Ezra's Bookshelf

Superabundance

by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley · 575 pages · ~10.5 hrs

EconomicsSociety & Culture

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Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley challenge the widespread belief that population growth makes resources scarcer. Using a measure they call 'time price'—how long an average worker must labor to purchase a given commodity—they demonstrate that resources have become more abundant as population has grown. The mechanism is innovation: more people means more minds to solve problems, and free societies allow those minds to pursue solutions. The authors extend the famous Simon-Ehrlich wager, in which economist Julian Simon bet ecologist Paul Ehrlich that commodity prices would fall rather than rise over a decade. Simon won that bet, and Tupy and Pooley show that his insight holds across larger datasets and longer time periods. The book is polemical—the authors have clear ideological commitments—but grounded in extensive data. They argue that human freedom and innovation have consistently outpaced resource constraints, and that Malthusian predictions have consistently failed. For readers open to reconsidering environmentalist orthodoxy, the book offers substantial evidence that abundance rather than scarcity has been humanity's trajectory.

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