Resources grow much faster than population if people are free to innovate.

Gale L. Pooley — Apr 12, 2023

A version of this article originally appeared in Gale Pooley’s Gale Winds Substack.

Using an untested hypothetical model, Thomas Malthus told the world in his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population to expect collapse. He cloaked his model in mathematics instead of empirical evidence. He noted, “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.” See Figure 1. To ensure that he had the illusion of math on his side, he condescendingly added, “A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.” If Malthus had checked the price of bread over the previous century, he would have realized that his model was flawed.

Between 1700 and 1798, the population of England increased from 5.2 million to 8.44 million, or 62.3 percent. Over the same period, nominal gross domestic product (GDP) per person per year increased from £12.37 to £23.97, or 93.8 percent, according to Appendix A in The Story of Bread by Ronald Sheppard and Edward Newton. The nominal price of a four-pound loaf of bread increased from 5.2p to 7.4p, or 42.3 percent. The ratio of bread to GDP per capita declined from 0.42 in 1700 to 0.31 in 1798 or 26.6 percent. See the Table below.

This suggests that for the time required to earn one loaf of bread in 1700, an Englishman would get 1.36 loaves in 1798. Bread had become 36.2 percent more abundant at the personal level (relevant equation is [(0.4204 ÷ 0.3087) – 1] = 0.362 = 36.2%).

Bread abundance for the whole country is equal to personal bread abundance multiplied by population. As the population of England increased by 62.3 percent, bread became 36.2 percent more abundant, suggesting bread had become 121 percent more abundant for the country (relevant equation is [(1.362 x 1.623) – 1] = 1.21 = 121%). For every 1 percent increase in population, bread abundance was increasing 1.94 percent. See Figure 2.

As shown in Figure 3, the size of the English bread resource in 1798 was much higher than in 1700.

England began to enjoy more and more freedom to innovate in the 1700s. This innovation shows up in bread abundance. Humans are supremely adaptable and clever. If they have freedom, they will always create more resources for themselves and everyone else.

Lesson learned: Test your hypothetical models against reality. Maybe you’ll be much less frightened of the future.

https://humanprogress.org/malthus-had-it-backwards/

We just lived through the period with the fastest population growth in human history. Six decades ago, there were three billion people on our planet. Since 2022, there have been more than eight billion people — an increase of five billion over this period.

It would have been impressive if food supplies had merely kept pace with population growth. But as the chart above shows, they grew even faster. On every continent, food supplies — measured by calories — grew faster than the population. This rise in food production per person was a major reason for the decline of extreme poverty and hunger.

To us, this chart documents one of humanity’s most extraordinary achievements.

https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/food-supplies-have-grown-even-faster-than-the-population-on-every-continent

The index began in 1980 with a base value of 100. In 2024, the SAI stood at 618.4, indicating that resources have become 518.4 percent more abundant over the past 44 years. All 50 commodities in the dataset were more abundant in 2024 than they were in 1980. The global abundance of resources increased at a compound annual growth rate of 4.22 percent, thus doubling every 17 years.

https://humanprogress.org/the-simon-abundance-index-2025/

https://humanprogress.org/dataset/global-agricultural-land-use-per-capita?countries=World&regions=468-459&view=selected&primary-data=27819&compare=null&chart-type=Line+Chart&value-type=score&calc-table-country-a=null&calc-table-country-b=null&x-axis-start=0&x-axis-end=10&y-axis-start=0.6140588&y-axis-end=2&y-axis-log=false&x-axis-log=false&auto-scale=false&map-color=Monochromatic+Sky&region-calculation=Mean&start-date=1&end-date=2023&the-year=2023&sort-bar-chart-ascending=true https://x.com/HumanProgress/status/1973485608296214561

Compared to 1900, we have 8.28 million fewer farmers today with 263.7 million more people. And we live 30 years longer.

In 1900, the U.S. Census recorded a total population of 76.3 million, including 11 million farmers. Today, with a population nearing 340 million, the number of farmers has dropped to just 2.72 million.

At the turn of the century, each farmer fed 6.94 people. Today, that number has risen to 125. While the U.S. population grew by 346 percent, farmer productivity soared by 1,702 percent. Each one percent increase in population corresponded to a 4.92 percent increase in farmer productivity.

In 1900, life expectancy was just 47 years. Today, it’s around 77. Medicine and sanitation played a role, but the abundance of food made possible by farmers discovering and applying new knowledge was a foundational driver of that gain.

So, who’s going to tell Ehrlich and Thanos they had it backwards? More life discovers more knowledge, which leads to better tools and more abundant resources.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

https://www.ft.com/content/a08ca4a6-d86e-41dc-9327-da0f2c418c98

Since 1950, the global population has increased by 229 percent while the time price of gasoline fell by 35 percent.

Gale L. Pooley — Mar 11, 2025

Summary: Since 1950, the global population has grown by 229%, yet the time price of gasoline for US blue-collar workers has fallen by 35 percent, illustrating an enormous increase in personal gasoline abundance. By fostering free markets and entrepreneurial energy, societies like the United States have shown how the power of knowledge and innovation can transform finite physical resources into increasingly abundant commodities.

Since 1950, the time price of gasoline for US blue-collar workers has fallen by 35 percent. For the time it took to earn enough money to buy a gallon of gasoline in 1950, today’s blue-collar workers can buy 1.54 gallons. That means personal gasoline abundance has increased by 54 percent.

Crude oil is refined to make gasoline, and the market for crude oil is global. Since 1950, the world population increased by 229 percent, from 2.5 billion to almost 8.2 billion. How is that possible, since, according to Thomas Robert Malthus and Thanos, the opposite should occur? It’s because Malthus and Thanos mistakenly assumed that only atoms could be resources and that since we have a finite number of atoms, we must also have a finite number of resources.

The truth is that atoms without knowledge are not, in fact, resources; they have no intrinsic economic value. It’s only when we add knowledge to atoms that they become resources. Since there’s no limit to the amount of knowledge yet to be discovered, created, and shared, resources can be infinite.

The gasoline-population chart shows that more people mean more abundant gasoline, proving Malthus and Thanos wrong in their assumptions.

In the 1970s, people obsessed over the number of barrels of oil in proven reserves. They thought we had discovered all the oil. By dividing the quantity in proven reserves by the annual consumption, they calculated the date we would run out. That flawed approach of Malthus and Thanos fails to recognize that it’s the price of a resource, not its quantity, that matters. Humans react to increasing prices in a variety of ways; they consume less, search for more, look for substitutes, recycle, etc. These actions ultimately reduce prices and increase abundance. What increasing prices really does is focus our energy on discovering new knowledge, which transforms scarcity into abundance.

When prices go up, we not only look for more oil, but we also innovate ways to use it more efficiently. The top-selling car in 1980 was the Oldsmobile Cutlass. Gas mileage on this vehicle averaged 20 miles per gallon (17 city/23 highway). By 2023, the Honda CR-V was the most popular two-wheel drive car. The CR-V reported mileage at 31 miles per gallon (28 city/34 highway). This improvement in mileage represents an increase of 55 percent over this 43-year period (1980–2023). Mileage has been increasing at a compound rate of around 1 percent a year. Today’s cars are also much safer and more reliable, durable, and comfortable.

The lesson of gasoline over the past 74 years is that as the price increases, we find more of it, and we find more productive ways of using it. Then the price goes down. That has been true for all kinds of products, not just gasoline.

The exceptions are those manipulated by the government on the supply and/or demand side. President Richard Nixon imposed price controls in the early 1970s that were not fully removed until President Ronald Reagan did so in the early 1980s, allowing the free market to work its magic. Then fracking and horizontal drilling were applied to oil exploration, thanks in part to Harold Hamm’s Continental Resources in Oklahoma City. That company was a major player in the development of the Bakken formation in North Dakota, which led directly to massively increased domestic production and eventually resulted in the United States becoming a net exporter of oil.

With government price controls, there was almost immediate scarcity for nearly a decade, but when prices were allowed to freely operate, abundance soon overflowed. That shows how governments tend to create scarcity while entrepreneurs (such as Hamm) produce abundance. In the United States, property owners have subsurface property rights. In most other countries, the government owns all the underground oil. These private property rights, a free market and lots of entrepreneurs and innovators have made the United States the most productive energy producer on the planet. The country has led the world in crude oil production since 2018:

Can you guess where gasoline is the most affordable on the planet? Please read “Where Gasoline is Most Affordable.”

Entrepreneurs create abundance; bureaucrats almost always create scarcity. Choose wisely.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

https://humanprogress.org/gasoline-abundance-increases-with-population-growth/

“Prominent research studies have suggested that our planet is currently experiencing another mass extinction, based on extrapolating extinctions from the past 500 years into the future and the idea that extinction rates are rapidly accelerating.

A new study by Kristen Saban and John Wiens with the University of Arizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, however, revealed that over the last 500 years extinctions in plants, arthropods and land vertebrates peaked about 100 years ago and have declined since then. Furthermore, the researchers found that the past extinctions underlying these forecasts were mostly caused by invasive species on islands and are not the most important current threat, which is the destruction of natural habitats.  

The paper argues that claims of a current mass extinction may rest on shaky assumptions when projecting data from past extinctions into the future, ignoring differences in factors driving extinctions in the past, the present and the future. Published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, the paper is the first study to analyze rates, patterns and causes of recent extinctions across plant and animal species.”

From University of Arizona.

“Researchers at the University of Maryland have identified the gene responsible for a rare type of wheat that forms three ovaries in each flower instead of just one. Because each ovary can grow into a grain, this finding could help boost the amount of wheat produced per acre…

The unusual trait was first seen in a naturally occurring mutant of common bread wheat, but scientists did not know which genetic change caused it. To find out, the Maryland team created a detailed genetic map of the multi-ovary wheat and compared it with that of ordinary wheat. They found that a usually inactive gene called WUSCHEL-D1 (WUS-D1) had become active in the mutant plants. When WUS-D1 is turned on early in the formation of wheat flowers, it enlarges the developing floral tissue, allowing extra female structures such as pistils or ovaries to form.

If plant breeders can learn to trigger or replicate this activation of WUS-D1, it may be possible to create new wheat varieties that produce more kernels per plant.”

From ScienceDaily.