Gale Pooley

Gale L. Pooley is an associate professor of business management at Brigham Young University-Hawaii. He has taught economics and statistics at Alfaisal University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Brigham Young University-Idaho, Boise State University, and the College of Idaho.

Dr. Pooley earned his BBA in Economics at Boise State University. He did graduate work at Montana State University and completed his PhD at the University of Idaho. His dissertation topic was on the Knowledge Acquisition Preferences of the CEOs of the Inc. 500.

In 1986 he founded Analytix Group, a real estate valuation and consulting firm. The Analytix Group has performed over 5,000 appraisals in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Dr. Pooley has held professional designations from the Appraisal Institute, the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, and the CCIM Institute.

He has published articles in National Review, HumanProgress, The American Spectator, FEE, the Utah Bar Journal, the Appraisal Journal, Quillette, and RealClearMarkets.

Dr. Pooley is a Fellow with the Discovery Institute and serves on the board of HumanProgress.org. He also serves on the Foundation for Economic Education Faculty Network and is a Scholar with Hawaii's Grassroot Institute. He is also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. He has presented at FreedomFest and the COSM Technology conference.

His major research activity has been the Simon Abundance Index, which he co-authored with Dr. Marian Tupy.

Archives

Cordless Drills on Sale: Buy One, Get 41.8 Free

_{Since 1961 when they were first introduced, the time price of a cordless drill has fallen by 97.7 Percent}_{Gale Pooley
May 18, 2022}

Technically speaking, the first “cordless” drill was called a bit and brace drill invented hundreds of years ago. You can still buy one of these classics at Amazon for around $57.

Elon Musk Gets an A in Econ. Janet Yellen Gets a D-

_{63 million more Americans would increase GDP per capita by $20,000 and GDP by $12 trillion.}_{Gale Pooley
May 13, 2022}

Elon Musk and Julian Simon are right. Janet Yellen and Thanos are wrong. More human beings create much more wealth for all of us to enjoy, if given the freedom to innovate by learning and discovering new valuable knowledge to share in free markets. Invest in people. We pay the highest dividends.

Elon Musk Gets an A in Econ. Janet Yellen Gets a D-

_{63 million more Americans would increase GDP per capita by $20,000 and GDP by $12 trillion.}_{Gale Pooley
May 13, 2022}

Even With Historic High Gasoline Prices, You Get 62 Percent More Miles for the Same Time it Took in 1980.

_{The Time Price of Gasoline per Mile has decreased by 38 percent.}_{Gale Pooley
May 10, 2022}

Yes nominal gas prices are at historic highs, but it’s not the money that counts, it’s your time. Time prices are the true prices.

Visualizing Global Resource Abundance

_{Gale Pooley
April 26, 2022}

Think pizzas. Personal resource abundance is the size of the slice. Global resource abundance is the size of the pie. Global resource abundance is the product of the size of the slice multiplied by the size of the population.

Knowledge vs Doom

_{Gale Pooley
February 24, 2022}

Countering the prevailing narrative of doom, economist Dr. Gale Pooley shows how the incredible power of learning curves has instead brought about an era of unprecedented abundance.

Nailing Innovation

_{Nail productivity has increased by 349,900 percent, in the last 250 years.}_{Gale Pooley
February 23, 2022}

Professor Daniel Sichel from Emory Riddle University has published an interesting paper on nails. He found that before the Industrial Revolution, it took about a minute for a skilled blacksmith or nailsmith to produce one hand-forged nail. Today, a worker can produce 3,500 nails per minute.

Cornpreneurs Save Us From Davos Elites

_{Since 1936 U.S. population increased by 157.8 percent while corn yields increased by 573.1 percent.}_{Gale Pooley
February 1, 2022}

You may want to try a worm with your next meal, but there is no reason to think we are running out of corn or the land to grow the food for making appetizing steaks, wings, and chops.

You get 22 bicycles today for the time price of one in 1910.

_{We have 345 percent more people on the planet today than 1910, but we are enjoying 9,725 percent more global bicycle abundance.}_{Gale Pooley
January 17, 2022}

In 1910 you could buy a bicycle for $11.95 from the Sears Roebuck catalog. This sounds like a good deal until you realize that blue-collar hourly compensation (wages and benefits) was 18 cents an hour. This means that it would take 66.4 hours to earn the money to buy one bicycle.

Visualizing Christmas Abundance

_{The time price of an LG 65" OLED TV has fallen over 75 percent in five years.}_{Gale Pooley
December 21, 2021}

Enjoying a beautiful display has become 305.8 percent more abundant, growing at a compound annual rate of around 32.3 percent a year. If this trend continues, the 65 inch display in 2026 will cost around 16.77 hours of work.

Kitchen Appliance Abundance

_{Comparing time prices in the 1980 Sears catalog to Walmart in 2020 indicates a 729 percent increase in abundance.}_{Gale Pooley
November 16, 2021}

As you prepare your dinner this evening, take a moment and thank the many kitchen appliance innovators who have given every home an extra 47.63 hours of life to enjoy.

The Reason We Are So Rich Is That There Are So Many of Us

_{Larger markets allow fixed costs to approach zero in total cost per unit.}_{Gale Pooley
October 21, 2021}

Adam Smith understood this back in 1776. If you want to get rich, have lots of people you can sell to. Large markets also allow people to develop their skills and specialize in such things as drug and software development.

U.S. Housing Became Much More Affordable Over The Last 40 Years

_{Gale Pooley
June 25, 2021}

Contrary to what your late-night infomercial might be saying, real estate is not just about location, location, location. It is primarily about financing, financing, financing.

Gale Pooley Discusses The Simon Abundance Index on The Human Progress Podcast

_{Gale Pooley
April 22, 2021}

Gale Pooley joined his colleague Marian Tupy to give an annual update on their Simon Abundance Index. Named after University of Maryland economist Julian Simon, the Simon Abundance Index measures the change in abundance of resources over a period of time.

The Changing Cost of Thanksgiving Dinner

_{It's not as bad as you might think.}_{Gale Pooley
November 26, 2020}

On this Thanksgiving Day, let us be thankful for all the American inventors and innovators who enrich our lives with plentiful food and, hopefully, a cure for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Revisiting the Simon-Ehrlich Wager 40 Years On

_{Gale Pooley
October 13, 2020}

And so, as you listen to the purveyors of doom on the television and the radio, and read apocalyptic predictions of humanity’s future on Twitter and in the newspapers, bear in mind that with every hungry mouth comes a pair of hands and a brain capable of thought, planning, and innovation.

Does More People Equal More Abundance? The Myth of Economic Scarcity

_{Jay W. Richards
August 7, 2020}

Economist Gale Pooley challenges the conventional wisdom that we are using up our resources and heading towards what economist Paul Ehrlich called "The Population Bomb."

Discovery Research Fellow Gale Pooley: Are We Doomed to Run Out of Resources?

_{Gale Pooley
February 11, 2020}

Are humans using up Earth’s scarce resources too quickly, posing an existential threat to humanity itself, as the chief villain in the popular movies “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame” believed? No, says Discovery Research Fellow Gale Pooley, an economist and associate professor of business management at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, who more fully explained his answer Monday, Sept. 9th at a luncheon on Maui sponsored by the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. Pooley recently co-authored with Cato Institute senior policy analyst Marian L. Tupy a study, “The Simon Abundance Index: A New Way to Measure Availability of Resources,” showing that Earth’s resources are actually becoming more plentiful.

The Simon Abundance Index

_{A New Way to Measure Availability of Resources}_{Gale Pooley
February 11, 2020}

Are we running out of resources? That’s been a hotly debated question since the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb in 1968. The Stanford University biologist warned that population growth would result in the exhaustion of resources and a global catastrophe. University of Maryland economist and Cato Institute’s Senior Fellow Julian Simon, in contrast, argued that humans would Read More ›