Cox, along with these television companies, supports cspan2 as a public service. Host and now were hen booktv were joined by professor gale pooley, coauthor of this book called superabundance the story of population growth, innovation, and Human Flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet. Professor pooley, what you mean when you talk about superabundance . Guest first of all thanks for giving me the opportunity to share what we discovered in our research. The idea of superabundance, it really occurred to us when we were looking at this original gap between julian simon and paul ehrlich. Every milbank in the 1980s you had paul or liquid written a population book and it was his book that painted this dystopian future that things were going to crash in england wouldnt exist and were going to starve. There were some economists that picked up the book, read it, initially thought that they become a model sounds like a make sense but me i should go back and look at the data and see what the data say about resources, how abundant resources are. As economists we look at the price of resources. If something is running out it should be getting more expensive. What julian simon found is that the price of these things wasnt going up. They were going down. So how can you something that could becoming more scarce that was becoming cheaper . So he begins to research other things turkey starts looking at these nonrenewable metals like copper and chromium and then he extend this to lumber and all these other resources and would observe is population increase, prices of these resources actually went down. So he published his findings and created this huge contention between the two. Science magazine published his article. So they had this disagreement, very public and finally julian says hey, why dont we just that . Paul, you pick five metals and you pick however many you want and i will bet you they will be cheaper in the future. So ehrlich and two of his friends picked five metals, chromium, copper, nickel, ten and another. They put a thousand dollars and said lets bet for ten years and see what happens. Ten years later the bet comes due and the inflation adjusted prices of these five metals had fallen by 36 . It was like, and i was doing the same decade that we have the highest growth of population on the planet. So the population is doing this but these prices are doing that. So we writes this check to julian and julian says, would you like to bet again . Keep doing this. We have always been as economists we have always been interested in that bit. We felt like this chapter when the most important checks have been written in economics. Host so in simple form how is it that population growth equals more abundance . Guest its kind of counterintuitive because you think well, if we have this pie, this pizza, and to keep inviting friends over, the slices all get smaller. And that thinking, the idea of living in a world where we have limited resources, thats the fundamental flaw. Because we recognize that we do live in a world with finite number of atoms but economics is not about adams. Economics is about knowledge, the creation of value. When we add knowledge to adams and thats really where it comes down to this court issue. Human beings are the source of knowledge and as they, and they bring their knowledge and to discover and trade knowledge it makes these things much more abundant and much less expensive. Thats the basic idea that we explore in the book. Host take you to oil which is a product that we talk about all the time. We thought we were going to run out of oil, that weve peaked on oil. Guest if you go back further and look at the history of oil, oil when it was first founded it was bubbling up on the graphic you go to pennsylvania and its like that stuff is stinky and is a liability. But through think about what could this be used for we discovered hey, if you heat up the oil and steam it and when it condenses it turns into these other substances like kerosene. Kerosene then became this valuable asset that replaced whale oil because the price of whale oil was doing this. People wanted to buy this whale oil so were out hunting all these whales to try to get their oil to operate these lamps. So kerosene comes along. Its a substitute and it is much, much cheaper to do that so suddenly this liability becomes an asset. Was because it was always there but what wasnt there was the knowledge of how to make this stuff valuable. George gilmer my friend, he said host who wrote the introduction. Guest right. He makes this great observation turkey says the difference between our age and the stone ages as entirely due to the growth of knowledge. We are not getting more atoms. What were getting is more knowledge and knowledge really is following free human beings are able to explore and innovate. Thats what allows us to escape poverty is this growth in knowledge. Thats a function of human beings. If you would want to have more stuff, youve got to be in favor of more human beings. Host you teach economics at baylor guest byu. Host byu in hawaii. At brigham young. And your coauthor is who . Guest marian tupy. Shes a Senior Editor at Cato Institute with human progress. Host and wondered if there is that you talk about is time pricing. What is that . Guest okay, great. Trent what is the example you use throughout the book . Guest first of all, remember that we buy things with money that we really pay for them with time. Right . When you buy something its like i have to go earn the money, take the money and buy this thing so what we said is if we buy things with money and we pay them with time, can we measure things and we can measure things in dollars and sense but we can also measure things in hours and minutes. If the pizza costs 20 and im earning 40 an hour, that pizza cost me 30 minutes. So thats the time price. Everything that gets converted from money to time and it really has four benefits. Time has four four benefitr money. The first benefit is is you dont have to worry about making adjustments for nominal dollars in real dollars. You can avoid the whole inflation issue. All of this cpi and whats the cpi and all of these adjustments that we try to make as economists to adjust back in some real numbers. You can avoid all that confusion. Just go straight to the time price. The second advantage is once you develop a time price you can look at the time price of anything through history. What was the time price for a fa loaf of bread in paris in 1850 . What is a time price of a loaf of bread in new york today . You can look at those high prices and measure the change in that time price. So convert money prices to time prices and look at the change in the time price over time. Thats really what we think yields this true insight about resource abundance. If the time price is going down, it means that resource has got, is becoming more and more abundant. The reason that the time price is going down, two things. Is that when you have innovation we are going to see it show up both in lower prices and higher incomes. When you have a new innovation in a business you are able to pay your employees more money. So the income actually increases. So time price more fully captures innovation than just the money price. So we like time price. The other reasons, ive got four here. The last reason is that we relate it back to this fundamental measure of time. Time of the seven measurements that we use in science, six of them relate to time. So we can take economics and relate them back in time and we have this universal constant that is recognized for everybody. We all get 24 hours a day. Everybody on the planet has this sense of what time is. And so we think time prices usually the two price, the two price versus the nominal and real, we think time prices better capture what it really cost you to buy something. Host the example you weave in throughout the book is a farm in india. Guest thats a good one. Go back to 1960, and your guy in india, how much time do you have to spend to earn the money to buy joe rice for the day . Back then based on what the price of rice was and what i would income was it would take about seven hours, seven to eight hours. Basically the guy works all day to earn money to buy rice. Well, since 1960 the price of rice has fallen and incomes have increased in india so now it takes less than an hour. So theres been like 8090 drop in the time price of rice. India now has six or seven more hours a day that they can devote to Something Else. Now you can compare that to somebody in indiana. In 1960 italy took them an hour to earn the money to buy their bushel of wheat. Today it takes less than six minutes. So their time price has fallen by the same amount but who is actually better off . The guy in india that has six hours, or the guy in indiana that has another 50 minutes . So it really shows us that these time prices are allowing this equality of life because now people have more and more time to be able to devote to other activities. Host you talk about the issue of innovation surprises in your book superabundance. Is innovation incremental or are there surprises . Guest yes, we would divide into, there is this idea of continuous innovation where on going to go at three, four, 5 a year year but then you also have these punctuated equilibrium periods. Pony express for example, is going along assembly of the telegraph, boom, you get this big gain all in one day. One day it takes this much time and the next its like, wow. So you have these punctuated equilibrium is schedules of s continuous innovation that occurs constable of those are happening around us. We get this big surprise of abundance that happens once every 20 years, you know, we had this continuous innovation and thats happening and we see that that occurs at about a rate of around three to 4 a year. If you you grow at 3. 5 a year you double, you double your abundance every 20 20 years. So the question would be, would you want to grow 3. 5 a year and double in 20 years or would you like to wait 20 years to get a doubling in one day . If you waited 20 years, went into a store and everything was 50 off one day, this is fantastic, that we are experiencing that every day just a little bit every day so we dont really notice it into a step back and say, well, what will happen in 1980 . How much was a earning in 1980 and our and what with the price of things in 1980 . You know what . It took me two hours to buy opeds in 1980. Today it. Today it only takes me 20 minutes. And thats what time prices allow you to do, to measure things in time and look at that change in the time over time, they really reveals this whole new world we think about whats really, really happening with our resources. We looked at these basic commodities. We started with that and look at 50 basic commodities, oil, energy, foods, materials, minerals, metals and new expanded it. We pulled out a a sears cataln 1980, looked to all the prices of things and then we went to walmart. Com today and looked at all the same prices of kind of the same things, bicycle, a blender, a microwave, a tv. It was astonishing at how expensive things used to be. You know, when you look at what we have to spend today versus what you had to spend even in 1980, 48 years ago. For us its like okay, okay, i remember 40 years ago. Host gale pooley were sitting here in las vegas, lake mead levels are dropping. Were talking about drought out here. The population growth leads to more water usage. Population growth leads to more secure to emissions. True, not to . Guest population growth leads to more water because as population grows, the issue is what is the price of water doing . And if the price of something goes up, four things happen. First, first of all people use less of it. Unit, gas, for example, its 5. 50 a gallon, im not going to be use as much gas so people use less of it. The second thing is on the supply side people start looking for substitutes. I me have these guys are today are talking about energy, trying to invent new energy. So theyre looking to increase the supply. They are also looking for substitutes. Can we find the things that are substitutes for this thing . There is that a good substitute for water but theres lots of water on the planet. So the issue is going to be 10g figure out, for example, how to innovate desalination and you can lower the cost of desalinization. We see that kind of innovation happening all over the planet with places like israel pentagon in and figured out how to desalinate water at less than ive since a i gallon, i meane half a cent per gallon. It is phenomenally and expensive today to desalinate water. So if we can trust human innovation to show up when prices go up, then we can expect these resources should not become more scarce, to become, in fact, more abundant because now you are taking and your applying knowledge to atoms. We say you are intelligent icing atoms pick you are adding intelligence to atoms in the way that you organize the atoms. For example, spencer hill doggerel this great economist at m. I. T. Draws this analogy and says you go and buy 2 million sports car and its this beautiful car and in your excitement you drive it off the lot, or driving and all of a sudden you crash it and the thing is boom. So whats happened to the value of the car . It like disappear but all the atoms are still there. The car, the atoms are still there. The organization of the atoms that made it valuable, not the atoms. This got here, when you got six ounces of basically sand, silicone and aluminum, what makes it so valuable is a way that we been able to organize these things. The knowledge that we are adding to this material physical world and thats what economics really is looking at. When you walk into the store to buy a loaf of bread, how may times to go up and count the number of loads on the shelf . Do you ever count the number of loads on the shelf . Was more important, the number or the price . Price, right . And thats economic thinking is what is the price, the information contained in the price really tells you about what you should do. So if you think like an economist instead of, we make fun of accounts. Accounts like to count everything. How much oil do have . How much are we using . Were going to run out in five years. No. The prize will actually signal to all the people that are in the market about changing behavior that ultimately will create this abundance because the focus will be on lets go out and discover and create new knowledge that will convert this scarcity into and abundance. You go back to your issue of oil. We are experiencing this oil thing right now but is it due to this fundamental, are really running out of oil, or is it Something Else that is affecting the price in a temporary nature . If you look at the price of oil and how much it takes you in terms of your time to earn the money to buy a gallon of gas, its been going like this. We have these periods of up, the underlying trend is that the time price continuing to get lower and lower and lower which really we can say its become more and more abundant. A car, for example, today gets twice the mileage of the car in 1980. It was like suddenly this is the price of gas has fallen by 50 effectively because we dont buy the gas for the gas we buy is or what it provides to us. So if you cant find oil what can you do . You can buy more efficient ways to use oil, and thats where the knowledge and innovation shows up over there in the efficiency that we see with car mileage, for example,. Host so when it comes to the superabundance, how do governments our Government Entities promote or the process . Guest . Guest with got to overcome this ideology that we live in this world of scarcity. This ideology that look on her going to out of stuff. No, were not going to run out of stuff. The second issue is, is the challenges. We are destroying the environment, right . Were having this effect on the environment. With knowledge and innovation will actually lead us out of these environmental challenges. We really see human beings ability to be able to adapt and accommodate to changing conditions. I live in hawaii. Its a chain of semidormant volcanoes. I wake up and ive got a costco, i have airconditioning. This is astonishing that i can live there because human beings are, they are supremely adaptable to conditions conditions change but we seem to be able to adapt and innovate and take a liability and converted into this really this valuable asset. Host there was a line in your book i want to quote to you that kind of struck me. Liberal societies appear to be growing less tolerant of eccentricity. Guest thats my coauthors line. I think what he was saying is as we become more and more prosperous, what do we worry about . We tend to start worrying about smaller and smaller things. The more prosperity we enjoy the fewer things out a big that we really have to worry about. That kind of intolerance of people wanting to try new things, innovate new things, take more risks, you kind lose that adage when you are full and in airconditioning. Its like okay, what do we need to do next . This idea that as a culture we need to be able to be more open to experimenting, allowing people to experiment with new ways of doing things, more tolerant, if you will, of mistakes. Let people have a go at it. See what they can come up with. Let people have a major freedom and that that we characterize china. China, to making 80, was flat, and suddenly they start to take off like this why was at . Well, you get people a little small measure of freedom and all of this new innovation and this new ability to create value. This fundamental argument that we make is superabundance is the idea that your resources are growing at a faster rate than population. Its as if the more people that you bring, they not only bring their pizza but they bring pizza to share with everybody else. For every 1 increase in population, corresponds to about 3 to 4 increase in personal resource abundance. So these people show up on the planet and suddenly i am three, 4 richer. Thats what weve seen over the last 200 years. Host this book was, the introduction is written by george gilder. You have blurbs of support from jason furman of the obama administration, jordan peterson, steven pinker. You did something right to get that Diverse Group of people to agree on your book, correct . Guest that was marion. Mary and knows all those guys, and i think what they were able to see is look, you have this framework looking at things with time prices instead of money prices and it reveals a completely different picture of whats happening. So we have this framework and then we go out and applied to this actual data and we see a different world. Its like a telescope almost. Its like once you have this instrument, this way of looking at things, then you see a completely different world. The world we see when we look at time, time prices says we are experiencing a superabundance where we dont see the population thats going to have a problem. We dont see an increase in population is going to make us run out of resources. We will become more abundant and we dont see an increase in population is going to cause these of the kinds of, i mean, recently our story here was about elon musk versus the new model suzy and spirit we have new model suzy ends, this guide 7098, there goes his book the said population is going to do this and your food is going to do this and youre going to crash. That thinking has been kind of this, we think of it as its been kind of this virus that is affecting our culture that were going to run out of stuff. We have today. Bill barr talks about we get to meet people, weve got this pollution. Aoc, is it still okay to have children . Theres never been a time on our plan and history of humanity or without more abundance to be able to have more children. Its really true. , lets go back to paul or lock the ship paul ehrlich. Never publicly apologized for getting it wrong or just cut the check . Guest he cut the check any claims can actually i saw him the other day and he said i wasnt extreme enough. Im still writing. Well, paul, theres still time to recap against. Host final question, you were born in 1955. I was born in 1960. How has our economic world changed in our lifetime . Guest well, if you go back and we have data that goes back to 1960 that we can analyze. We are growing, so im 60. Every 20 years my life has doubled. On average my life standard of living has doubled every 20 years. So as i went from one to two to four to eight, im really eight times better than it was in 1955. 1955. You think about your life, what did you have in 1960 . Youve got at least eight times more today. You really do. I show my students this and i say what did you pay for this . I paid 600. I always ask, what would i have to pay you for you to never use this again . Thats really how much you value it. I cant find a student that will do it for less than 5 million. Its like youve got a 5 million thing here and youre going to walk around with it. How rich are you . How abundant is your life . Host gale pooley is the coauthor of this book, superabundance the story of population growth, innovation, and Human Flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet. Thanks for being with us. Guest all right. American history tv saturdays on cspan2 exploring the people and events that tell the american story. At 8 p. M. Eastern on lectures in history, York College Professor jaclyn beatty talks about womens rights and changing political power during the American Revolution in the early years of the republic. At 9 30 p. M. Eastern eastern on the presidency, for 13 days and october of 1962 the u. S. Face the threat of nuclear war with the soviet union over the qm missile crisis using tapes of president kennedy and his advisers delivering the option. The university of virginia professor details. Exporting the american story come watch American History tv saturdays on cspan2 and find a full schedule on your Program Guide or watch online any time at cspan. Org history. Middle and High School Students its your time to shine. You are invited to participate in this years cspans studentcam documentary competition. In light of the upcoming Midterm Election picture yourself as a newly elected member of congress. Ask vicious competitors what is your top priority and why . Make a five to six minute video that shows the importance of your issue from opposing and supporting perspective. Dont be afraid to take risk with your documented. Be bold. Amongst the 100,000 in cash prizes is a 5000 grand prize. Videos must be submitted by january 20, 2023. Visit. Visit our website at studentcam. Org for competition rules, tips, resources and a stepbystep guide. Latest book, robert e lee a life, who was he before the civil