Superabundance: Combatting the Ideology of Scarcity

Conventional wisdom has long posited that population growth leads to scarcer resources. In 2021, for example, one widely publicized report argued, “The world’s rapidly growing population is consuming the planet’s natural resources at an alarming rate . . . the world currently needs 1.6 Earths to satisfy the demand for natural resources . . . [a figure that] could rise to 2 planets by 2030.” But is that true?

Join us on Thursday, May 4 for a reception and lecture as Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Gale Pooley discusses his new book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. Contrary to the anti-human theory of overpopulation, Pooley and his coauthor Marian Tupy found that resources actually became more abundant as the population grew. This is because every new person represents something more than just another mouth to feed. They are also another mind that can spur innovation and economic growth.

At a time when alarmists are stoking fear about overpopulation, Superabundance reminds us that human beings are not a problem, they are a solution.

Praise for Superabundance

For centuries, the ivory towers of academia have echoed this sentiment of multitudinous ends and limited means. In this supremely contrarian book, Tupy and Pooley overturn the tables in the temple of conventional thinking. They deploy rigorous and original data and analysis to proclaim a gospel of abundance. Economics ― and ultimately, politics ― will be enduringly transformed.

George Gilder

There are those who wish for scarcities, and who work to inhibit economic growth, so that government can claim an excuse to ration this and that. Happily, they have met their match in Tupy and Pooley, who demonstrate that population growth is not a problem, it is the solution — the most important resource.

George Will

With great writing and a mountain of good evidence, Tupy and Pooley remind us that we are immeasurably better off than our ancestors. In this day of pestilence, war, and climate change, we need that reminder, and we can hope that the doom-mongers will be wrong about the future, just as they have always been wrong about the past.

Angus Deaton, Nobel Prize-Winning Economist