Gale Pooley

Senior Fellow, Center on Wealth & Poverty

Archives

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.

More Light Innovation

Gale Pooley
August 30, 2023
The cost of a 1600 lumen LED lightbulb has recently dropped by 25 percent. The new bulb also offers a great innovation. The problem with LED bulbs is that they come in five different shades. Feit Electric’s new light solves this problem by putting a switch on each bulb that lets you pick your preferred shade level. The energy to use this new lightbulb costs 17 percent more, or around 31 cents a year ($2.11 versus $1.80 based on 3 hours per day at 11 cents per kWh.) The new bulb will give you an hour of great light for less than 0.2 cents. Blue-collar workers are currently earning around $35 an hour in compensation (wages and benefits). One hour of work will buy them 18,421 hours of light. Work 1/5th of a second and you get one hour of light. Recall that in 1830 it took three hours …

From 1979 to 2019 Finished Goods Became 761 Percent More Abundant for Upskilling Workers

Gale Pooley
August 8, 2023
35 consumer goods take 54.4% to 94.9% less time to earn the money to buy. Most of us begin our work life as unskilled workers. But we learn new skills every day and this allows us to upgrade to higher-paying jobs. In a word, we enjoy career mobility. This is why it is important to follow a person’s path through their economic life.  We create categories to divide populations into groups. Categories can provide useful demographic snapshots. Categories don’t change but people move through categories throughout their lives. This is why in many cases it makes more sense to look at individuals instead of categories. We talk about this issue here. We looked at the time prices of 35 finished goods for workers who started out as unskilled workers and moved up to …

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 and Marian Tupy
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.

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
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.

Work Less, Earn More, Live Longer

From 1856 to 1981 men in the U.K. got 174,720 more hours to enjoy life while incomes rose 383 percent.
Gale Pooley
July 19, 2022
In 1856 men in the U.K. had a life expectancy of around 58 years, or 502,860 life hours. According to a study by Professors Jesse Ausubel and Arnulf Grübler, over the course of their lives, these men typically spent around 30 percent of their time, or 149,700 hours working.

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.