Rationally Optimistic on Earth Day: An Abundant Future

I’d like to propose a new, liberating anthem for Earth Day, it’s “Getting Better” by the Beatles.  

Paul McCartney sings: “I used to get mad at my school, the teachers who taught me weren't cool.”  In my reimagining, the teachers aren’t cool, because they’re full of hot air, using Earth Day and other instances to ingrain students with a crisis mentality about a dystopian future for the planet, in which overpopulation leads to crippling scarcity, and human industry unleashes environmental disaster, that makes earth uninhabitable.

Students who absorb this narrative are understandably terrified, depressed, and as described by the Beatles song, mad: “I used to be angry a man, Me hiding my head in the sand.”  But then: “You gave me the word, I finally heard, I'm doing the best that I can.”

For me, that word comes from Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley, authors of Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.  I  interviewed Tupy about the book on an episode of The Atlas Society Asks, and came away singing: “I've got to admit it's getting better, A little better all the time.”

Tupy and Poole created the Simon Abundance Index (SAI), which tracks how much more available basic resources have become as the global population grows. It crunches the numbers on 50 everyday commodities and compares that to how many people are on the planet, giving us one simple score.

The index starts in 1980 with a base value of 100. By 2024, it had jumped to 618.4—which means resources are now over five times more abundant than they were 44 years ago.

All 50 tracked resources became more plentiful during that time. On average, global resource abundance grew at about 4.2% a year, meaning it doubles roughly every 17 years.

Figure 1: The Simon Abundance Index, 1980–2024 

With the SAI, the authors draw their inspiration from the work of Julian Simon, an economist from the University of Maryland and a fellow at the Cato Institute. While many people assume that if the population keeps growing, we’ll eventually run out of stuff. Simon found the opposite: as the world’s population grew, resources actually became more abundant.

How is that even possible? According to the authors: “Simon recognized that atoms, without knowledge, have no economic value. Knowledge transforms atoms into resources—and the supply of undiscovered knowledge is limitless. He also understood that only humans can discover and create new knowledge. Therefore, resources can be effectively infinite, and humans are the ultimate resource.”

The key takeaway: Humans aren’t a drain on resources—we are the resource. We're the ones who discover, innovate, and find new ways to make more out of less.

The authors give us an example about how innovation -- and trade -- led to advances in agricultural productivity, which in turn fueled population growth: 

“Before the 19th century, agriculture relied heavily on manure for fertilization, limiting crop yields due to its low nitrogen content. As populations grew, farmers sought more potent alternatives. In the early 1800s, guano—bird droppings rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—was discovered on islands off the coast of Peru. Its extraordinary effectiveness led to a global guano trade boom, fueling industrial agriculture in Europe and America. By the late 19th century, however, supplies started to dwindle.”

“The breakthrough came in the early 20th century with the Haber–Bosch process, developed by the German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. This method allowed for the synthetic fixation of atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, producing fertilizer on an industrial scale. It decoupled food production from natural nitrogen sources, revolutionizing agriculture and enabling the rapid expansion of global populations. It is estimated that without synthetic fertilizer, the planet’s food production would be able to support only four billion rather than eight billion people.”

Time Prices: Length of Time Working to Buy Something 1980-2024

Back in 2017, when Tupy was working on a paper updating Simon’s early wager to 2017, he got a call from someone who would end up becoming his co-author, Gale Pooley, who asked:  “What would happen if you looked at the terms of the wager from the perspective of wages? In other words, don't just adjust for inflation, see what's happening to people's wages”  And that’s what led to their revolutionary innovation of “time prices.” In our interview, Tupy explained time prices this way: 

“Time prices are basically how many minutes or hours of work you have to work in order to earn enough money to buy something. And if in 10 years time the number of minutes falls from five to four or to three, then you are getting better off in life.” Why is this an innovation over nominal prices and real prices?  Because those “do not take into account the productivity gains in human labor. So if you are looking at an item, let's say, a can of water or can of Coke over a period of 20 years, well, it can tell you that in terms of real price, it hasn't changed or it has slightly increased or slightly fell. But if your wages in those 20 years have increased twofold or threefold, then of course you are getting ahead in life at a much faster pace than the real price would suggest”

He gave the example of buying a Hershey bar: if it costs you a dollar, and you are making $10 an hour, then you can get 10 Hershey bars for an hour of labor -- or to put it differently, you have to work six minutes for one Hershey bar.  Let’s say that in a decade, the price of the Hershey bar has doubled to $2.  But if in that time, your wages have tripled from $10 to $30, now one hour of labor buys you 15 Hershey bars -- or you have to work only four minutes for one bar. In this way time prices factor in gains in productivity, measuring the true cost of things.

When Tupy and Poole looked at the changes in time prices for individual commodities between 1980 and 2024, they found a stunning average decrease of more than 70 percent.  As illustrated in the chart below, this decrease ranged from −2.9 percent for oranges to −85.2 percent for lamb. As they put it: “That means that the average inhabitant of the planet saw their personal resource abundance increase by 238.1 percent, ranging from 2.9 percent for oranges to 573.6 percent for lamb. Put differently, the same length of work that allowed the average inhabitant of the planet to purchase 1 unit in our basket of 50 commodities in 1980 allowed him or her to buy 3.381 units in 2024”.

Or sticking with their fertilizer example: the time price of fertilizer has fallen by 56.4 percent since 1980. The amount of time an average human would have to work to purchase 1 unit of fertilizer in 1980, now allows him  to buy 2.2 units in 2024, -- a whopping 120 percent increase.

To the extent that protectionist policies put up barriers to the free trade in such innovative products -- whether Peruvian bird poop or industrial fertilizer -- that raises time prices.  Tariffs  artificially raise the cost of goods. That means people have to work more to buy the same thing.  By contrast, when countries trade freely, they can focus on what they do best (comparative advantage). That makes goods cheaper and more efficiently produced, lowering time prices.

Figure 2: Individual Commodity Percentage Change in Time Price and Percentage Change in Abundance, 1980–2024

But what happened to the global population during this time frame?  Between 1980 and 2024  the global population increased by nearly 83 percent, rising from 4.444 billion to 8.126 billion.  A Malthusian lens would have predicted greater scarcity -- more mouths chasing a static number of goods, with higher demand leading to higher prices.  But as the authors note, the personal resource abundance increased by 238.1 percent during this time frame.  That number (+1), multiplied by the percentage change in population (+1)  is how they arrive at the SAI score.

While the Malthusians paint a gloomy future of a future of inexorable scarcity, the more optimistic future suggested by the SAI shouldn’t lead us to take future abundance for granted.  Cataclysmic events -- whether natural (e.g. meteor hits or volcanic explosions) or manmade (e.g. socialism or the lockdowns during Covid) can lead to market disruptions.  

To use the latter example, when asked during our interview how much lockdowns knocked the abundance index off its upward trajectory, Tupy estimated two to five years: “Both in terms of economic productivity, but also in terms of life expectancy, for example. Also in terms of poverty or reduction around the world. It's tough to estimate, but I would say between two and five years.”  He continued:

“Lockdowns and wars and pathogens, things like that. It is very important within the context of this question to reemphasize that the line of human progress is not smooth. It is jagged…very often human beings make two steps forward, one step back, three steps forward, two steps back, et cetera.”

He observes that even with the 20th century being the bloodiest century in human history, Yet even at the end of that history, “as a species, we were richer than in 1900. We were better educated. We lived longer, we were healthier, we had more political rights—certainly women who were much better treated in 2000 than they were 1900.”  And to Tupy, that’s a testament to “the resilience of the species to cope, and to move forward so long as a certain fraction of humanity is able to live in freedom and come up with all of these technological changes which drive human progress forward.”

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand gives us one of the most compelling fictional illustrations of civilizational collapse brought on by socialist policies driven by irrationality, envy and resentment.  Were the SAI measuring the impacts of such insane policies, like the “Anti-Dog Eat Dog” rules, productivity and abundance would have seemingly been sent into a death spiral. 

But an intuitive understanding of the way the world works saved Hank Rearden from despair, when he said to Dagny: "All that lunacy is temporary. It can't last. It's demented, so it has to defeat itself. You and I will just have to work a little harder for a while, that's all." 

Hank, and the other creative men and women of the mind who’d gone on strike against the sacrificial policies being imposed upon them by withdrawing their productive energies from society became Tupy’s “certain fraction of humanity,” those few capable of coming up “with all of these technological changes which drive human progress forward.”

Our challenge, and opportunity, is to embrace the values that lead to a society and economy in which we maximize the “steps forward” and minimize the “steps back.”  That includes rejecting a zero-sum mindset that flirts with protectionism in favor of freer trade, which delivers faster innovation + broader specialization = cheaper goods in less time.

If we do so we can raise our videos in chorus:

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Getting so much better all the time

It's getting better all the time (Better, better, better)

It's getting better all the time (Better, better, better)

Getting so much better all the time

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