Gale Pooley

Senior Fellow, Center on Wealth & Poverty

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

After 96 Years, TV Abundance Continues to Flourish

What Philo T. Farnsworth invented in 1927 has become one of our most beloved products with billions sold.
Gale Pooley
April 11, 2023
Without the innovation of TV, there would be no internet or mobile phones. It is a foundation technology for the age of knowledge discovery.

Healing Peter’s Pessimism

Take Elon Musk’s advice and “look at the numbers”
Gale Pooley
December 3, 2022
While it is easy to be pessimistic if you compare today to utopia, a much better perspective is to look at yesterday and see how far we’ve come in our journey to lift everyone from poverty. We’re experiencing growth in material abundance, time abundance, and choice abundance. Welcome to Superabundance!

A Tale of Two Curves: Physical Life vs. Economic Life

Gale Pooley
October 26, 2022
Our economic lives improve if we are free to continuously add knowledge to our planet’s atoms. Knowledge makes atoms more valuable and more abundant at the same time. To better understand our world, we need to focus on the growth of knowledge instead of the aging of our bodies. We face limits to our mortality, but not limits to the growth in value-creating knowledge.

Superabundance in the Washington Times

A relentless advance toward superabundance
Gale Pooley
September 24, 2022
Escaping grinding deprivation has been the aspiration of humanity since the dawn of time. Now that many of the planet’s peoples are blessed with sufficient means of survival — and some with plenty — a trendy narrative threatens to turn the dream into a nightmare.

Superabundance Day

Gale Pooley
August 31, 2022
Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Gale Pooley's new book "Superabundance" is officially released today. It tells the story of population growth, innovation, and human flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet.

Superabundance

The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet
Gale Pooley
August 31, 2022
Generations of people have been taught that population growth makes resources scarcer. In 2021, for example, one widely publicized report argued that “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 Read More ›

The Greatest Inequality in America

The rich are 58 times richer than the poor.
Gale Pooley
August 23, 2022
Your perspective will determine what you see. If you compare yourself to someone today, you will always be a loser because it is easy to find people that are better off than you. If you compare yourself to people who lived in the past, you will always be a winner.

Refrigerator Abundance

For the time to earn the money to buy one refrigerator in 1956, you get over 13 today. While U.S. population doubled in the last 66 years it takes 85 percent less time to give everyone a refrigerator.
Gale Pooley
August 16, 2022
The next time you open your refrigerator to enjoy a cool beverage or a frozen dessert, thank all of our fellow human beings who work to discover and create little bits of knowledge each day that show up in the innovation abundance all around us.

Are We Running Out?

From 1980 to 2020, every one percent increase in population corresponded to a four percent increase in personal resource abundance and an eight percent increase in global resource abundance.
Gale Pooley
August 4, 2022
Economics is the study of how human beings create value for one another. Value is a function of how intelligently we organize things like atoms, musical notes, words on a page, pictures on a screen, and bits in software. The quantity of things is important, but it’s the value of things that count. And value can change as fast as people can change their minds.

Are We Running Out?

From 1980 to 2020, every one percent increase in population corresponded to a four percent increase in personal resource abundance and an eight percent increase in global resource abundance.
Gale Pooley
August 4, 2022
The quantity of things is important, but it’s the value of things that count. And value can change as fast as people can change their minds.

Elon Musk’s Learning Curves

Can he do for electricity what he's done for rockets and cars?
Gale Pooley
July 26, 2022
Musk is growing car and rocket knowledge every day. If he really wants to advance humanity let’s hope he can turn to generating green clean electricity knowledge next.

Elon Musk’s Learning Curves

Can he do for electricity what he's done for rockets and cars?
Gale Pooley
July 26, 2022
Musk is growing car and rocket knowledge every day. If he really wants to advance humanity let’s hope he can turn to generating green clean electricity knowledge next.

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.

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.

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.