We have discover this in our research. The idea of super abundance is, it occurred to us when we were looking at this original bet between julie simon and paul. If you remember that back in the 19 80s, you had paul, who had written a population. It was this book that painted a dystopian future that england wouldnt exist, we were going to start of. There was an economist who picked up the book, read it, and initially thought in three you could model, it seems like it makes sense. Maybe i should go back and look at the data, see what the data says about resources, how abundant resources are. As an economist, i look at the price of resources. If something is running out, it should be getting more expensive. What julian simon found was that the price of these things wasnt going up, they were going down. How could you have something that was becoming more scarce, it was becoming cheaper. He begins to research other things, he starts looking at these non renewable metals like copper. He extended it to lumber and all of these other resources. What he observed is that as population increases, these prices, these resources actually went down. He published his findings and it created this huge contention between the two. Science magazine published his article. They have this disagreement, a very public. Finally, julian says hey, why dont we just bet . Paul, you pick five medals, how many ever you want. I will bet you that theyre gonna be cheaper in the future. His two friends picked five medals, it is chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. They put 1,000 on the table and said, okay, lets bet for ten years and see what happens. Well, can years later, the debt comes due and the inflation adjusted prices of these five medals had fallen by 36 . Its like this. Now during the same decade that we had the highest growth of population on the planet. The population is doing this, but these prices are doing that. He writes this check to julian. Julian says, would you like to bet against . Lets keep doing this bet. We have always been, as economists, we have been interested in that that. We felt like this was one of the most important checks that had ever been written in economics. In simple form, how is it that population growth equals more abundance . Well, its kind of counterintuitive because you think, if we have this pie, we have this pizza and i keep inviting friends over, the slices all get smaller, we are gonna run out of pizza. That thinking, the idea of living in a world where we have limited resources. That is the fundamental flaw because we recognize that we do live in a world with a finite number of atoms. Economics is not about adams, economics is about knowledge. The creation of value when we add knowledge to adams. That is really where it comes down in this core issue. Human beings are the source of knowledge. As they come, they bring their knowledge and they discovering trade knowledge, it makes these things much more abundant and much less expensive. That is the basic idea that we explore in the book. Take an oil, which is a product that we talk about all the time. We thought we were going to run out of oil, then we picked on oil. If you go back even further and look at the history of oil, oil, when we first found it, it was bubbling under the ground. You go to pennsylvania, that stuff is stinky, it is a liability. Through thinking about, what could this be used for, we discovered if you heat up the oil and steam it, when it condenses it turns into these other substances like kerosene. Kerosene became this a valuable asset that replaced whale oil. The price of whale oil was going up, people want to do by this whale oil. We are hunting all these whales to try to get their oil to operate these light lamps. Kerosene comes along, it is a substitute, it is much, much cheaper to do that. Suddenly, this liability becomes an asset. It was because it was always there. What wasnt there was the knowledge of how to make this stuff valuable. George hill, my friend, he says he wrote the introduction to the book. He makes this really great observation. He says, the difference between our age and the stone age is entirely due to the wealth of knowledge. We are not getting more adams, what we are getting is more knowledge. Knowledge really is the product of human beings who are able to explore and innovate. That is what has allowed us to escape poverty, this growth and knowledge. That is a function of human beings. If you really want to have more stuff, you have to be in favor more human beings. You teach economics at baylor, i apologize, be why you in hawaii. Your coauthor is you . Marion, he is a Senior Editor at Cato Institute of human progress. One of the theories that you talk about in super abundances time prices. What is that . Okay, great. What is the example that you use throughout the book . First of all, remember that we buy things with money, but we really pay for them with time, right . When you buy something, ive gotten the money to take the money and then by this thing. What we have said is, if we buy things with money and behave in a time, can we make sure that things are measured in dollars and sense. We can also measure things in dollars in minutes. If a pizza, for example, cost 20 and im earning 4 an hour, that pisa cost me 30 minutes. That is the time price. Everything gets converted from money to time. It really has for benefits. Time has fort benefits over money. The first benefit is, you dont have to worry about making adjustments for nominal dollars and real dollars. You can avoid the whole inflation issue. All of this cpi, all of these adjustments that we try to make as economists to adjust back to some real number. You can avoid all of that confusion and just go straight to the time crisis. The second advantages, once you developed a time price, you can look at the time price of everything through history. What was the time price for a loaf of bread in paris in 1850 . What is the time price of a loaf of bread in new york today . You can look at those two time prices and measure the change in that time price. Convert the money prices to time prices, and look at the change in the time price overtime. That is really what we think yields this true insight about resource abundance. If the time price is going down, it means that resource has to become more and more abundant. The reason that the time prices going down, two things, it is because we have innovation and 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. The income actually increases. Time price more fully captures innovation than just a money price. We like time price a lot. The other reason, i have four here. The last reason is that we laid it back to this fundamental measure of time. Of the seven measurements that we use in science, six of them really to time. If we can take economics and related back to time, now we have this universal cost that is recognized for everybody. We all were 24 hours a day, everybody on the planet has the sense of what time is. We think time prices really are the true prices, the true prices versus the nominal and real. You think these time prices better capture what it really cost you to buy something. The example you even throughout the book is a farmer in india, and a farmer in india. Go back to 1960 and you are a guy in india, how much time we have to spend to earn the money to buy your eyes for the day . That then, based on what the price of rice was and what hourly income was, i would take about seven hours, 78 hours. Basically, a recall day to earn the money to buy my rice. Well, since 1960, the price of rice has fallen and incomes have increases in india. So now takes less than an hour. There has been this 80 to 90 drop in the time price of rice. In india, they have six or seven more hours a day that they can devote Something Else. Now, you can compare that to someone in indiana. In 1960, it only took him an hour to earn the money to buy their bushel of wheat. Today, it takes less than six minutes. Their time price is falling by the same amount. Who is actually better off . Is the guy in india that had six hours, or a guy in indiana that has another 15 minutes . It really shows us that these time prices are allowing this quality of life because now people have more and more time to be able to vote with other activities. You talk about the issue of innovation surprises in your book super abundance. Is innovation incremental . Or are there surprises . We would divide it, there is this idea of continuous innovation. But then you also have these punctuated equilibrium. Pony express is going along and suddenly you have the telegraph, boom. You get this big gain on one day. One day it takes this much time, the next day it is like wow. You have these punctuated equilibriums. But you also have this continuous innovation that occurs. Both of those are happening around us. The tension kind of gets drawn to these punctuated equilibrium where we look at this big surprise of abundance that happens once every 20 years. We have this continuous innovation that is happening and we see that that occurs at a rate of about three to 4 per year. If you grow it three and a half percent a year. You double your abundance every 20 years. The question would be, would you want to go through a half percent per 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, everything was 50 off, wow, this is fantastic. We are experiencing that every day just a little bit every day. We dont really notice it until we step back and say, what really happened in 1980 . How much was ironing in 1980 . What were the prices of things in 1980 . You know what, it took me two hours to buy a pizza in 1980. Today, it only takes me 20 minutes. Thats what time prices allow you to do, to measure things in time and look at the changing time overtime. That really reveals this whole new world we think about what is really, really happening with our resources. We looked at these basic commodities. We start with that. We looked at 50 basic commodities, oil, energy, food, materials, minerals, medals. Then we expanded it, we pulled out a series catalog in 1980, look through all the prices of things, then we went to walmart and looked at all the same prices and the same thing. By school, a blender, a microwave, a tv. It was astonishing at how expensive things used to be. When you look at what we have to spend today, versus what you had to spend even in 1980, 40 years ago. For us, i remember 40 years ago. Gail, we are sitting here in las vegas. Lake meads levels are dropping, were talking about you out of here. Population growth leads to more water usage. Population growth leads to more co2 emissions. True, not true . Population growth leads to more water. As population grows, the issue is, what is the price of what are doing . If the price of something goes up, four things have been. First of all, people use less of it. Gas for example, it is 5 50 gallons, im not going to use it as much. People use less of it. The second thing is on the supply side, people start looking for substitutes. Half of these guys here today are talking about energy. Try to invest in new energy. They are looking to increase the supply. They are also looking for substitutes. Can we find things that are substitutes for this thing . Now, there is not a good substitute for water. There is lots of water on the planet. The issue is going to be, can we figure out, for example, how to innovate desalination . Can you actually lower the cost of desalination . We see that kind of innovation happening all of the planet with places like israel, finding out how to disseminate water at less than five cents a gallon. It is half a cent a gallon. It is phenomenally expensive today to de70 water if we can trust human innovation to show up when prices go up, then we can expect then we can expect these versus not become more scores. In fact, they become more abundant because now you are flying knowledge to that. We say, you are intelligenceing adam. You are adding intelligence to adams in the way that you organize those adams. For example, this great economist was at m. I. T. He comes up this analogy. If you go buy 2 million for a body, the sportscar, it is this beautiful car. In your excitement, you drive off the lot, all of a sudden you crash it. Boom. What is happened to the value of the car . Well, it disappeared. All the adams are still there. The car, the atoms are still there, it was the organization of the atoms that made it valuable. Not the adams. This guy here, you have six ounces of basically sand, silicone, and in aluminum. What makes it so valuable is the way we organize these things. It is the knowledge we are adding adding to this material physical world, that is what economics really is looking at. When you walk into the store to buy a loaf of bread, how much time do you count the number of lows on the shelf . Never count the number of lows on the shelf . What is more important you, the number of loaves or the price . It is the price, right . That is economic thinking, it is what is the price. The information contained in that price really tells you about what you should do. If you think like an economist, we make fun of accountants. Accountants like to count everything. How much oil do we have, how much are we using, are we going to run out in five years . No, the price will actually signal to all the people that are in the market about changing behavior that ultimately will create this. The focus will be, lets go out and generate knowledge never convert this scarcity into an abundance. You go back to your issue of oil. We are experiencing this oil thing right now. Is it due to this fundamental are we 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, it is been going like this. We had these periods of up, but the underlying trend is that time crisis which is continuing to get lower and lower. Really, it is becoming more and more abundant. A car for example today gets twice the mileage of a car in 1980. Suddenly that means the price of gas has fallen by 50 effectively. We dont buy the gas for the gas, we buy it for what it provides to us. And you cant find oil, what can you do . You can find more efficient ways to use oil. That is where the knowledge of innovation shows up over there in this efficiency that we see with car mileage for example. When it comes to the super abundance, how do governments or Government Entities promote, or pervert the process . The first issue, to issues. The first one is, weve got to overcome this ideology that we live in this world of scarcity. This idea that we are going to run out of stuff. Were not gonna run out of stuff. The second issue is that we are destroying the environment. We are having this effect on the environment. Well its knowledge and innovation that are going to lead us out of these environmental challenges. We are really seeing human beings ability to be able to adapt and adapt to changing conditions. I live in hawaii and it is a chain of semi dormant volcanoes. I wake up and i go to costco. Its astonishing that i can live there, be because human beings are supremely adaptable. Conditions change that we seem to be able to adapt and innovate and take a liability and convert it a valuable asset. There is a line in your book that i want to quote to you. Its kind of struck me. Liberal societies appear to be growing less tolerant of eccentricities. Thats marions align. What did you mean by that . I think what he would say is that as we become 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 that are big that we really have to worry about. And that intolerance of people wanting to try to do things, innovate new things, take more risks, you kind of lose that edge when you are full, and you are in air conditioning. Like okay, what are we going to do next . This idea that as a culture, we need to be able to be more open to experimenting and allowing people to experiment with new ways of doing things. To be more tolerant, if you will, of mistakes. Let people have a go at it, see what they can come up with. Let people have adventure. Thats how we characterize china. China, until 1980, is just flat. And suddenly they start to take off. Why was that . When you give people a little small measure of freedom, there is new innovation and this new ability to create value. And this fundamental argument that we make is super abundance is the idea that your resources are growing at a faster rate than population. Its as if the more people that you bring, they bring not only bring their pizza but they bring pizza to share with everybody else. So every 1 increase in population corresponds to about three to 4 increase in personal resource so these people show up on the planet and suddenly, i am three to 4 richer. And that is what we have seen over the last 200 years. This book was the introduction written by you have blurbs of support from the obama administration. Jordan peters. It takes something right to get that Diverse Group of people to agree on your book. That was marion. Marion knows all those guys, and i think what they were able to see was, look, you have this framework. Looking at things with time prisons instead of money prices. It paints a different picture of you have this framework, and then you apply it to the actual data. And we see a different world. Its like a telescope, almost. Its like, once you have an instrument, this way of looking at things, then you see a completely different world. And the world that we see when we look at time says, we are experiencing this super abundance. Where we dont see that the population is becoming a problem. We dont see that an increase in population is going to make us run out of resources. We dont see that an increasing population is going to cause these other kinds of recently, we had a story here about elon musk. And we have these new maltese eons. All this was this guy in 1798 who wrote this book. It said the population is going to do this, but your food is going to do this and you are going to crash. That multibillion thinking has been this it is a virus that has affected our culture that we will run out of stuff. And we have it today. Bill maher talks about, weve got too many people. Aoc says, is it still okay to have children . You know, there is never been on a time on our planet in the history of our humanity where weve had more abundance to be able to have more children. Its really true. Lets go back to paul irvine. Did he ever publicly apologize for getting it wrong . Or did he just cut the check . He cut the check and he claims actually, i saw him the other day. He said, i wasnt extreme enough. I am still right. There is still time to repent, i guess. Gail pulley, final question, a little selfish exercise. You were born in 1955, i was born in 1960. How has our economic world changed in our lifetime . Well, if you go back to 1960, we can do a trend line. We are drawing i am 60 years old. Every 20 years, my life has doubled. On average, my standard of living has doubled every 20 years. I went to two to 4 to 8. I am really eight times better than i was in 1955. If you think about your life, what did you have a 1960 . Youve got at least eight times more today. You really do. You know, i show my students this and i say, well, what did you pay for this . I paid 600. And i always ask them, what would i have to pay you for you to never use this again . Thats really how much evaluate. I was guessing they would do it for less than 5 million. Youve got a 5 Million Dollar thing here that you walk around with. How rich are you . How abundant is your life . Gail cooley is the author of this book, super abundance, a story of population, innovation, human force on an infinitely bountiful planet. Thanks for being on book tv. All right. In south dakota, for a democrat to be elected and even for republicans, you need to be a little bipartisan and work together. South dakotas very populous. People think its very conservative, but its really not. In fact, my last race, when i ran for governor, just three and a half years ago, i only won by three points. It was against a guy who is a Bernie Sanders supporter. So its very much a state that can go back and forth, and tom was the majority leader. I cared about tax reform. And i was somebody who didnt complain about things. I tried to show up and be a part of the solution. I think he appreciated that. He had a Leadership Camp every year that he would host for new leaders in the state that he thought had potential to serve. And he did invite me to that one year. And i went. It was in the black hills, for a weekend. And he brought in speakers and we spend time together, talking about policy and what its like to run for office. It was interesting to me, because i never once considered becoming a democrat. I think maybe he hoped i would, but boy, four years after that even when i ran for congress, i had a lot of republicans who questioned if i was truly a republican just because i had attended that Leadership Camp. It was surprising how they felt like that tainted my credentials to even be a republican, that i would go and spend time with democrats. To watch this program and others, visit book tv dot org slash afterwards. Welcome everyone. This is the institute on reli welcome, everyone. This is the institute on religion and democracy, as well as providence, the journal of christianity, and we have the delight of hosting the unveiling of a new book, very connected to our major themes of christian realism. Its called power, politics, and moral order. Three generations of christian realism. Put together by two friends of our organization,