Gale L. Pooley is an associate professor of business management at Brigham Young University-Hawaii. He has taught economics and statistics at Alfaisal Univerity in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Brigham Young University-Idaho; Boise State University; and the College of Idaho. Pooley has held professional designations from the Appraisal Institute, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, and the CCIM Institute. He has published articles in National Review, [...], The American Spectator, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Utah Bar Journal, the Appraisal Journal, Quillette, Forbes, and RealClearMarkets. Pooley is a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute, a board member of [...], and a scholar with Hawaii's Grassroot Institute. His major research activity has been the Simon Abundance Index, which he coauthored with Marian Tupy.

Marian L. Tupy is the editor of [...], a senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and coauthor of the Simon Abundance Index. He specializes in globalization and global well-being and the politics and economics of Europe and Southern Africa. He is the coauthor of Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (Cato Institute, 2020). His articles have been published in the Financial Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Newsweek, the UK Spectator, Foreign Policy, and various other outlets in the United States and overseas. He has appeared on BBC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, and other channels. Tupy received his BA in international relations and classics from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his PhD in international relations from the University of St. Andrews in Great Britain.

Contents

Foreword by George Gilder

Introduction

part one

Thanos's deadly idea: from antiquity to the present and beyond

Chapter 1: Are we in the midst of progress, or are we facing the apocalypse?

Chapter 2: Thanos's intellectual and practical progenitors

Chapter 3: Julian Simon and the bet that made him famous

part two

Measuring abundance: new methodology, empirical evidence, and in-depth analysis

Chapter 4: Introduction to the Simon Abundance Framework

Chapter 5: Personal resource abundance: empirical evidence and analysis

Chapter 6: Population resource abundance: methodology, evidence, and analysis

part three

Human flourishing and its enemies

Chapter 7: Humanity's 7-million-year journey from the African rainforest to the Industrial Revolution

Chapter 8: The Age of Innovation and the Great Enrichment

Chapter 9: Where do innovations come from? The crucial roles played by population growth and freedom

Chapter 10: The enemies of progress from the Romantics to the extreme environmentalists

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendixes

Notes

Index

About the Authors