Gale Pooley

Gale L. Pooley teaches U.S. economic history at Utah Tech University. He has taught economics and statistics at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Alfaisal University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Brigham Young University-Idaho, Boise State University, and the College of Idaho. Dr. Pooley serves on the board of HumanProgress.org.

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

Tire Abundance

_{Gale Pooley
June 16, 2025}

Walmart sells the Goodyear Reliant 195/60R15 88V All-Season Tire for $77. Unskilled workers today are earning around $17.17 an hour, indicating a time price of 4.46 hours. For the time it took to earn the money to buy a single tire in 1920, you get 20 of them today.

The Virtues of the “Knowledge Theory of Value”

_{Gale Pooley and George Gilder
May 2, 2025}

Kevin Hoover suggests that William Nordhaus relied on the labor theory of value in his paper on light (Letters, April 24). Yet Nordhaus actually used knowledge, not labor. He offered a method to measure innovation: the discovery and sharing of valuable new knowledge. Nordhaus measured the amount of knowledge per unit of time and observed that knowledge about light was growing exponentially, surpassing traditional measures of economic development. It is the time price over time that truly deserves our attention.

We Should Measure Prices in Time

_{George Gilder and Gale Pooley
April 17, 2025}

How can the laws of enterprise and business consulting diverge so significantly from the accepted wisdom of economic analysis and political rhetoric? More baffling, how is it that products are becoming simultaneously more expensive and more affordable? This paradox is possible because while we buy things with money, we actually pay for them with our time—not in dollars and cents but in hours and minutes of work.

AH (Artificial Horses) Made Farmers 62.5 Times More Productive

_{Gale Pooley
April 14, 2025}

In 1800, the U.S. Census Bureau recorded a population of 5.3 million. Roughly half — about 2.65 million — were farmers. Today, the U.S. population is nearing 340 million, yet the number of farmers has risen only slightly to 2.72 million. Back then, one farmer fed just two people. Today, each farmer feeds 125.

Cruise Ship Billionaires

_{Gale Pooley
March 11, 2025}

Adjusted for inflation, the Icon of the Seas cost 55 times more to build than the Mardi Gras but passengers pay 23 percent less to enjoy. How is this possible? Two words: people and knowledge. More people create larger markets. With a larger market, projects that require a high development or fixed cost become feasible because you can now spread these costs over lots more customers.

The Abundance of the Five Metals in the Simon-Ehrlich Bet

_{Gale Pooley
January 27, 2025}

Between 1900 and 2000, global population grew by 400 percent, from 1.6 billion to 8 billion. During the same period, the production of the five metals soared: chromium increased by an astounding 78,082 percent, copper by 4,062 percent, nickel by 26,918 percent, tin by 226 percent, and tungsten by 4,829 percent. On average, production of these metals rose by an extraordinary 22,823 percent.

The Right Question Is How Much Time Does It Cost?

_{Gale Pooley
January 2, 2025}

One of the reasons we love money is that it makes trading easier. Everyone will take money in a trade. Much harder to trade for shoes or bread or economics lessons. Pricing things in dollars and cents gives us a quick way to calculate how products relate to each other. But money has a fundamental problem.

Time Equality is Rapidly Increasing

_{Gale Pooley
December 9, 2024}

Jordan Peterson’s Rule No. 4 says you should “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” Since we each get exactly 24 hours in a day and no one can buy time (otherwise rich people would never die), isn’t it better to compare differences in how we spend our time?

Things Used to Cost Less but They Were Much More Expensive

_{Gale Pooley
July 24, 2024}

We buy things with money, but we pay for them with our time. This means there is a money price, which is expressed in dollars and cents, and a time price, which is expressed in hours and minutes. A time price is simply the money price divided by hourly wages. Take, for example, the bicycle.

Entrepreneurs Create Abundance. Bureaucrats Create Scarcity.

_{Gale Pooley
July 17, 2024}

Mark Perry does a great chart that illustrates the relative changes in the nominal prices of a variety of products and services. What is the difference between growing abundance and growing scarcity? In a word, government.

Ritz Abundance

_{Gale Pooley
July 9, 2024}

Joseph (Jake) Klein recently wrote a great article about Ritz Crackers. He notes that they were introduced in 1934 at a price of 19 cents for a one pound box. There are around 8.75 crackers per ounce so a 16-ounce box would yield around 140 of the tasty wafers. Ritz outsold every other cracker their first year on the market.

Climate-Related Deaths Down 97 Percent Since 1920s

_{Gale Pooley
June 12, 2024}

Our friend Bjorn Lomborg has updated his chart on climate-related deaths. Since the 1920s the number of deaths has fallen by more than 97 percent. As the global population quadrupled over the century, the risk per million declined from 241 in the 1920s to 1.5 in the 2020s. This is a 99.38 percent decrease.

Strawberries In The U.S. Grew 2,755 Percent More Abundant Since 1960

_{Gale Pooley
May 8, 2024}

Researchers at UC Davis have documented the tremendous growth in yields for strawberries in California. Genetic gains from breeding and production advances increased yields by 2,755 percent from the early 1960s. The strawberry joins wheat, rice, and other staple crops of the Green Revolution.

Money Is Time and Time Flies

_{Gale Pooley
April 15, 2024}

On April 21, 1787, the Congress of the Confederation of the United States authorized a design for an official copper penny, later referred to as the Fugio cent because of its image of the Sun and its light shining down on a sundial with the caption, Fugio. Fugio is Latin for “I flee/fly”, referring to time flying by.

The Abundance of Air Travel Since 1970

_{Gale Pooley
March 27, 2024}

Transcontinental flights were once a luxury. Now they are affordable for almost everyone. Free-market entrepreneurial capitalism isn’t about making more luxuries for the wealthy, it’s about making luxuries common for the average person.

The Good Old Days Were Really Expensive

_{Gale Pooley
March 20, 2024}

We buy things with money but pay for them with our time. Money prices are expressed in dollars and cents, while time prices are expressed in hours and minutes. A time price is simply the money price divided by hourly income.

Coca-Cola Abundance

_{Gale Pooley
March 7, 2024}

Unskilled workers are getting 214.7 percent more than their 1959 counterparts.

Who Is Creating More Value For Society? Jeff Bezos or Bernie Sanders?

_{Gale Pooley
February 7, 2024}

Michael R. Strain of the American Enterprise Institute has noted: Billionaire innovators create enormous value for society. In a 2004 paper, the Nobel laureate economist William D. Nordhaus found “that only a minuscule fraction” – about 2.2% – “of the social returns from technological advances” accrued to innovators themselves. The rest of the benefits (which is to say, almost all of them) went to consumers. If Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is worth $170 billion, then according to Nordhaus, he’s created over $7.7 trillion in value for society. Bezos has made each American around $23,000 richer. But Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders thinks an innovator’s 2.2 percent is too much. Sanders tweeted “Billionaires should not exist.” Continue …

Time Pricing Mark Perry’s Chart of the Century

_{Gale Pooley
January 31, 2024}

Time prices are a better way to measure standards of living.

TVs Versus Degrees

_{Gale Pooley
January 17, 2024}

Government heavily subsidizes demand and restricts supply in higher education. We should not be surprised when this translates into much higher prices.