by the co-author of this book called "superabundance: the story of population growth, innovation, and human flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet." professor fully, what do you mean when you talk about superabundance? >> thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about what we discovered in our research. the idea of superabundance occurred to us when we were looking at this original bed between julian simon and paul ehrlich in the 1980's. paul ehrlich had written this book that painted this dystopian future that things were going to crash and england would not exist and we were going to starve. and economists picked up the book and read it. they said initially, this looks like it makes sense. but maybe i should look at what the data says about resources. how abundant the resources are. as economists, we look at the price of resources. you know, if something is money now it should be getting more expensive. what julian simon found is that the price of these things was not going up. they were going down. so how can you have something becoming more scarce that was becoming cheaper? so, he begins to research other things. he starts looking at nonrenewable metals like copper. then he extended it to these other resources. what he observed is this population increase. these prices, these resources they went down. he published his findings. this created this huge contention between the two. science magazine published his article. so, they had this disagreement. finally julian says, why don't we just bet? paul, you pick five medals, however many you want and i will bet that they will be cheaper in the future. so paul ehrlich and two of his friends took the five metals, chromium, copper, tin, and tungsten. they said, let's bet 10 years and see what happens. 10 years later the bed comes through. the inflation adjusted prices of these five metals have fallen by 36%. that was during the same decade we had the highest growth of population on the planet. the population is doing this. prices are doing that. he writes this check to julian. julian says, well, would you like to bed again? -- to bet again? so as economists we have always been interested in that bet. we felt like this was one of the most important checks ever written in economics. >> so in simple form, how is it that population growth equals more abundance? >> well, it's kind of counterintuitive. you think, well, if we have supply, this pizza, and i keep inviting friends over and the slices get smaller with every round of pizza. that thinking, the idea of living in a world where we have limited resources, that is the fundamental flaw. because, we recognize we do live in a world with a finite number of atoms. but economics is not about atoms. economics is about knowledge and the creation of value. when we add knowledge to atoms. that is really where it comes down to this core issue. human beings are the source of knowledge. as they come and bring knowledge and discover and trace knowledge, this makes these things much more abundant and much less expensive. that is the basic idea that we explore in the book. >> oil is a product you talk about all the time. we thought we would run out of oil, that we had peaked on oil. >> if you go back and look at the history of oil when we first found it it was bubbling on the ground. we were like, that stuff is a liability. but thinking, what can this be used for? we discovered, if you heat up the oil and steam it when it condenses it turns into 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 bite whale oil. so we are out hunting whales because we wanted to get there oil to operate these plants. kerosene comes along. it is a substitute and it is much, much deeper to do that. suddenly the liability becomes an asset. because it was always there. what was not always there was the knowledge of how to make this stuff valuable. george gilmer, my friend he makes this really great observation. he says, the difference between our age and the stone age is entirely due to the growth of knowledge. we are not getting more atoms. we are getting more knowledge. knowledge is really the product of free human beings that are able to explore and innovate. that is what allows us to escape poverty. growth in knowledge. if you really want to have more stuff, you have to be in favor of more human beings. >> so you teach economic at baylor. >> byu. >> byu in hawaii. >> yes. brigham young. your co-author is to? >> marion tupy a senior fellow at the cato institute. >> what is an example you use through the book? >> remember, we buy things with money. we really pay for them with time. if you buy something you're like, i will go earn the money and then by this thing. we said, we buy things with money and we pay for them with time. we measure things in dollars and a sense. we can also measure things in hours and minutes. a pizza, for example, costs $20. i am earning 40 -- $40 per hour. the pizza costs 30 minutes. that is the time price. everything gets converted from money to time. that has four benefits. time has four benefits over money. the first benefit is you don't have to worry about making adjustments for nominal dollars in real dollars. it avoids the whole inflation issue. all of the cpi, all of these adjustments that we try to make as economists, to adjust that to some real number. you can avoid all that confusion. go straight to the time price. the second advantage is once you have developed the time price you can look at the time price of anything through history. what was the time price for a loaf of bread in paris in the 1850's? what was the time price for a loaf of bread in new york today? you cannot measure the change in the time price. so, convert money prices to time prices and look at the change in the time price over time. that is really what we see yields the true insight about resource abundance. if the time price is going down, that means that resource has got to become more and more abundant. the reason that the time price is going down, two things. when we have innovation, we will see both the lower prices and higher incomes. when you have a new innovation in business, you are able to pay employees more money. so income action increases. so time price more fully captures innovation than just the money price. we like time price. the other reasons. i have four here. the last reason is that we related back to this fundamental measure of time. of the seven measurements we use in science, six relate to time. so we can take economics and related back to time. then, 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. time prices are really true prices versus nominal and real. these time prices together capture wrote -- what it really costs you to buy something. >> in the example you weave in throughout the book is a farmer in india. >> that's a good one. that goes back to 1960. your guy in india, how much time you spend to earn or buy rice for the day. back then based on the price of rice and hourly income it would take about seven to eight hours. that's a guy working all day to earn money to buy my rice. since 1960, the price of rice as fallen. incomes have increased in india. now, it takes less than an hour. that's like an 80% to 90% drop in the time price. so, india now has six or seven more hours a day they can devote to someone -- somewhere else. compare that to somebody in indiana. in 1960 it took them one 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 it was actually better off, the guy in india that has six hours, or, the guy in indiana that has 50 minutes? time prices are allowing this quality of life. now people have more and more time to devote to other activities. >> talk about the issue of innovation. his innovation incremental? or are their surprises? >> yes, we divide it. there is this idea of continuous innovation. i will grow at 3%, 5% per year. then you also have these equilibrium times. the pony express for time -- for example is going along and suddenly you have the telegram. that's a big gain in one day. the next day, it's like, wow. so, you have these punctuated equilibrium's and also this continuous innovation that occurs. both of those are happening around us. in punctuated equilibrium's we get surprise abundance once every 20 years. we have this continuous innovation happening. we see that this occurs at a rate of around 3% to 4% a year. if you grow at 3.5% a year you a double your abundance every 20 years. the question would be, would you want to go -- grow 3.5% a year and a double in 20 years or wait 20 years and get a doubling in one day? if you waited 20 years and went into the store and everything was 50% off one day you would be like, this is fantastic. but we are experiencing it a little every day so we don't notice it until we step back and say, what really happened in 1980? how much was i earning in 1980. what were the price of things in 1980? it took me two hours to buy a pizza in 1980. today it takes me 20 minutes. that is what time prices allow you to do. to measure things in time. you look at the change in time over time. that really reveals a whole new world, we think, about what is really really happening with resources. we look at the basic commodities. we started with 50 basic commodities. oil, energy, food. materials. minerals. edibles. then we expanded it. we pulled out a sears catalog in 1980 and looked through all the prices of things. then we went to walmart.com today and look at the same prices of the same things. a bicycle, a blender, a microwave, atv. it was a -- astonishing 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 42 years ago. for us it's like, i remember 40 years ago. but we are sitting here in las vegas. lake mead levels are dropping. we are talking about drought here. population growth leads to more water uses. population growth leads to more co2 emissions. true or not true? what well, -- >> well, population growth leads to more water. if the price of something goes up, four things happen. first, people use less of it. gas, for example. i will not be using as much gas so people use less of it. on the supply side people start looking for substitutes. half of these guys here today are talking about energy, trying to invest in 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. but there is lots of water on the planet. the issue will be can you figure out how to innovate desalination ? can you lower the cost of desales nation -- desalination? we see that all over the planet where's -- with places like israel that have figured out how to desalinate water at less than five cents per gallon like 50% of once and for gallon. it is so inexpensive today. so, if we can trust human innovation to show up when prices go up, we can expect these resources to not become more scarce. to become in fact, more abundant. because, you are taking and applying knowledge. we say, you are intelligent rising atoms. you are adding intelligence to atoms in the way you have organized those atoms. for example, spencer hill dongle this great economist at m.i.t. has this analysis. you go by a $2 million sports car. it is a beautiful car. in your excitement you drive it off the lot and all of a sudden you crash it. boom. what has happened to the value of the car? well, it might disappear. but all of the atoms are still there. it was the organization of the atoms that made it valuable. not the atoms. you know, this guy here. you have like six ounces of basically sand, silicone, and aluminum. but what makes it valuable is the way we have been able to organize these things. the knowledge we are adding to this material. that is what economics really is looking at. you know, when you walk into the store to buy a loaf of bread, how many times you count the loaves on the shelf? do you ever? what is more important the number of loaves on the show for the price? the price, right? that is economic thinking. what is the price? the information contained in the price tells you what you should do. if you think i get economists instead of -- you know, we make fun of accountants. accountants like to count everything. how much oil do we have? how much are we using? oh, we will run out in five years. no. the price will signal to all the people in the market about changing their behavior that will ultimately create abundance. because, the focus will be on let's go out and to discover and create new knowledge that will convert this scarcity into abundance. go back to the issue of oil. yes, we are experiencing this oil thing right now. but is it due to this fundamental? are we running out of oil or is something else affecting the price with a temporary nature? if you look at the price of oil, how much time it takes to earn the money to buy a gallon of gas, it has been going like this. we have these periods of up. the underlying trend is that the time price is continuing to get lower and lower and lower. really, we can say it's becoming more abundant. a car today gets twice in the mileage of a car in 1980. suddenly, this is the price of gas fallen by 50%. because we don't buy the gas. but the gas we buy is for what it provides to us. if you can't find oil, what can you do? you can find more efficient ways to use oil. that is where knowledge and innovation shows up in the efficiency we see with car modification, for example. >> so when it comes to superabundance, how did governments or government entities promote door -- promote the process? >> there are two issues. the first is, we have to overcome the ideology that we live in a world of scarcity. this ideology that we will run out of stuff. we will not run out of stuff. the second issue is, the challenges. we are destroying the environment, right? we are having this effect on the environment. with knowledge and innovation, this will actually lead us out of environmental challenges. we see human beings ability to adapt and accommodate to changing conditions. i live in hawaii. it is a chain of semi-dormant volcanoes. i wake up and i have a costco. i have air conditioning. this is astonishing that i can live there. because, human beings are supremely adaptable to conditions. conditions change. but we seem to be able to adapt and innovate and take a liability and convert it into a really valuable asset. >> there is a line in her book i want to quote to you that has struck me. "liberal societies appear to be less -- growing less tolerant of eccentricity." >> that is my co-authors line. >> what did he mean by it? >> i think that what people say is as we become more and more prosperous, what do we worry about? we tend to start worrying about more smaller and smaller things. more prosperity means there are fewer things that are big we really have to worry about. that intolerance of people wanting to try to innovate new things, take more risks. you lose that edge when you are full and in air conditioning. it is like, ok, what we will -- what will we do next? there is this idea here at that as a culture we need to be more open to experimenting, allowing people to extreme it with new ways of doing things. more tolerant, if you will. let people have a go at it. see what they can come up with. let people have freedom. that is how we characterize china. china until the 1980's was flat. suddenly, they take off like that. why is that? you give people a small measure of freedom and suddenly they have new innovation and new ability to create value. there is this fundamental argument we make. superabundance is the idea that your resources are growing at a faster rate than the population. the more people you bring not only bring their pizza, they bring pizza to share with everybody else. for every 1% increase in population, that corresponds to a 3% or 4% increase in personal resource abundance. so these people show up on the planet. suddenly, i am 3%, 4% richer. that has been what we have seen over the last 200 years. this book, the introduction was written by george gilder. you have 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? >> that was marian. marian knows all those guys. i think what they were able to see is look, you have this framework. looking at things with time prices instead of money prices reveals a completely different picture of what is happening. so we have this framework. then we go out and apply it to actual data and see a different world. it is like a telescope almost. it is like once you have this instrument, this way of looking at things, you see a completely different world. the world we see when we look at time prices says we are experiencing superabundance where we do not see that population will increase and make us run out of resources. we will become more abundant. you don't see an increase in population that will cause these other kinds of -- i mean, recently we have heard about elon musk versus the new mall susie ends. -- new malthusians. thomas mall this wrote this --malthus wrote this book that said if you're population does this the economy will crash. we think it has been a virus that has infected our culture, that we will run out of stuff. bill marr talks about, we have too many people. aoc says it's not ok to have children. there has never been a time in the history of humanity where we have been able to have abundance to have more children. that's really true. >> paul ehrlich of population bomb never publicly apologized for getting it wrong or did he cut the check? >> he cut the check. i saw an interview with him the other day. he said, i was not extreme enough. i am still right. it's like, paul, there is still time to recant, i guess. >> you were born in 1955. i was born in 1960. how has our economic world changed? in our lifetime? >> we have data back to 1960 that we can analyze. i am 60 years old. every 20 years my life as doubled. my standard of living has doubled every 20 years. i went from one to two to four days. i am really -- i went from one to two 24 to eight. i am eight times better than i was in 1955. what did you have in 1960? you have at least four times that today, you really do. i show my students this and they said, what do you pay for that? i said, $600. what would i have to pay you to never use this again? this is really how much you value it. i can't find a student that will do it for less than $5 million. you have a $5 million in your you can walk around with. how rich are you? how abundant is your life? >> "superabundance: the story of population growth and human flourishing on an infinite war general who commanded the confederate army in northern