Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley have a book, Superabundance. This discusses how prosperity has increased and what this means for pessimistic views of the world. The book is published by the Cato Institute. This is a right-wing think tank in the US, although the institute did not endorse Donald Trump’s view of the US in decline. In fact, the viewpoint of the authors is optimistic to a fault. I’m not a Cato Institute type person so I wondered how much I would agree with them. In the end, I was left with a mixed assessment of their work. (I will talk about writing style in the next post). There are certainly things they say that seem sensible. Their analysis of Time Prices is useful but it isn’t everything. It is a massive book — at the end of the book they even express surprise that readers will have stayed with them the whole way — but the book still leaves out some important things.
Where Are The Authors Coming From?
The authors believe in the power of capitalism to improve society — you can see why the Cato Institute would support this book. It describes how goods are becoming cheaper despite the fact that there are many more people on the planet. They use this analysis to reject the idea of pressures on the world’s resources caused by overpopulation.
Throughout their book is a strong belief in capitalism. They credit markets with much of the progress that we have seen. Some things make sense but their arguments can have a circular quality. For example, I got the impression they thought
- 1) Betamax (a competitor with VHS video tapes) was a bad tech because it failed in the market, and
- 2) that markets being perfect at giving people what they want was shown by the failure of Betamax.
Exactly what role markets — versus regulation, versus democracy, versus education, versus other stuff — have in the progress they point to is an interesting question. They largely make assumptions about what exactly causes the progress, rather than make a strong argument. Still, that doesn’t mean they are wrong when they point to significant progress.
Time Prices Are Useful But Not Everything
The book is really an introduction, a conclusion, and a lot of tables in the middle. I believe they put a lot of work into the time prices that they show. The heart of the book is a lot of data about how resources have gotten cheaper compared to the wages that various types of workers might hope to gain for an hour’s labor. If you are the sort of person who wants to know how much lead a semi-skilled laborer could buy from an hour’s labor over every year in the last century this is the book for you.
Abundance is failing prices compared to labor. Superabundance, to them, is time prices falling more as the population rises. They make interesting observations along those lines. It certainly helps to combat the argument that we will inevitably run out of stuff soon (see here). That said, causation in their work is not properly tackled. At their boldest, they suggest population growth causes prices to fall through the extra innovation driven by having more people. Unfortunately, there isn’t a detailed argument about how exactly this happens. Nor an attempt to add nuance. Are there any scenarios where extra population would not provide sufficient innovation to compensate for the extra numbers?
What Don’t Time Prices Show?
Time prices are useful but not everything. Externalities are not dealt with in the book. This is a massive omission. Many concerns about the market not doing a great job at ensuring continued progress revolve about what the market doesn’t cover, e.g., sick people can’t work to buy the stuff they need. The authors don’t cover any such concerns. It is pretty hard to complain, as they do, that people are too worried about stuff when you don’t address what the people are worried about. Maybe the worriers are wrong and the authors are right, but showing the time price of butter over time isn’t ever going to demonstrate that either way.
Lack Of Specifics
Where I was underwhelmed was in their lack of specifics. This is especially true in the introduction and conclusion sections where they mostly just ramble about their thoughts. They are against confiscatory taxes and for sensible regulation as am I, but they didn’t say what that meant by that. I was left thinking that we probably disagree pretty strongly about what level a tax becomes confiscatory or when a regulation ceases to be sensible.
They complain about the secular-religious aspect of environmentalism but have a bit of that themselves when talking about free markets.
In a free economy, nobody sets prices. They emerge spontaneously through the revealed preferences of individual buyers and sellers.
Tupy and Pooley (2022) page 155
Unfortunately, I know people who set prices, so this statement seems obviously wrong about human society in practice and is easily shown to be wrong given people do literally set prices for a living. Maybe the economy isn’t free, and never has been because people have always set prices. The problem for them is that if they don’t exist then free markets logically can’t take all the credit for any progress. The world is much more complicated than their theory.
What To Do Next?
There wasn’t really anything actionable in the book which was a little disappointing after wading through so, so, so many tables of time prices. They said they were concerned about environmental issues but didn’t seem to share anything meaningful to be done to aid the environment. Positive views of the world run the risk of being complacent, and there seems little in this book to suggest that they aren’t simply complacent.
It is great that we have made so much progress. The tables of time prices are interesting, but they aren’t everything.
For more on Malthus and Ehrlich see here, here, and here.
Read: Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley (2022) Superabundance: The Story Of Population Growth, Innovation, And Human Flourishing On An Infinitely Bountiful Planet, Cato Institute