“THIS UNIVERSE IS finite. Its resources, finite. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist.” So declares the Marvel supervillain Thanos near the end of Avengers: Infinity War, when he destroys half of humanity with the snap of his fingers.
In Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, Marian L. Tupy of the Cato Institute and Gale L. Pooley of Brigham Young University–Hawaii note that Thanos was channeling millennia-old critiques of progress and population growth. In the best-known version of this argument, the English political economist Thomas Malthus contended that an increase in the number of people inevitably means famine and starvation.
But Malthus—and Thanos—are wrong. The past 200 years have seen historically huge increases in the number of people living on planet Earth, taking us from 1 billion in 1800 to 8 billion in 2022, but we are flourishing more than ever before and living longer, more productive lives.
In December, Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Tupy and Pooley. They discussed how the real prices of our most basic necessities—and most of our luxury goods—have declined over time and how free markets and human innovation make our planet infinitely bountiful.
Reason: Who is Julian Simon and why is he so important?
Pooley: Julian Simon actually was this obscure economist. There was a book that was published in 1968 by Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich titled The Population Bomb. And [Ehrlich] makes these claims about how we’re facing this extinction because there are too many people. Julian actually said that when he originally read the book, he thought, well, this theory seems to be reasonable. But as he began to check the facts, what he discovered, to his surprise, is that as the population increased, all these resources became even more abundant.
So he and Ehrlich began to have this quite public dispute about what
