[PREMIERING 9PM ET] Gale Pooley: Resources Are Actually Becoming More Abundant, Not Less—Here’s Why

“We buy things with money, but we really pay for them with our time. And so, that says that there’s really two prices: there’s the money price, but there’s also a time price. Money prices are expressed in dollars and cents, but time prices are expressed in hours and minutes.”

Gale Pooley is a former professor of business management at Brigham Young University in Hawaii, and the co-author of “Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.”

“The economic underlying numbers of our fundamental basic commodities … that really give us these kinds of lives that we enjoy—those are all becoming much, much more abundant,” says Mr. Pooley.

Contrary to the belief that the world is overpopulated and humans are a burden on our planet, Mr. Pooley argues there’s actually a positive correlation between population and resources.

“As [economist Julian Simon] began to look at the price of things that were non-renewable—copper, chromium, iron—he noticed that these prices have all been decreasing, not increasing. So, with that data, he developed this theory about how things become more abundant,” says Mr. Pooley.

We discuss the flow of resources, wealth as a form of knowledge, and what Mr. Pooley calls the “original sins of economics.”

“The first original sin is that we conflated, or we equated, resources with atoms,” says Mr. Pooley.