity as a resource capable of incredible innovation that can overcome resource constraints and create abundance. Based on the work of earlier economists and his own work, he expected that the impact of a rising population would be a drop in raw material prices, not an increase, and was willing to make a wager to call attention to this insight.

Under the terms of Simon’s wager, Ehrlich, teaming up with John Harte and John P. Holdren, professors at the University of California at Berkeley, chose the category of metals and selected five that they expected to become scarcer over the coming decade: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. A $1,000 basket with $200 worth of each resource as priced in 1980 would be tracked. After ten years, if the inflation-adjusted price of the basket was greater than $1,000, Simon would send a check to Ehrlich for the amount of the difference. If the price dropped below $1,000, Ehrlich would send a check to Simon for the difference.

In 1990, Ehrlich, without comment, quietly mailed Simon a check for $576.07 due to the dramatic drop in prices of those metals (see John Tierney, “Betting on the Planet,” New York Times, 2 Dec. 1990). As shown in a chart on p. 186 in Superabundance, Ehrlich’s payment was 36% of the value of the $1,000 basket in 1980 when adjusted for inflation in 1990 ($1,580). In other words, the inflation-adjusted price of the basket of metals had dropped by 36% in a decade. That outcome is even more dramatic when population growth is considered: “During that decade the world’s population grew by more than 800 million, the greatest increase in history, and the store of metals buried in the earth’s crust did not get any larger” (Tierney, “Betting on the Planet”).

Ehrlich’s loss of the wager received little attention and was argued as insignificant evidence, perhaps just bad luck, even though the trend of declining metals prices had been occurring for many years before 1980. Simon’s victory, though given little publicity, was noticed by Tupy and Pooley and motivated them to explore the topic of scarcity and population growth in much more detail. Simon’s victory was the impetus for the further research that led to Superabundance.

A Methodology Drawing on Simon’s Work

Simon’s prediction that raw materials prices would drop was not based on ideology or an optimistic personality. It was based on economic data that had caught him by surprise and led him to pursue his own studies that would undermine many of the simplistic Malthusian theories of our day. Tupy and Pooley describe what Simon had learned from his work in economics:

Simon thought like an economist who understood the powers of incentives and the price mechanism to overcome resource shortages. Instead of the quantity of resources, he looked at the prices of resources and at the human creativity that higher prices awaken. He saw resource scarcity as a temporary challenge that can be resolved through greater efficiency, increased supply, development of substitutes, and so on. The relationship between prices and innovation, he insisted, is dynamic.

Relative scarcity leads to higher prices, higher prices create incentives for innovations, and innovations lead to abundance. Scarcity gets converted to abundance through the price system. The price system functions as long as the economy is based on property rights, the rule of law, and freedom of exchange. In relatively free economies, therefore, resources do not get depleted in the way that Ehrlich feared they would. In fact, resources tend to become more abundant. (p. 5)

Tupy and Pooley would build upon Simon’s approach by looking at the “time price” of goods and services, overcoming the many difficulties in using inflation-adjusted prices. The price of a good, whether inflation-adjusted or not, does not really describe how abundant a resource is for an individual or a population. A much more useful measure is how long people must labor to obtain a given quantity of that good. By looking at how long people worked in the past to obtain a unit of bread, light, leather, tin, etc. at various times in history, we can measure the abundance of those items for individuals and for the population as a whole.

But for global measures, it is not possible to directly determine the global average hourly earnings. A reasonable approximation, however, is to use the gross domestic product for each nation and divide it by the total hours worked, and then use that data to determine average global nominal GDP per hour worked (pp. 120–23). For the United States, though, the Officer–Williamson database of nominal U.S. wages provides useful data from 1774 to 2018.

While other economists have sometimes discussed scarcity in terms of how much labor is required to obtain a product, Tupy and Pooley’s methodical use of time prices in interpreting vast bodies of data is an important contribution from their work, including the systematic application of multiple measures of time prices such as the “personal resource abundance multiplier” (the time price at the end of a period of time divided by the time price at the start of the period), the “personal resource abundance elasticity of population” (percent change in personal resource abundance divided by the percent change in population), the “population resource abundance multiplier,” etc.

With a strong nod to Simon’s foundational work, Tupy and Pooley call their methodology the “Simon Abundance Framework,” the subject of Chapter 4:

The Simon Abundance Framework (SAF) measures and analyzes the relationship between the abundance of resources and population growth over time. The framework captures all the benefits of innovation. It transcends currency fluctuations, inflation measurement uncertainties, and purchasing parity adjustments. It enables us to see the true prices of all goods and services as expressed in the universal constant of time. The framework consists of two levels of analysis: personal resource abundance analysis and population resource abundance analysis. (p. 101)

There’s straightforward math involved in these calculations, but a number of equations that may be barriers for some readers. Readers pained by math need not worry. The math can be skipped over, for the trends and results obtained are usually easy to grasp with an impressive message that is unmistakable: we live in an age of abundance. In fact, the data show that our planet has long experienced superabundance in which more humans can make life better, not worse. We are not doomed by the limited resources of the earth or by a rising population. In hundreds of ways, we enjoy greater abundance today than our ancestors did.

Related Economic Insights from 1984: The Doomsday Myth

Simon is not the only other scholar who has helped us understand the foolishness of Malthus and modern pushers of population-based doom. Over 30 years ago, I became aware of significant evidence rebutting perpetual and misleading claims that our planet faced great crises due to impending shortages of various materials. This occurred after a visit to the campus of Texas A&M University, when I purchased a book by two professors of economics there: Charles Maurice and Charles W. Smithson, The Doomsday Myth: 10,000 Years of Economic Crises (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1984), now available at Archive.org. Maurice and Smithson also drew upon insights from Julian Simon, who also quoted them in his later works.

Maurice and Smithson’s book was enlightening. Whether it was the lumber crisis of the early 1900s, the tin crisis of the ancient Greeks, the oil crisis of the 1970s, or the perpetual “problem” of excess population threatening the collapse of everything, in case study after case study, Maurice and Smithson illustrated that apparent crises are readily resolved by human innovation and free markets, when allowed to operate. The mechanism is simple and aligns closely with Tupy and Pooley’s discussion: when a needed resource becomes scarce, free markets respond by offering higher prices for the scarce resource. The mechanism of price then motivates three things: 1) increased production, when possible, often by finding new sources or new ways to increase supplies, 2) substitutes for the scarce resource through innovation, and 3) conservation or reduced consumption of the scarce resource.

The result is generally a rapid resolution to the problem and often advances in technology that make the world better off than before. When free markets and economic freedom exist, for example, scarce whale oil is replaced with petroleum. Later the rising price of scarce petroleum makes it profitable to use oil sands as a new source or to pursue alternatives like biofuels, nuclear energy, or solar power. Scarce natural rubber is replaced by rubber-like polymers made from relatively inexpensive oil. Scarce food is met with advances in production, reduction in waste, and increased land used for agriculture. The result of temporary shortages is often more abundance, when economic freedom exists.

On the other hand, when government tries to solve the problem by fixing prices or otherwise controlling the market, scarcity is worsened. Artificially low prices cause a misallocation of resources and exacerbate shortages. They discourage production while keeping demand high. They inhibit innovation in the absence of reasonable returns for the investments required to innovate or increase production.

Those lessons from 1984 in The Doomsday Myth have now been greatly reinforced with a tremendous amount of new data in Tupy and Pooley’s work.

Tupy and Pooley Mine an Abundance of Data

For those who appreciate the importance of data and evidence when it comes to many of the biggest issues of our era, this book may vastly exceed expectations. There are nearly 200 pages filled with tables and charts examining numerous categories of goods and their measures of abundance over time. This could be the most valuable part of this book for those keenly interested in understanding the breadth of the data supporting the authors’ conclusions. This deep dive begins with Chapter 5, “Personal Resource Abundance: Empirical Evidence and Analysis,” which looks at the following:

• Fifty basic commodities (energy, food, minerals, metals, materials, etc.) that have been tracked between 1980 and 2018 by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. (p. 134)
• Thirty-seven basic commodities tracked by the World Bank from 1960 to 2018. Wages for comparison to these commodities are based on the average global nominal GDP from 28 countries accounting for 75% of global production. (p. 134)
• Forty commodities dating back to 1900 compared to U.S. hourly wages. (p. 134)
• Twenty-six commodities dating back to 1850 compared to U.S. hourly wages. (p. 134)
• Forty-two food items in the U.S. with price information going back 100 years, supplemented with Walmart data for modern prices. (pp. 134–35)
• Thirty-five finished goods between 1979 and 2019 compared to U.S. wage information for unskilled, blue-collar, and upskilled workers. (p. 135)
• A variety of services over various time periods. (p. 135)
• A revisit of the metals considered in the Simon-Ehrlich wager extended to the range of 1900 to 2019. (p. 135)

Importantly, the data over various periods of time and locations reflect another consistent aspect of our growing abundance: an increase in population consistently is associated not just with more available goods in total, but more per person – and with good reasons to see this as cause and effect, not just a bizarre random correlation. More people make it possible for more resource abundance, not greater scarcity. This remarkable phenomenon is what Tupy and Pooley call “superabundance.”

When there is a reasonable degree of economic freedom, more people are an economic blessing: a source for more innovation, more specialized skills, more work that can add value and increase the quality of life for a society, leading to a state of superabundance. It’s a message of hope that has been hiding in abundant data for many years.

That hope was illustrated in Part 1 by summarizing the many issues pointing to the abundance that has accelerated with population growth. In terms of the “time prices” (time required to obtain units of an item) for basic resources such as food, energy, and numerous materials such as metals, wood, leather, etc., the time a typical worker needs to labor has dropped dramatically over the decades, often by 50% or much more.

For example, a database of fifty key commodities including aluminum, beef, chicken, cotton, oranges, plywood, rubber, soybeans, sugar, wheat, etc., every single one dropped in time price over the span of the database from 1980 to 2018. The average time price fell by 71.6% and the personal resource abundance increased by 252% (p. 137). For the thirty-five finished goods in a database covering 1979–2019, all but one showed a drop in time prices (gold necklaces were the exception). The average time price dropped by 72.3% (pp. 171–72). This is remarkably good news.

As another of numerous examples, the convenience of air conditioning, once a luxury that is now viewed as essential in many parts of the world and the United States, has dropped significantly in time price. In 1952, a blue-collar worker in the U.S. would have had to work 214 hours to afford an air conditioner plus 1,000 kilowatt-hours. By 2019, that time price dropped to 9.8 hours, a 95% drop in the time price (p. 179). The U.S. population had doubled over the time, so in spite of a great increase in demand for resources such as air conditioners and the materials they are made from, the time price declined dramatically. Chart after chart in Chapter 5 tells much the same story for resources such as flour, prunes, round steak, cocoa, steel, wool, cotton, logs, etc.

Meanwhile, data on child labor, extreme poverty, literacy, maternal mortality, and other areas show incredible progress. Conveniences such as flush toilets, lighting, running water, hot water, shampoo, abundant soap, etc., are things we take for granted today that would have been cherished as treasures by many of our ancestors.

While it may be surprising to many, the data strongly show that Malthus, the archetypal doomsayer whose naïve math “proved” that disaster was inevitable from population growth, was fundamentally wrong in his approach and assumptions. Malthus and his echoers have been demonstrably wrong for centuries already, but Superabundance seems to remove any remaining room for debate.

Yes, there can be many problems in our world, and many issues such as polluted soil, food, and water remain to be solved in several regions, but pollution and other issues are often resolved as a nation begins to prosper and can then devote more resources to the processes needed to prevent or reduce pollution, in addition to improving water quality and coping with challenges in the environment.

Dealing with Counterexamples: A Potential Gap

Some critics of Superabundance have said that the categories of goods examined are too limited, for there are some products that clearly have become much less abundant over time. Economist Arnold Kling, for example, in a Substack post gives the example of baseball tickets. In 1966, the most expensive ticket to watch the St. Louis Cardinals play in their stadium cost about 4 hours of average wages for production workers. Forty years later, such a ticket cost about a month of wages.

I could propose similar “counterexamples” that likely have not become much more abundant over time: tickets to a Taylor Swift concert, an acre of land next to Manhattan’s Central Park, the Hope Diamond, and various goods and services that are tightly controlled by government, where the mechanisms and incentives of the “invisible hand” of a free market are anesthetized or amputated. But like Kling’s baseball tickets, these items are not at all like the commodities and resources investigated in Tupy and Pooley’s study.

Superabundance explores basic resources and services that are widely used for life and business—materials and products like rice, wheat, butter, petroleum, metals, leather, and glass. The emphasis is on commodities, “the building blocks of most foodstuffs and other finished products” (p. 161). One-of-a-kind items or items with a fixed supply like seats to a live Taylor Swift concert are clearly outside the scope of the book. But while stadium tickets are capped in their supply, note that technology and innovation can make access to a baseball game or concert available at low cost to millions, making the remote experience of a sports game or a concert vastly more abundant than ever.

However, some readers will encounter an important counterexample within the pages of the book that could leave them confused. While most of the examples considered deal with basic goods, a variety of services are also included. One of these is cosmetic procedures (cosmetic surgery, etc.) in the U.S. (pp. 173, 176, 181–84). The good news is that the time price for nearly all of the procedures declined. But readers might wonder why we should care about this good news for discretionary cosmetic procedures when most families feel great pain from the rapidly increasing costs of general health care. Nearly everyone can see that these costs are rising more rapidly than inflation. In fact, this is admitted when the issue of cosmetic procedures is introduced:

U.S. Cosmetic Procedures (1998–2018)

University of Michigan-Flint economist Mark J. Perry conducts an annual cost analysis of the 19 most popular cosmetic procedures in the United States. According to Perry, the average nominal price of those 19 procedures increased by 22 percent between 1998 and 2018. The prices ranged from a 47.3 percent decrease for laser hair removal to a 93.3 percent increase for chin augmentation. Over the same period, the CPI increased by 54 percent (in other words, the prices of cosmetic procedures rose slower than inflation, on average). By contrast, the average cost of medical services increased by 109.8 percent, and the average cost of hospital services rose by 201.6 percent (that is, both medical and hospital costs rose faster than inflation, on average). (pp. 173, 176)

A few pages later, the authors briefly point to the explanation for the apparent counterexample of non-cosmetic health care, but with what I fear is not enough attention to help readers grasp this important issue:

U.S. cosmetic procedures: the U.S. unskilled worker perspective (1998-2018)

It may seem a little strange to include a section on the abundance of U.S. cosmetic procedures relative to the wages of U.S. unskilled workers. People at the bottom of the income ladder, we recognize, face more pressing challenges than hair removal and chin augmentations. In the end, we decided to discuss cosmetic procedures from the perspective of unskilled workers for one simple reason. The budgets of the unskilled workers are disproportionately squeezed by fast-growing medical and hospital bills in the United States. We contend that those price increases would be lower if health care in the United States were subjected to some of the competitive forces that operate in the market for cosmetic procedures. By outlining the effect of market competition on the abundance of cosmetic procedures, we hope to show that a somewhat more affordable health care is possible, even for poorer Americans. (p. 181)

Earlier in the book, the authors also briefly compare cosmetic procedures to medical health care, noting that “the delivery of health care is heavily regulated, subsidized, and influenced by third-party insurance policies and payments. As such, the normal functioning of the law of supply and demand is heavily compromised” (p. 135). To this one could also add the escalating prices caused by the conflicts of interest of the pharmacy benefit managers that strongly influence medication prices in the U.S. This is illustrated in the New York Times article, “Giant Companies Took Secret Payments to Allow Free Flow of Opioids” by Chris Hamby, 17 Dec. 2024. Such factors might well have been mentioned in introducing Tupy and Pooley’s selection of the vastly less compromised field of cosmetic procedures as one of the services considered in terms of time price over time.

A slightly fuller discussion of why medical care and health insurance were excluded could help reduce misgivings or confusion. The contrast to cosmetic procedures may help underscore the importance of free market forces to bring about abundance.

The rising cost of housing is another area where readers might object to Tupy and Pooley’s optimism. Today many headlines note that the rapid rise in housing costs makes home ownership increasingly out of reach for the rising generation. How can the conclusions of Superabundance be accurate if such a basic resource is now less abundant? Housing is considered by Tupy and Pooley, who note that a key issue is the much larger size of a typical home today. The average size of a home in 1970 was 1,500 square feet, which became 2,700 square feet by 2019. When the time price of housing per square foot is considered, that price declined from 1970 to 2019 by 21.5% for unskilled workers, 29.6% for blue-collar workers, and 66.9% for upskilling workers (pp. 341–42). Further:

Where houses have gotten significantly more expensive, they have usually done so due to highly restrictive zoning and regulatory requirements, which have artificially raised the price of land. On average, however, we are getting much more house for much less effort. (342)

However, since 2019, the costs seem to have escalated sharply. Is housing now less abundant than in the past? For more current insight, Pooley has addressed the housing issue in a 2025 post in his Substack blog, Gale Winds, where he examines six important differences between homes in the 1970s and modern homes in the U.S. as of 2023. The first of these are the increasing size of homes, as mentioned above (a 60% increase in size in 2023 compared to 1972), and also the decreasing number of people per household, 18% less in 2023 than in 1972. Thus, while housing as a percentage of household income increased from 22.3% in 1972 to 25% in 2023, it actually decreased to 14.3% when adjusted for square footage and household size. In spite of various actions by the government that may have interfered with the housing market, the tendency for resources to become more abundant on average over time still seems to generally apply to housing.

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In Part 3, we’ll consider implications of Superabundance for Latter-day Saints in particular, though these may largely be extended to Christians and adherents of some other faiths as well. Respecting the handiwork of God on this planet involves both respect for the environment and the creations here, but also for the ability of God to make this planet sufficient for the needs of all of his children who will be born here. We live in a world designed by God to have the resources the world and His children would need, if we will be good stewards and respect His creations — including humanity itself.