funding for c-span2 come from these television companies and more including cox. >> homework can be hard but squatting and adina for internetwork is even harder. that's why we're providing low income students access to affordable internet, so homework can just be homework. cox connectso compete. >> cox, along with these television companies, supports c-span2 as a public service. >> welcome everybody to the cato institute. i am the in, vice president for international studies here. it is easy but wrong to become pessimistic about the state of the world, to think that every thing ise. getting worse. we are after all wired to focus on the negative, on the possibility, the dangerous round as. that'sl, how humanity has survid for hundreds of thousands of years. and the news cycle emphasizes disasters, catastrophes come misfortunes of all kinds come add news cells. politics itself frequently accentuates the negative, helping to shape our perceptions. what the world has changed dramatically in the past 250 years, and the change is a story of tremendous and unprecedented human progress that is ongoing today and in which the facts speak with a single voice. humanity has never had it so good.er we are living longer, healthier, safer lives on an increasingly bountiful planet. i virtually any measure, human well-being has improved notably as evidenced by large increases in lifespan, the collapse of world poverty, , the following infant mortalityra rate, the rarity of armed international conflict, the increase in safe drinking water, literacy rates, education, and on and on and on. they gains have been especially pronounced in developing world in recent decades, and the gap in well-being between the rich and the poor has been closing dramatically. but what if all of this is unsustainable? what if there are too many people consuming too much stuff and wede are headed for disaste? aren't we running out of resources? who supply, after all, is not physically infinite. the answers that my colleagues marian tupy and gale pooley get is a resounding no. they do so in their new book, "superabundance: the story of population growth, innovation, and human flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet" ." i'm delighted to host this book for him today for what i think is an incredibly important publication. one that breaks b new ground and tells a compelling and uplifting story of humanity. the book is an antidote to the enthusiasm like it is not wide-eyed optimism know is a deterministic. itas is based on a massive array of empirical data and on reason, or atig science writer matt ridy might say, the book is rationally optimistic' i'm delighted,, too, because a book carries on the tradition of the late great julian simon, who was a friend and scholar at the cato institute, and who for decades was the lone pioneer of rational optimism and had a deep understanding of the key role that innovation plays in human progress. simon pointed out that the data was telling us a story that was starkly at odds with what the pessimists were saying. we will also be hearing from his son, david son, who i will introduce later in the program, and a delighted he could join us. finally, i would like to thank, think that as in so many areas of human progress the appreciation of humanities great advances has itself seen progress. that is, that an increasing number of people, including intellectuals, recognize what a poor guide mouth issm and has bn and how impressive have been the gains of humanity in our times. this too is a sign of progress not least because how we perceive the world matters for politics and for ourur own well-being. i hope this book helps people to see things in a more realistic light. before introduce the authors i like to first introduced dr. larry summers who willht share some thoughts about "superabundance" get we've invited professor sum is that just because is one the most important economies in the worlo but also because he can be counted onn to provide critical comments comes in which women not agree with. alll of which will be useful to us and refining our own thinking on this bigig issue. larry summers is a president emeritus of harvard university where he holds ash professorship still. during the past several decades he served in a series of senior policy positions including vice president of development economics and chief economist at theor world bank director of the national economic council for the obama administration, and secretary of the treasury of the united states from 1999-2001. i could go on but we would rather hear directly from professor summers. professor summers, thank you for joining us via zoom, welcome back to the cato institute. >> i'm glad to be with you. i wish you had gone on your i i was rather enjoy all the nice things that you were saying about me, and i was remembering what lyndon johnson had said when he was introduced in a similar way. i wish my parents had been here for that. my father would have appreciated what you said, and my mother would have believed it. i'm flattered and honored by the invitation too participate in this book. i think that, i think that pooley and to be have written a very, very important book. it is important i think in three respects. first, it adds to the growing body of evidence and knowledge that we have documented that with all the problems, with all the travails, all that we worry about, humanity does make staggering and immense progress. i remark often to students that, all things considered, i would probably rather have the wife and the opportunities of a lower income student in the united states in material terms than the life of john d. rockefeller. the chance of suffering a fatal illness at a young age would be much lower. the range of foods that would be open would be much larger. the extent of entertainment options available would be much greater. the comfort of being able to live in a room whose temperature was adjusted to suit would be vastly better for that student. the ability to get to a place three or five or six or 10,000 miles away quickly would be immensely larger. the number of things about which that person could learn would be far greater. the freshness, the range of foods that would be available to eat would be substantially more. and the comfort of the available clothing would be substantially greater. and so i think it is immensely important to recognize the kind ofs progress, and while this a point that has been made by a number of others, i have rarely, if ever, seen it made as extensively and as thoughtfully, and in as many spheres, as it is made in this important body. second thing that i think is very, very important is the notion of time costs that this book passes. there's something slightly odd about using the notion of time costs in the cato institute publication. since after all it was karl marx who put forward a labor theory of value and sought to explain the value of all things based on the extent of labor input that went into them. but i think it is a very powerful way of capturing the kind of progress that we've all observed. the truth is that an hour of labor translates into far more in the way of goods that provide necessities for satisfaction, services that provide utility. that has been the case at any point in human history. and one does not believe in gdp figures, one doesn't have to believe in markets and doesn't have to believe very much in anything in economics, science, to see what has happened through the time cost of an immense array of goods and services. and that is documented in a very way here, anything it is an important contribution. and i hope that there will be continuing efforts of some kind to instruct ongoing timeseries on a range of time costs, different goods at different times in different places so that one can continue to monitor this very progress. i think the third thing that is important about this book is the celebration of what are in some sense the greatest forces that have pushed human well-being forward. combination of technological and scientificd inquiry and the decentralization and economies on information made possible by markets. it's an extraordinary truth that i always stress in teaching students economics, that there's not a single person anywhere on thepl planet who in an entirely self-sufficient way from the own knowledge would create a ballpoint pen, the ink, the liner, the tip, packaging, the everything, with all the inputs to those things. and yet wes go into stores without the slightest hesitation or doubt that b we will be ableo obtain a ballpoint pen and obtain a ballpoint pen at negligible costs in terms of our effort. that idea, that things can happen and progress can be made without central direction and without central plan is a crucialrh lesson, is perhaps the most important lesson in a different way from evolutionary biology, and it is the most important lesson that comes out of contemplation of the market economy. designed without overarching designers can achieve extraordinary things. that is not, to me, i case for libertarian viewpoints on all questions, but it is a tribute to what we now understand about the human endeavor. the other book that was published beside this one is, the last month that made huge impression on me was my dude needs work, slouching towards utopia, that highlights the dramatic turn that humanity took in 1870 when progress clearly was established in a way that overturned the malthusian devil. that is something that is profoundly important and is profoundly important to recognize whenever it is contemplated, that something needs to be directed or to be planned. now, if i have a difference with our authors, it is not in their optimism. itpt is not in their overall vision. it is not in their rejection of malthusian ideas, but it is in their libertarian bias. to say that markets and science produced tremendous, incredible outcomes, is not to say that those outcomes cannot be made better through collective and planned action. and the great questions of our time, in many ways, involve what those actions should be, how they should be designed, what the role of incentives should be versus the role of coordination and planning. as an economist i share the authors bias for decentralization, but i think it is very important to consider each of these issues on a case-by-case basis. but we will all engage in that consideration much more wisely for the extraordinary collection of data and the extraordinarily powerful arguments presented in this important volume. i am honored to have been asked to give these opening remarks, and i commend this important work to all who wish to understand the human condition and the prospects for its improvement. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you so much, professor summers, for those encouraging words and critical comments. i'm sure that there's parents are also proud of them, if they hear those words today or later. and i'm sure that they also have something to say about your comments. we would like to go now to the first of the co-authors, my colleague marian tupy, who is senior fellow here at cato said for global liberty and prosperity, and he's also the editor of humanprogress.org, which this is a part of the project. i encourage all of you to go to humanprogress.org to see the whole body of work in the project. he is also thehe co-author of te annual simon abundance index along with gail to be. -- deal to be. mary is ssa the co-author of today's book and he's also a co-author of the book that we published two years ago called pin global trends, every smart person should know and many others you willdo find interestg but also documents vast in preventing human well-being. it is a coffee table book and i encourage you to buy these two books as a a set. his articles have been published in the financial times, the "washington post" of placenta sums up theot "wall street journal" and other important outlets. he received his phd in international relations from university of saint andrew's in great britain. please help me welcome marian tupy. [applause] >> thanksre i'll give a come. much appreciated. i'm going to get straight to it. so that we can hear from our other two speakers, and then eventually have a q&a session. some want to begin with a short video. -- so i want to begin with a short video. >> the great under discussed factor in the climate -- is there are just too many of us and we use too much shit. [laughing] climate deniers like to say there's no population problem. just look out the windoww of an airplane. so much of an interest d endeavor but it's not about space of that space. it's about resources here e already using 1.7 times the resources the planned can support. in 1900 there were less than 2 billion people earth. now it is project. we can't't just keep going on le this. the work is is just too crowded. >> there are not enough people. i can emphasis is enough. there are not enough people. and i think one of the biggest risk to civilization is the low birthrate and the rapidly declining birthrate. and yet so many people including smart people think that there are too many people in the world and think that. the population s growing out of control. it's completely the opposite. >> their scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult and it does lead i think young people to have a legitimate question, you know, should, , is it okay to still have children? >> so who is right? the debates over population growth goes back to at least fifth century bc in ancient china, for example, confucius a arise there was an ideal ratio of land to population. when the population grew be on that ratio, , quality of life would diminish and social discord would ensue. therefore, it was a dutye of te government to maintain that ratio by forcing people to immigrate to less populated areas. the greeks thought that the population should be large enough to be economically self-sufficient, but not so large as to make democratic governance impossible. plato, for example, advocate in favor of reproductive incentives and immigration if population was too low, and birth control and colonization, or immigration, if the population was too hi. similarly, aristotle -- we will get there. the vehicle. similarly, aristotle worried that since cultivated land could not be increased as quickly as population could go, it was necessary to abort or exposed, i.e., lead to die, some children. the anglican district recessit that this ancient it is very influential essay on the principle of population in 1798. thomas malthus became fascinated with geometric and asthmatic groceries. g medicalio group growing value increases in proportion to its current values such as also become so, foror example, one, two, four, 16 and arithmetic growth rate in countries increases possibly come one, two, three, four pixele he wrote population went unchecked increases in a geometrical ratio subsistence by contrast increases only in an arithmetical ratio. a slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison to the second. as a result of the mismatch between population and resource rates, famine would follow, said malthus of this debate reached a fever pitch in the second half of the 20th century when the populations of many poor countries exploded thanks primarily to the spread of scientific knowledge and better medical care. enter the stanford university biologist paul ehrlich and his 1960 the seller population bomb. in that book he wrote the battle to feed all the amenities over. in 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. there we go. on the east coast of the united states, the university of maryland economist and senior fellow at the twoti institute, julian simon, who is a main hero of our story, did not buy ehrlich arguments. 1980 simon challenged ehrlich to a $1000 bet on inflation-adjusted prices of five medals. it over the next ten years prices rose, simon would pay ehrlich. if they fail, ehrlich would pay simon. in 1990, ehrlich mailed simon a check $ for $576 at the real pre of the five metal basket of commodities fell by an average of 36%. so howe come that simon one? ehrlich measured up and by county resources, how much wheat we grow, how many barrels of oil we can drill, and how much aluminum we can extract. but that's problematic for many reasons. for e example, measuring quantities of meat does not account for technological breakthroughs such as gmo which canie increasing yields, thus leading tobi bigger harvest on fewer acres of land. also, measuring quantities is not account for substitutes. oil fired power plants, for example, have been largely replaced a gas powered plants in recent decades. moreover, quantities do not account for efficiency gains an aluminum can come for example, weighed three ounces of ten, aluminum in 1959. today it weighs less than an ounce. why? acus capitalists in the pursuit of profit are incentivized to spend less or resolute as poe on inputs, thus making outputs cheaper. there are other reasons but i think you get the picture. simon understood that it is much better to measure abundance by looking at prices. rising price of you muttered in place growing scarcity. falling price of the commodity applies growing abundance. prices reflect the behavior and expectations of 8 billion people. and a sense, the market is a giant calculator fighting just in time as possible estimates regarding what is scarce and what is abundant. but which price are we to use? you are all familiar with the nominal price. that's the one you see in the store every time you go it and buy a loaf of bread. but that price treacly changes. sometimes in some countries overnight. to consider the long-term trends, assignment and ehrlich did, the real price is better. the real price takes into account inflation, and to figure out whether something to cheaper or more expensive, you simply have to subtract the inflation rate, nominal price. this is a picture from germany in the 1920s during hyperinflation. if you can see that focuses 1000 1 trillionrman means deutsche marks which this loaf of bread particular costs. so unfortunately inflation measures like the consumer price index are contested and distrusted, partly because they're produced by the government which caused inflation inau the first place y printing too much money. and there's another problem with nominal and real prices. they do not takee into account what is happening to wages, and that's what time price enters the picture. how many times have you heard an older person say that prices were much lower when he or she were a w child? that's absolutely true, but so with a wages. and wages tend to rise at a faster pace than prices because they tendur to reflect the increase in productivity of our species. here is a boy delivering newspapers and here in imagine in 30 30 years here is the sn now reading a newspaper in the back of a vehicle. so during our lifetimes, obviously i wages increase. not only that, we also become much more productive as a species across time. here as an example of wheat harvest in egypt in 3000 3. and here's something that you may counter in american midwest today. so the two character standards of living we must account for increasing wages. time price is correctly by dividing the number price of a good or a service by the nominal hourly wage you are earning at the time of the purchase. that's the time price. where as money prices are measured in dollars and sense, hi prices are measured in hours and minutes. simply p put, time price tells u how long you have to work to earn enough money to buy something. time price is the true price because while we buy things with money, we payhe for them with time. time that we could be spinning to other things like traveling, playing sports or spending time with our friends. so using time price make sense or right of reasons. first, time prices capture the changes in both prices and wages. they do not rely on gdp deflator is or other contentious measure of inflation like the cpi. they do not have to be adjusted for purchasing power parity between countries because an hour of work is the same in the united states and in china, and their work across time. so it is possible to compare standard of living of the united states in 1850 and in 2022. and finally time is ann independent variable is not influenced by external factors such as humanan perception or te environment. time is universal and constant for general purposes. that's a little issue with einstein theory of relativity but we don't need to get into that. of course time is equal for everyone for if one has only 24 hours in a day. so let's look at a specific example. the nominal price of the price of bread, this statistic comes from the pla's, bureau of labor statistics, was 50 cents. by 2022, the, the price of the same loaf of bread quantity and quality rose to $1.56. on that we could conclude that bread cut e 212% more expensivews and very often when you open a newspaper, the newspaper will inform inform you of something reached a a peak, something never before seen. that's because they are talking about nominal prices. they are not accounted for inflation. when you account for inflation you get to the real price. 50 cents in 1980 is equivalent tono $1.81 today, and since we know that the price of bread was only $1.56, we can therefore conclude that bread cut 13.8% cheaper. now cheaper. now we go to the time price. back then in 1980, bread, ssn, cost $.50 cents. butyo your typical manufacturing worker was paid $6.57 an hour, which hour, which means that he or she o had to work for mcmanus in order to buy a loaf of bread. -- four minutes. by 2022, 22, the loaf of bread cost $1.56. but in the meantime hourly wage of our manufacturing workers increased to $26.87 which means that now he or she has to work only three minutes, andnd that means that bread actually got 25% cheaper. so remember that as long as income is increasing at a faster pace than prices, you are becoming that are all in terms of time. so where does abundance come from? well, , we start with the overal population. the bigger the population, the more likely it is that it will produce an inventor who will change the world for the better. like the scottish patrick bell who in 1828 develop an agricultural reaping machine that made wheat harvesting much easier. bell'ss invention was much improved by market competition over thehe next 200 years, leadg to l the modern combine harvestr that helps to make supermarket shelves burst with wide varieties of affordable bread. of course, large populations are not enough to sustain abundance. china hasughe been the most pops country in the world for at least 2000 years, yet until recently it was desperately poor. 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, or release for your than the use to be. with that, let me thank you for your attention to hand it over to deal who actually show you will show you the actual empirical data from our book. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you, mary. gale pooley is an associate professor of business manage at brigham young university hawaii. he has taught economics at six in riyadh saudi arabia, at brigham young university idaho boise state university and the college of idaho. he has published widely in such places like forbes utah bar journal and other places. he is a senior fellow with the discovery institute concerts on the board of human progress.org and also serves on the foundation for economic education faculty, and is a scholar with how wise grassroots institute. he's also a of the montpelier society andnd doesn't mention previously, the co-author of the annual simon abundance index. please helppl me welcome profesr pooley. [applause] >> well, thank you very much for coming out today. it's a great privilege to be back to at cato, i'm especially honored to be a with david simon, julian simons son. also what you think twitter. that's i met marian, about five years ago and he has been the perfect collaborator for this adventure of new discovery thato we've been on. sir david attenborough community of you know he's a face and voice of many bbc programs said anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist. i guess that would make me an marian two mad economists. so we are pleased that you here today that we can share with you the madness thatre we've discovered all around us. in addition to julian simon, i work is also based on three propositions from george gilder. wealth is knowledge, growth is learning, and money is tight. from these three propositions we can derive at the room. the growth of knowledge can be measured with time. there we go. okay. so this is really the first conceptual step that we made. we had to move be on measuring things with money and begin to measure things with time. now, scarcity is about what we want, and abundance is about what we have. we can never really measure scarcity because we measure it against this infinite want, we can measure and quantify abundance. abundance can be measured that can be thought of is what is the percentage changed in what you get today for the same amount of time yesterday? is this change in time over time? that's how we can quantify measure o it. now one of our astute readers of joe job if you can do the same amount in half the time, you are twice as smart. you have doubled your knowledge. and with time prices we can measure abundance both at a personal level, how abundant specificbu to each one of us personally, but we can also measure it how it affects us at a population or global level. let's talk about personal level first. so instead of using money to measure our standard of living, this reveals when we go to using time instead of money, it reveals this astonishingly increasing prosperity that we are enjoying. so for the time it took your grandparents in 1956 to earn the money to buy one refrigerator, you can buy 13 today. for the time it took a great grandparents during the money to buy a buy a bicycle, 100 use go, you can buy 22 bicycles today. and for thee, time it took someone, a blue-collar worker, in 185050 to earn the money to buy one pound of sugar, you get 227 pounds today. so we just, we started looking at these products and we extended our another suit look at hundreds of different productsng and services some gog back 1850 in 1815 do you suspect in the book were analyzing 18 different data sets of things from commodities to consumer goods to cosmetic surgeries. so the first thing that we did is we applied it to this data set, it is safety basic commodities that are tracked by the world bank, good data going back to 1980. so we looked at this, this is data set that includes energy items, food, materials, metals and minerals. so you've got this broad range, think of a g want to go to a deserted island and have stuff i would like toth have these 50 things to go with me. so the other advantage of this is these commodities have really not changed. i mean, a bushel of wheat is kind of a bushel of wheat today. it's been pretty much the same. so when we looked at those, what did we discover? a banana in 1980, what constituted by a banana in 1980. you can get almost three bananas today for that price. the price to buy a pound of coffee in 1980, you get almost seven pounds today. so from 1980-2018, these commodities fell by an average of 71.6%. what that means is for the time it took you to buy one item in 1980 can you get 3.52 items in 2018. items in 2018. that's a 252% increase in 2 your personal bonus. now, what that means is we were growing at about a 3.37% annual rate of growth. that doesn't seem like much but it means that your abundant is doubling every 21 years. soi every 21 years i double i , go from one to two to four to eight every 20 years. we also ran linear regressions on all of these different commodities, and what we found is the linear rate of growth was about 6.37% a year. that wasve the average some commodities were much higher, somewhere a bit lower than that but that was, that was the slope that we found. the regression, for your statisticians here, our square was .895, and we tested all these at a s 95% confidence. not a singleti one had actually been negative. they had all been positive. so we were very, very pleased when we found that this underlying trend, yes, we have is temporary periods with things occur and prices go up and down but this underlying trend that we saw was very clear. all of them were positive without exception. all of them were positive over this period. you know, back in the 1970s when julian simon hadho done his homework, he knew the david. he did the regressions. he knew how to do these regressions to discover these trends. that's why he was unafraid to bet on what the future is going to look like. we went back to 1961 of issues is the further you go back in time, the thinner the data becomes. it's a little difficult. .. of this 3 to 4% growth every year. now we found ourselves a we ourselves, our hands on a 1979 sears catalog. some of you may remember those look like that used to be the amazon its day in 1979. so we pull this catalog out and we comparing prices. >> we start comparing prices. we looked at 35 different products like toasters and dishwashers and clothing and compared it to walmart. what do you find if you go to walmart.com and find something that's very same product, does walmart have that today? the average for blue collar worker, fallen by 71%. so they're getting 3.53 times as much. you know, so the commodities have grown about 3.5 and all of those consumer goods have grown 3.5 times and indicates this 3% a month -- or 3% a year. then we said we'll see if we can go back further. we went back to 1919 and pull up 42 different food items for both blue collar and unskilled workers. and the average price decline was about 89.5%. average time price decline. the time it took you to buy one of these in 1990 you get about 9.7, almost 10 of them today. so we're 10 times richer than we were basically 100 years ago. now at the top of that list, on the top of that list were eggs. so from the time it took you to buy one egg in 1919, how many eggs -- a little quiz, how many eggs do you think you could get today if you're a blue collar worker? you get 36 eggs. you get three dozen eggs for the price of one. so, you know, even chickens, are being innovative. this innovation is happening around us. we're able to discover new ways to add knowledge. that's what we're doing is adding knowledge to the atoms, we recognize we live on the planet and fixed number of atoms, but economics is not about atoms, economics is about knowledge and the growth in knowledge. how do we add atoms to the knowledge around us. so when we go back to 1850, unskilled workers today compared to 1850 have almost 28 times as much for the same amount of time. if you're a blue collar worker, you have about 58 times as much. so, we've had this phenomenal increase. what we realize is things used to be really expensive. they used to be really expensive. so now let's talk about resources and population. because this is really where this argument goes back to. what's this relationship? now, ethon musk, he raised eyebrows when he made these remarks, you know, we're running out of people. and he talks about, you know, smart people think that we're-- we've got too many people and he says it's completely the opposite. he said please look at the numbers. if people don't have more children, civilization's going to crumble, mark my words. well, we think this book is a great place to go to look at the numbers. now, to understand the difference between the personal level and the population level, i want you to think about pizzas. now, the personal resource abundance is how large is your slice. and the population abundance is how large is the pie. okay? how large is the pie. so we can calculate population abundance by simply taking how many slices do we have. multiply that times how many people do you have, and that will tell you how large the pie is. okay? all right. so, we can illustrate this with a little chart. so let's draw this chart and we'll put population on the horizontal axis and personal resource abundance on the vertical axis and set this to 1980, induction the population, the population the size of the pie in 1980. there it is. one by one box. let's draw another chart and do 2018. so we start at 2018 and two things happened, right? first of all, what happened to personal abundance. when prices drop by 72%, personal abundance goes up by 252%, instead of one, you get three, three and a half. but at the same time you also have population increasing. population increased about 70%. so, you get that movement as well. so you see how we're growing from both dimensions. so, the size of that box is about 6.02. so, you went from one in 1980, let's overlay 1980 on 2018. you go from that little red box to the green box. the difference there is that percentage change. about 500%. so, on a global scale, we're experiencing this compounded annual growth rate somewhere around what, 4, almost 5%, which means every what, 14 years you get a double abundance. once again, when we think about prices. if you've got the price here and you double population, but the price remains the same, what does that tell you about the abundance of that item? if you double population and the price is the same, doesn't that tell you that somebody's figured out how to accommodate all of that additional population because the price is not going up. you've doubled abundance. if the price remains the same. and what we observe is the price actually going down in many cases. going down and so we get the two effects. all right, so the other interesting thing, when we look at that relationship between those two. so for every 1% increase in population, you and i our personal abundance was growing about 3.5%. every 1% growth in population on the planet, you and i got 3.5% richer. now, the whole planet got about 7% richer because we're getting bigger slices, but also getting lots more slices. there's more slices in this pie. 71% more slices. so, we saw that and it's like, wow, this is pretty incredible. this is pretty incredible that as population goes up, resources are actually going up at a much faster wait. 3 1/2 times for individuals and seven times for the planet. so, we look at other things. let's take a look at 1850 -- no, this is -- yeah, 1850. the guy in canada tracked these 26 commodities and he goes clear back to 1850 and so we've got the data and nominal values and looked at 1850 and made the comparisons, so this little dot here, that represents the size of the global pie in 1850. and remember, growth in two dimensions. so, population grew by 1300%. and personal abundance, if you're a blue collar worker, grew by 5700% and you get almost what, 83,000% increase. 83,000% increase in the size of the pie on the planet. virtually everywhere we look with all of these products across countries we observe that abundance was increasing faster than population was increasing. now, recall that we had this little chart here from 1980 to 2018. we went, also, we had 42 different countries that we used in our analysis to come up with overall global numbers and we looked at each country and also looked at what the change happened in that individual country. if we want to zoom out. we'll zoom out and set that to a scale and compare it to china. so, there's china. same little red box, the size of china's pie, if you will, in 1980. and how did china grow? well, population grew by 43%, but their personal abundance grew by 3900%. so the difference there is phenomenal. phenomenal. and what we would say about this is, every 1% increase in china's population corresponded to this 131% increase in their personal resource abundance. and china's growing more people, but what were they really growing over this period? they were growing more freedom. they were giving people the freedom to be able to have some rights and markets and part of what we believe is this equation that we think about when we're thinking about this growth and prosperity, it's the function of population and freedom. when people are given freedom, suddenly, they can lift themselves out of this poverty. so, we think that we're much better off if we compare our self to who we were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. and time prices allow us to do that. where were you 40 years ago? you have to be three to four times better off than you were 40 years ago. you really do. now, this obsession on incoming quality is really this kind of a dead end because no matter how you compare yourself, how good you are, there's always somebody that's better. you always look like a loser, right? if you compare yourself to yourself, your parents or great grandparents, you're always a winner. the comparison so key to understanding how far we have come. we are much richer. instead of income inequality we like to think about time inequality. now, everyone of us gets 24 hours in a day and how do you use your time. now, elon musk is like a billion times richer than i am, but you know he doesn't have a billion times more hours in a day. he's got the same time that you and i have and no matter how rich you are, you can you not buy more time. 1960, a person in india spent six to eight hours a day to buy food for, and today it's less than an hour. that person has six more hours in a day to do other things, to be creative, to learn, to pursue. it's got to be a great thing to consider how people are able to spend their 24 hours today and how much we are very much equal in terms of how we are able to do that. yeah, we have a difference in income, but what is the time difference between you and i and other people on the earth in terms of what kind of time we have to devote to the things that are important to us. do we have that choice today? now, we simon and poehler both agreed that we have-- hang on, they both agreed there was this relationship between population and resources. right? now, ehrlich argued if population increased these resources become much more scarce. julian, on the other hand side, no, as population increases, these things would become much more abundant. now, ehrlich based his argument on a theory. simon, on the other hand based his on facts. and as art laffer made an interesting comment. without data any theory can be true. without data any theory can be true. what it we find when we looked back at 18 data sets, we found they were all up here. every one of them were up there. resources were growing faster than population was growing. so if you do find something in the red zone, it's probably something that's controlled by the government, the supply and/or the demand is controlled by government and it's becoming maybe less and less abundant and everything else seems to have this increasing abundancy. now, we recognize that past performance does not guarantee future results, but past performance is pretty darn good and we got this stack of data that says, look, we should be pretty confident, confident in the future that when you increase population and freedom, you can expect this kind of flourishing of abundance. now, alexandria said, is it okay to have children? now, we answer that question with absolute yes. absolutely. there's never been a time on the planet-- (inaudible) probably don't have to worry about that. and there's never more time to have children and gifts and talents if they're free to create and have free markets to share creations. thank you for the opportunity to share our story of population growth. innovation, and human flourishing on an infinitely boundful planet and i'm profoundly grateful for all of my fellow human beings that have contributed the little bits of knowledge all over the place that have made our life what it is. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you, gale. and the reason it's called superabundance is because of the abundance in resources are increasing greater than the population. we now have time to hear from david simon who has graciously agreed to share a few words about his father, who was very much the pioneer, the inspiration of a lot of this work. david simon is a senior fellow at the washington-based committee to unleash prosperity and he's a lawyer in chicago. his father was as i said, julian simon who did path breaking work, economics of population growth, immigration, national resources and the environment and developed the based solution used to voluntarily resolved. so when you're in the airport, and call out -- sometimes call out to not see if you want to change your seat for another flight. innovation, the auction innovation that julian simon came up. with his father, mr. simon co-authored articles concerning the state liquor distribution systems and state regulations on liquor prices. mr. simon is a graduate of johns hopkins university, honorary graduate of wisconsin law school. please help me welcome david simon. >> thank you. to the memory of simon and frederick and milton freedman, their younger colleague. the dedication of my father's book, the economic consequences of immigration. i mention this because my father would have treasured marian's and gale's new book because it makes excellent contributions that my fire admired the nobel prize winners that i just mentioned. freedman and kuznik. and it shows the critical role of market order of society and horrendous failure of a particular form of central economic planning, government population planning, china being the most dramatic example. like freedman's work, super abundance shows through empirical analysis of the connection between population growth and resource availability, the importance of elevating importance analysis over theory. in other words, something that gale just said, that the data matters. there were crucial contributions to the national income measurement, the man who helped us figure outgrows domestic product, for example. and important of early work on population growth. and super abundance has contributed to the economic measurement. abundance increase, time prices and price multipliers and elastity of population, all things they talk about in their book. super abundance reminded me of my father's somewhat tongue in cheek line about the difference between sociologists and economists. socialologists, he would ask-- he would say they would ask, does something matter? economists on the other hand asked, how much does it matter? superabundance answers many different aspects of this question in great detail. in great depth. superabundance continues to vindicate my father's explanation of the central mechanism of human progress. and natural resources, human resource,in the short run, any pressure on supplies and higher prices in the market and rationing, from my father's book, the ultimate resource 2. and longer run is different than the shorter run. the standard of living has improved since the beginning of recorded time and with it increases population, less severe shortages, lower cost and increased availability of resources. there's no physical or economic reason, he wrote, why human resources and enterprise cannot forever continue to respond to impending shortages and existing problems with new expedience that after adjustment period, leave us better off than before the problem arose, adding more people will cause us more problems, but at the same time, there'll be more people to solve the problems and leave us with a bonus of lower costs and less scarety in the long run. in other words, we become better off than we were before the problem existed. superabundance also emphasizes three more big points of my father's work. number one, there's only one important resource which has shown increased scarety rather than increasing abundance. the resources, the most important of all, human beings. there are more people on earth now than ever before, but if we measure the scarety of people the same way that we measure the scarcity of other economic goods, how much must we pay to obtain services. we see that wages and salaries have been going up all over the world in poor countries as well as rich countries. number two, the main fuel to our speed of progress, he wrote, is our stock of knowledge and the break is our lack of imagination and the ultimate resource is people, skilled and conspiratored and hopeful people who have assert their will for their own benefit and inevitably benefit not only themselves, but the rest of us. number three, even talented and energetic people require an incentive to create better techniques and organizations and protection for property that is the fruit of their labors. therefore, the speed with which economic development occurs. in the presence of economic liberty and respect for property, population growth causes fewer problems in the short run and greater benefits in the long run than where the state controls economic activity. my father's work and superabundance rebut the population bomb and limits to growth hysteria and the policies from those abhorrent books and theories that were based-- those were based on unfounded models, contrary to the data and caused harm to human freedom and abundance. and today, climate change, joe biden, and they're causing harm, the catastrophe in sir lanka, and recent power outages in texas resulting from policies to reduce production and use of fossil fuel. the data shows that global warming has not been harmful, has been beneficial for saving lives. for those interested in my article, page and a half, two pages, my website, wwwdms writings.com. thank you marian, thank you, gale, thank you to the cato institute for giving us super abundance. [applause] >> thank you very much. we now have time for questions, both-- taking them both online and in person. the online audience may join in the conversation and submit questions directly to the event website, facebook, youtube and twitter using the #catoevents. when i call on you, first of all, please raise your hand and then please identify yourself and your affiliation and then ask the question. we'll take the first question right here, please. >> thank you. i'm a professor of economics, studies in romania. and founder of a magazine and thrilled to be here. three quick shots. first, you said that this book is about optimists, but i was hysterically scared when i read its title because i'm an economist, and like all economists, in superabundance sounds dramatic and could have left all the economists in the world jobless. oh, i can't afford to think of such an outcome. second, please help me answer eventual question of one of my students related to the glorious revolution, but not the glorious revolution, but the glorious industrial revolution, implies increasing returns on the software sides, but the high pressure and resources on the hardware side, the side of semiconductors, the rare earths and so on. we had a recent crisis and seems not to match with the optimism even if it is rational in this book, how can it reconcile the software optimists on the industrial revolution with the scary movie on the hardware side. and third, it was being here and travelling a quarter of the world from bucharest, romania. >> the real question seems to be rare earth and things like that. >> i'll take the first shot. >> use your microphone. >> the question, i think we got off-- >> use the microphone. >> we got off on the issue of -- this idea, this -- i call it the ideology of scarcity has been the most harmful virus we've had in humanity. this idea that we have a fixed number of atoms and we've got to fight over these atoms. it's been very, very harmful. when we recognize that it's not atoms that we vl, it's the arrangement of those atoms, and when we add knowledge to atoms, that's what makes them valuable. so, that's how it -- i'm hoping, yeah, we get up first day in class in econ and say it's a study of choice under scarcity. it's about the study of human beings create value for one another when they discover and share knowledge in markets. that's what economics really studies. moving from counting atoms to thinking about the price of things. the price, follow the price. it will tell you much more than the quantity. and it will also lead to incentives that allow people to focus they heavily and trying to find a substitute. trying to find more supply. you notice we have these crisis, it's a crisis of the shortage. anybody have any trouble getting toilet paper today? well, a year and a half ago, it was a crisis of toilet paper. what happened? people stopped going to the bathroom? what happened? yeah, the market responded to that. you know, be a little bit patient and these things will pass if people are free to be able to pursue this new knowledge that allows us to lift one another. that's what i'd say about scarcity. kind of related to this rare earth thing. right, when the price goes up, what does that tell you to do? one, stop using it. two, go find some more of it. three, find a substitute and four, recycle. when those things happen julian always said this, you're going to have a period that loose like this. after, the price is going to come back down. you'll be better off than where you started. and the crisis will lead to being in a position that's better off and you will then have the incentives to create the new knowledge necessary to make these atoms even more abundant. >> my favorite example of subsidy. when you exchange one commodity you're using for another, has to do with electric vehicles. right now, the world seems to be moving toward more electric vehicles which need batteries, batteries are powered by lithium ion batteries and therefore, we can project how many electric cars we're going to be seeing and therefore armageddon down the road and scientists have discovered that sodium ion may be better than lithium ion in order to power the batteries. and who knows whatever discoveries we're going to discover in the periodic table which has 100 different atoms, which has 100 different items in it. and just calculating the different combinations could take eternity. once you start thinking about two calculations, you're talking about 10,000 calculations and, sorry, two items, you're talking about 10,000 calculations and when you get to 10-item compounds there are more calculations, possible calculations than the big bang, so there's not enough time for us to scratch the surface of the kinds of knowledge that humanity can discover in order to get around the problem scarcity. we'll take a question right here. >> thank you. max with google, a long time fan of human progress and glad to see this come together in a book. so one of the three variables that you have is knowledge and there are dramatic advances being made in artificial intelligence, a human creation. i'm wondering if you've thought in a look forward what that might mean for the potential of even more abundance. >> yeah, so the book is based on the assumption that's -- that right now the only entity capable of producing a new idea, is the human brain. it's potentially that ai could come up with its own ideas. we're not there and don't know if we'll get there. my hope is that if ai eventually arrives, it will compliment humans, will speed up the process of calculation and problem solving. that would be the best of both worlds, but right now, and looking for-- looking toward the immediate future, the problem is not that we don't have ai yet to come up with the big problem we are facing, is that a lot of people are simply freaked out about the future. and in the concluding chapters of the book, we have a number of studies who our parents say we cannot bring children into the world that is on fire, the world that is going to end and that is a problem because no people, no civilization, no future. >> thanks, marian. actually, nick gillespie sends in this question online. what are the biggest intellectual and emotional stumbling box getting people, especially those under 40 who seem preoccupied with climate change as an existential threat to contemplate and embrace the idea that we're in a world of superabundance. what are the stumbling blocks that you see? >> i think that gale has pointed to mental block where you perceive the finality, finite nature of the atoms in the world and it's very difficult for the brain to think, but out of it, you can create infinite value, right? how can you create infinite value out of something that's finite. and my answer to that would be the great quote, the stone age man had exactly the same amount of resources that we have in the world today and difference between his standard of living and our standard of living is the knowledge that we can bring to those same resources. and as i said a short while ago, that knowledge is minuscule compared to what is awaiting humanity, provided that we have human brains and perhaps even ai functioning together, cooperating in order to create new knowledge. >> yeah, i would just add to that, you're all in this room and there's a reason that you made the choice to come here. i think that you see something that the general public doesn't see and where we've maybe failed in the last couple of decades is being able to articulate that vision to these younger people about what we see and what we've seen and what we see potentially going forward into the future. they've been told lots of things by people who profit from this fear and so we've got this -- we've got all of these facts on the table, but we've got to take the facts and tie them to ideas that are compelling and persuasive. that's what we've got to be able to do. now, it happened, ian and i were talking about free to choose this. if you remember milton freedman in this series, that was very, very persuasive and it persuaded me when i was 21. wow, this is a -- you know, very good. we don't seem to have that today that we can use to put on the table and say you need to be countering what you're hearing with this. so hopefully, you know, we can do something on that order. >> i want to say one more thing on the subject and that is that even though young people, old people are constantly surrounded by technological change and often we complain about the speed of technological change. when it comes to solving our problems, that still remains, somehow the human brain considers technology to be static. we do not understand that technology is actually dynamic so if you're using product x or, you know, a food item or a mineral, we simply assume that we are going to be using it until we run out of it and then it's all over, but once you understand that there is this technological-- that technology is dynamic, you will understand that there are all sorts of ways you can get around the problems of scarcity, provide you're free to innovate and we shouldn't be prevented from that by principles and government idiocies. >> we have a question on this side. we'll take it from the gentleman. >> hi, dan martinez. formerly with the state department, now with a law firm in texas, houston, texas. so i spent 20-plus years promoting u.s. commercial competitiveness in the global economy, trade investment area and i guess my question is how does globalization, global trade investment factor into your analysis and specifically this regard to china, you know, this trade war, trade differences that we have with china, how does that factor in? if we begin a process of deaccelerating globalization, how does this-- how do you see that playing out? >> well, what i would say is back to this definition, wealth is knowledge and anything you do to prevent the creation of knowledge by definition is going to prevent the creation of new wealth. now, when we limit our ability to have communication with anybody else on the planet, we are effectively limiting our ability to discover new knowledge and share that knowledge, so i would say that in general, know, the specific details with countries. we know that we have other issues beside economic growth that we're concerned about. the political, the military, those issues, but fundamentally when you've got 1.2, 1.3 billion chinese that have this small major freedom and rights, look at what they've been able to accomplish, that's really blessed the rest of us. our lives over the last 40 years have become immensely better because of chinese entrepreneurship and china's freedom to be able to innovate and share their innovations with us. do we want to have that continue? i think we do. and then in terms of the ability that we have to share these ideas across the planet when everybody's got a smart phone. everybody's connected to the internet. everybody is able to tap into the existing knowledge and add and grow to that, that's also got to be phenomenally positive for this forward ability to discover and grow knowledge. so, this potential is really infinite. the questions is are we going to be able to politically going to be able to manage that in such a way that we treat people with this dignity and respect that we all have on this atlanta, because we don't know who is going to be able to be that next contributor. who is the next steve jobs? where is he or she or they? and so it really leads us to this idea of we've really got to advance this idea of human freedom if we want prosperity, human beings have to have freedom all over the planet. >> that point is incredibly important and it highlights the fact that the diminishment of freedom anywhere in the world is the diminishment of your own freedom because if we can't actually interact with, by the market or exchanging ideas with people in another part of the world, our own freedoms have been reduced, not to mention the human product that comes out of that interaction. that's a key, i think, to sustaining the superabundance book. at bottom, this is an idea where dignity and respect of the individual is taken seriously. let's take a question here. >> thank you, my name is mark sherman, aim he in wealth management. i have a quick follow-up for china, and i understand adding all of these people and market and creativity. and how about intellectual property and shared political economic environment where people could flourish. doesn't that diminish some of that in some ways as well if someone is not playing by the same rules, so to speak, globally. >> well, david is a lawyer. all i would say, if you go back and look at what we did in the u.s. in the 1800's, we were over in the u.k. stealing all of their stuff. yeah, intellectual is insizing people to go out and create wealth. sometimes i think we're so obsessed with that we're preventing new knowledge, is it worth the trade-off to be able to do this and what we notice is that countries come along, when they reach a certain level of prosperity, they begin to respect those rights. what are we going to do? are we going to expect people to remain in these conditions or are we going to give them some opportunities to grow out of those conditions by using our intellectual property and then hope, based on history, that they're going to mature as well in this respect of this particular kind of a property right. >> we have a question over here. kevin, i'm concerned about the ai that china is using to repress the people there. i don't think they have that much freedom, so how do you prevent the science from being used against people like in china? and i like your counter point. i'd like to see musk and owe ocasio-cortez debate and c-span put people like michael hudson civilization on their book tv. and so you get a different point of view. >> okay. just to be clear, when we talk about freedom in china, we are, of course, talking about the period of 1978 when china start today liberalize, nothing we say should sort of be read to think that we consider china to be a free country, it's not and in fact, less free after 2012. in terms of technological development. any technology can be used for good and evil. pretty much all technologies could be used for good and evil. where you stop or where you should stop, that's obviously a conversation that is being had by people much smarter than me. let's assume that we were to decide as a society that we should stop right now in terms of development of ai. and because ai could turn us all into paper clips. okay. what if there is a new pathogen down the road that could wipe out humanity and could be resolved through further technological advance, including ai? what if there's an asteroid that we need to take care of and ai could help? you know, stasis, there are new problems arise that we have to care for and there's cost for that as well so that needs to be taken into account. we have time for at least one more question and i want to take one question online from an anonymous audience member who writes, do statistical representations of productivity, product and resource availability take into account global inequity in the distribution of wealth and access. tent to discount the poor and disadvantaged. i think that gale pooley talked a little about that in his presentation. but what about what you have to say with respect to superabundance and inequality. >> and i think the 50 basic commodities. if you're poor you're spending more on those basic food items. so if you see innovation occur there, the poor are the primary beneficiaies of what is happening. if you can from seven hours a day to an hour a day just to be able to feed yourself, that's phenomenal progress and once again, the inequity, with income, i think it's-- we go down that road and it's a dead end because we're always going to have this income inequity. the question, what do you get to do with your next 24 hours of your life and that seems to be a much more important question and what we see there is people are much more equal, becoming much more equal to one another in terms of the amount of time that we have to devote to the levels in the manslow hierarchy. if you're not hungry, you can do lots of things. and fewer and fewer-- we still have great hunger on this planet, no question about it, but fewer and fewer of us are facing this kind of hunger and that has these two benefits of being able to now give people this time that they need during the day to do other things, to learn, to grow, to be able to discover, to be able to create and that ability to do that makes us all really much more, more equal. once again, elon musk has a billion times more net worth than you and i, but does he really have a billion times more hours in a day? no, he doesn't. the time that he devotes to his efforts during the day is really not that much different than the time you and i do, really. so, that's what i note on that one. >> we have time for one last, very quick question and quick answer, and we'll take it right here in the back. >> i'm michael, george washington university. i'm surprised there was no citation of lomberg in your book. >> yeah, there are many people that we haven't include in the book. he's one of them. i'm a big fan. i follow his work, it's just that we've been working on natural resources on which i'm not aware bjorn extensively. >> buy his book along with our book. >> he's a great guy and spoken here on several occasions. >> we recognize his contributions, the earlier contributions, the skeptical environmentalist his first book. once again, used facts to be able to challenge the theory at the time and i think it's also important when they were asked, how come you became a-- you know, you're a marxist and you studied under milton freedman and you're a marxist, what changed your mind? and he said, facts. facts. so, facts can be difficult because there's not the emotion associated with facts that sometimes those folks on the other side are able to use, but, i think it's key that we are able to put these facts on the table and look at this perspective. this is the way you need to think about your life. bjorn has done a great job with that and we hope that our book makes a similar contribution. >> yeah, we hope that this book will provide the facts and argument to help change people's minds, contribute to this debate in an important way and i'm afraid we've run out of time and i want to thank you all for joining us today and i especially want to thank larry summers, the authors of our book and david simons for joining us. it's been a great event and i encourage you all again to buy this book. those of you who are here, we will be having a little reception in the winter garden on the first floor. thank you again to everybody. 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