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.
People don’t depend on stuff; they depend on ideas—formulas, algorithms, knowledge—which allow stuff, useless by itself, to satisfy our wants. In this lucid and illuminating book, Tupy and Pooley lucidly use this insight to explain a fact that, surprisingly, surprises people: over the centuries, our increasing knowledge has made more stuff available to us.
We are living in signal times. The rate at which everything is changing is unparalleled, as is the increase in that rate itself. Two starkly divergent paths therefore present themselves before us, more clearly than ever before: movement toward an era of superabundance, where everyone could have everything they needed and perhaps even most of what they wanted, or degeneration into a state of apocalypse-inspired, faux-compassionate, authoritarian hell, perhaps worse than anything we saw in the most extreme excesses of the 20th century. Could we choose the former path? Tupy and Pooley, anything but naive optimists, say yes and explain why. Read this book. It’s a valid antidote to demoralization, cynicism, and hopelessness.
Pessimism sells, which is strange. But the scientific evidence shows that optimism is a lot more sensible. Stop weeping. Read the book, and smile.
It’s true that we live on a delicate planet that is composed of a finite number of atoms. But as this fascinating and heartening book shows, it’s also true that we humans can increase both our population and prosperity as much as we want without endangering the Earth. The key, as Tupy and Pooley show, is innovation. Read Superabundance to have your assumptions challenged and your sense of hope restored.
My father, Julian Simon, would have treasured Tupy and Pooley’s 'Superabundance.' Its breathtaking scope, encyclopedic data, and deep and precise analysis of both economics and history powerfully confirm that people are indeed the ultimate resource—and that a growing population, particularly with greater freedom, has and will overcome every challenge and will, in virtually every measurable way, continue to enjoy greater prosperity.
More people produce more ideas and innovations. They also produce more nonsense. It is not resources but hope and common sense that are scarce. Human ingenuity can come up with a solution for every scarcity, though, and now we have an antidote to nonsense as well: this magnificent, groundbreaking book by Tupy and Pooley.
There are those who wish for scarcities, and who work to inhibit economic growth, so that government can claim an excuse to ration this and that. Happily, they have met their match in Tupy and Pooley, who demonstrate that population growth is not a problem; it is the solution—the most important resource.
In their essential and provocative new book, Tupy and Pooley show that the ultimate resource remains human ingenuity. 'Superabundance' is a must-read for anyone who cares about the fate of humankind and our bountiful, beautiful planet.
In a tsunami of bad news about Russian revanchism, nuclear saber rattling, global warming, inflation, supply chain shortages, and a pandemic emerges Superabundance, a data-fueled corrective to the doom and gloom the media daily heaps upon us. Tupy and Pooley have done the world a service with this fact-filled reminder of how good our lives are compared to ages past, and how much more human flourishing is in store if we unleash human innovation.
Many people think that superabundance is too good to be true. More of something can be a blessing, but to take the obvious counterexample, superabundance of fossil fuel is a potentially catastrophic curse. If doomsters could recognize the innovative capacity revealed by superabundance and boomsters could admit that the market can blindly misdirect that capacity, the two sides could agree that all it takes to sustain progress are small policy adjustments that point innovation in the right direction.
The decline of poverty and famine and disease and violence over the past few decades has been spectacular, as Tupy and Pooley demonstrate. There is every reason to think it can continue and our grandchildren will look back on today’s world with horror and pity. This book is a comprehensive, detailed, and devastating riposte to the perpetual pessimists who dominate modern discourse.
'Superabundance' pulls off the remarkable feat of being both exhaustive and entertaining at the same time. It adds a critical piece to the growing canon of books documenting the rapid improvements in the quality of human life: an explanation that is grounded in rapid population growth. Anyone that cares about the future of humanity should read this book.
More people produce more ideas and innovations. They also produce more nonsense. It is not resources but hope and common sense that are scarce. Human ingenuity can come up with a solution for every scarcity, though, and now we have an antidote to nonsense as well: this magnificent, groundbreaking book by Tupy and Pooley.
People don’t depend on stuff; they depend on ideas—formulas, algorithms, knowledge—which allow stuff, useless by itself, to satisfy our wants. In this lucid and illuminating book, Tupy and Pooley lucidly use this insight to explain a fact that, surprisingly, surprises people: over the centuries, our increasing knowledge has made more stuff available to us.
