 and welcome to Hawaii Together on the ThinkTech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm Kelea Ikeena, your host and president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. My guest today is Gail Pooley, a good friend and associate professor of business management at BYU Hawaii and also a Grassroot Institute scholar. Gail has taught for BYU Hawaii and at colleges and universities on the mainland and internationally. He's a fellow of the Discovery Institute and serves on the Foundation for Economic Education Faculty Network. Gail and his colleague Marion Tupi are well known for their work in the Simon Abundance Index which is a measure of how the scarcity of resources has changed over time. Gail joins me today to talk about his new book, Super Abundance, the story of population growth, innovation, and human flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet. What an intriguing title. Gail will also be talking about the implications of his thoughts for Hawaii and the world. Gail, welcome back to the program. So glad to have you today. It's great to be here, Kelea. Thank you for the opportunity. What we've been seeing each other at conferences across the country as you've been taking your message to the world, really. Are you getting a good reception to some of your ideas? Well, we've really been surprised at how pleased people have been with what we have discovered, this idea that as population increases that our resources are increasing at actually a faster rate. And that's really what the book is about. We developed this framework that allows us to look at what we call the time price of things. And that's based on this idea that we buy things with money, but we really pay for them with time. So if we can measure how much time it takes you to earn the money to buy something, we can convert a money price into a time price. For example, that's very fascinating. So I look forward to sharing your book with a lot of people. You know, the world's population is expected to grow to more than eight billion people by the end of this year. There are a lot of people, Gail, who fear that the world cannot sustain that growth. What do you think is creating those concerns? But why do we have such a fear of this? Well, we've had this history of Malthusianism, which is really this idea that was was advanced by Thomas Malthus back in 1798 that population was going to increase. But we could only increase food production at a much lower rate. In other words, food production grew at a linear rate, but population would grow at a geometric rate. And as a consequence of this, we would we would end up kind of collapsing. And this this argument has kind of captivated the minds of much of our culture over the last 200 years. So we saw it kind of rise up again in the 60s with the publication of Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb. We saw it in the early 70s with other books like The Limits to Growth. We saw it in our culture with movies like Soylent Green. And so we've had this idea in the culture that we live in a planet that has a fixed number of atoms. And if you add more people to it, that everybody shares is going to get smaller and smaller. Now, you've actually countered that with your own research. And your first major book on the subject was entitled Super Abundance. Give our viewers a 50,000 foot view of what your primary message is to counter who those we call the prophets of doom. OK. The primary message is that is that economics is not about atoms. It's not about we recognize that there are a fixed number of atoms on the planet. But economics is not about atoms. Economics is about knowledge and what the difference between our age and the stone age is entirely due to this growth and knowledge. Knowledge is what makes atoms valuable. And we don't appear to have any kind of a limit on this ability that we have to discover, create, share and consume knowledge. It's knowledge that makes things valuable. And knowledge comes from human beings. It begins with human beings that have ideas, that those ideas then become inventions and those inventions can become innovations. And so it's really knowledge, the growth and knowledge that we should be focusing on. And we can we can measure that. Well, that's a fascinating thesis. Instead of looking at finite resources and thereby putting a cap on what we can actually produce and envision for the future, we look at knowledge itself and the capacity of knowledge to actually impact the finite resources that are out there. Tell me first a little bit about your co-author, Marion Tupi. Why did you both decide to start writing on this topic? And are there other authors and researchers out there who collaborate with you, who have inspired you? Well, I actually discovered Marion on Twitter. He'd written this nice little article, which was a follow up to this bet that occurred back in the 1980s between Paul Ehrlich, the author of the Population Bomb and an economist, Julian Simon, and they'd made this bet in 1980 about what was going to happen to these five non-renewable metals. It was copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten. And by 1990, the real price of these five metals had dropped by 36 percent. So our initial research question was, would Simon win this bet today? And so we went back to 1980, expanded the set of resources from just these five to 50. So we include energy and food, materials, minerals and metals. And then we also extended the period from 1980 up to that point to 2018. So we made a much larger database to analyze. And then we subjected it to this analysis. We suspected that there would be at least one of these 50 commodities that had become less abundant into our kind of astonishment. Not a single one had become more scarce. In fact, on the average, the time price or the time it takes to earn the money to buy this basket of 50 commodities had fallen by over 70 percent. Now, remember that the world population also grew by almost three billion people over this period. So as as population was increasing, the price of these things were all going down. In other words, they were becoming much, much more abundant. And so that was our initial paper that we did. And we call this the Simon abundance index. And then as a consequence of that paper, we decided we should look at other things as well. So we went and went back further in time, went back to 1850 and found commodity prices and compared them to wages and developed time prices for those. And so Mary and I, Mary and I, he's with the Cato Institute. He and I just developed this great kind of working relationship where we were both very curious about this. And so we would just find these data sets to do this analysis and produce our findings. And that's what what really evolved into the book that we wrote. Well, I read time price quite frequently in the literature that you produce. And it's a new addition to our vocabulary of looking at resources and the future. How would you apply that to some of the struggles that we're facing in the world today? How can we talk more about the value of time price? Well, I think we go back, you know, there are money prices and the money prices, we kind of separate that into nominal prices and real prices. In other words, what's the price today in terms of dollars and cents? And what was it yesterday? And we make these adjustments to try to say, well, inflation is this percent. All inflation is doing is just telling us just how much the price has changed. It's not telling us about the affordability in order to really calculate in the term of something's becoming more or less affordable, you've got to compare it to wages. So what is the price divided by what are the wages? And that ratio really gives you the time price. So if the pizza costs $20 and you're earning $20 an hour, that pizza, the time price is one hour. So money prices are expressed in dollars and cents. Time prices are expressed in hours and minutes. So what we do is we go back in time and determine what the time price is of a product or service and then compare it to what the time price is today. And that percentage change in the time price over time is really the basis for what we should be doing when we're trying to determine if things are becoming more or less abundant. If it takes you half the time to work to earn something today as it did 10 years ago, your life is twice as abundant. Jordan Peterson makes an interesting observation. He says that if you can produce the same amount in half the time, you're twice as smart. You've doubled your knowledge. And that's what we try to do. Yeah, that's what we try to do is we try to. Can you measure the growth and knowledge with time? George Gilder, our friend George Gilder has these three beautiful little principles that he states. He says wealth is knowledge, growth is learning and money is time. And that gives you the basis to derive a theorem that you can measure the growth and knowledge with time. So just look at how much in the fundamental issue is that when you experience innovation, when an innovation happens, it shows up in the economy all over the place. It shows up in lower prices, but it also shows up in higher incomes. And so unless you're looking at the relationship between the price and wages, you're really not fully capturing what innovation is doing. And that's what we attempted to do in the book. It's fully captured innovation. I remember when I was a young man and growing up in elementary school and then even all the way through my early years of college in order to look something up, a very basic fact, something from history or something from philosophy or science, I'd have to get ready to walk to the library. And then I remember back at Northwestern University, I'd have to put my winter clothes on and my cover my chest and fight the snow and get to the library and find out that the book wasn't there. Today, you just pull up your phone and you Google, you Google the question. And it's so much different than before when you talk about the role of time in terms of the measurement of value. Now, there's another value that you and I have talked about a lot. And that is economic freedom. It's an important principle, the extent to which individuals, organizations and countries are free from government control and being able to enter into free will economic decisions with other people and other entities. Now, in your work, I think we see some correlation. Let me ask you this question. Places like India, China and other countries that have very rapidly growing populations also tend to have less economic freedom and relatively high poverty rates. What could these countries learn from the principles of superabundance and has embracing economic freedom helped in the past? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, part of our book is we looked at the economic growth in terms of these time prices for 42 different countries, China and India, both were included in our in our index. And what we really have come down to is this idea that that this growth and knowledge is a function of people times freedom. So you have a country that has a lot of people, but if they don't have much freedom, you're not going to have much innovation because it really is. It's innovation fundamentally starts with this discovery of new knowledge and that requires a culture where freedom is present, the freedom to be able to act on your ideas and then turn that idea into the invention that you are imagining and then having a free market where you can go test that invention to see if it's actually created value or not. As you see these countries with large populations, China and India move toward a more innovation friendly or knowledge creation friendly environment. You're going to see people being able to escape poverty and then make contributions to the rest of us on the planet with their new discoveries. So we're very hopeful that that people will be able to recognize that you know, the governments will be able to recognize, look, if you want to escape poverty, you've got to let people have the freedom to really pursue new knowledge because of wealth is knowledge. What do you have to do to give people the incentives and the ability to discover this new knowledge the rest of us all benefit from? Bringing the conversation a little bit closer to home, Gail, you and I both know here in Hawaii that a lot of people think that there are too many people in the islands that we are actually overpopulated for some time, some organizations and government agencies actually communicated that our population was growing. When, in fact, we look at the data and find that over the last decade, our population has started to decline and is projected to decline further in the next several years. What kinds of problems does it pose for Hawaii that we have a declining population? How does that actually how do you think that's going to impact our islands? Well, I'm not an expert on Hawaii, but I can tell you from the perspective of how do we create more knowledge? It fundamentally starts with human beings that have this freedom. So when Hawaii becomes less and less attractive, you have fewer and fewer people here that can work on solving the problems and creating the new ideas you need to be able to to create this wealth around us. And knowledge has this interesting characteristic that if someone comes up with an idea in San Jose or New York, that the knowledge can come to Hawaii. But what Hawaii is missing out on is those individuals that are here with us to help us in this discovery of new knowledge. When they leave their ability to share and create ideas with people around them, also lives with them. So we're we're losing this asset to another part of the planet. Wouldn't you say that Hawaii could in some ways be a laboratory, a Petri dish, so to speak, for testing theories such as the theory as to whether or not population increase is bad for a place? There are there's no lack of individuals claiming that the resources of Hawaii are being used up rapidly and just can't sustain a growing population here. What are we discovering about that? Well, what we discover is typically when you have people and they have the freedom to be able to innovate, they discover more resources. You don't use up resources. You create resources. So Hawaii's ability to attract population that are creative, that have imaginations of that asset that Hawaii has could be leveraged into creating an environment that's much more open to to this creativity and knowledge creation. This idea that if we add more people to the island, I mean, look at where the island was a hundred years ago compared to today and ask yourself, is Hawaii richer today in terms of our standard of living, what our lives are like? Then it was a hundred years ago. I wake up every morning and I'm just I'm just astonished that I live on a chain of semi dormant volcanoes in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And I have air conditioning and I've got a Costco. And it's just and that's all the consequence of human beings being able to adapt and be creative and be able to turn liabilities into assets to be able to discover new ways of taking these liabilities and adding knowledge to them. And suddenly they become a very valuable asset to the rest of us. Well, talking about energy and liabilities, you know, Hawaii has among the highest gasoline prices in the nation. And it just seems that the oil prices will continue to rise. And we're dependent upon importing this. Are we going to forever pay higher prices at the pump? That's possible. But is that due to is that due to a fundamental physical challenge in energy or is it due to a political environment? If you have the Jones Act, if you have other things that are going on politically on the planet that prevent this ability to to acquire energy, you could have a challenge. I've always advocated that if Hawaii wants to be a laboratory, they should be a laboratory of of a green, clean energy state which uses nuclear power. If we're really concerned about lowering CO2 and minimizing the amount of land that's necessary to create energy, it's got to be nuclear. The innovations recently with these micro small nuclear plants, Hawaii could really lead the nation in in how you can create an independent an energy, a self-reliant and green place for growth using nuclear innovations. So I mean, it'd be lovely if we had the electricity rates that we knew were going to be, you know, 10 and 12 cents a kilowatt hour instead of 30 and 40 cents a kilowatt hour like Idaho and some of these other places who have access to much lower energy costs. Hawaii has this ability to do this if they open themselves up to these emerging innovations that are occurring in the nuclear energy industry. I live up here at La Yie and I see the windmills and the land that was used to develop that and what it looks like. And I just you take the most expensive land on the planet to build windmills that do not produce the kind of reliability that you need that require redundant energy systems down in Honolulu to be able to support. It's just it's really unfortunate. You know, there are many metropolitan areas across the nation that benefit from the fact that large populations can come and go so that you have a higher levels of commerce and diversification of industry and so forth. Do you think that the push to limit the population in Hawaii has a negative impact upon whether we can diversify economies and be less dependent upon merely one or two major industries? Right. When you when you limit the population, I mean, who are you going to limit? Who are you going to say can't come to Hawaii? I think you've got to be open to the idea is we want to be an attractive place for the most creative, innovative people on the planet to come and and live and work and contribute here if possible. And people that have that kind of creativity are also going to want to live in a place where they have other people around them and they have services and resources that that will give them the kind of life that they want to enjoy. And when you limit the number of people, I mean, I have several of my friends that have left the island because they just they lost their businesses through covid and they've had to leave. And it's a tragedy that I think those people have left the value that they were creating disappeared with them. So Hawaii's got to be open to the idea that we want to be this attractive, beautiful place for people that want to come and and create new value for the rest of us. Well, Gail, many popular reviewers, including the Economist magazine or author Jordan Peterson, have given positive reviews of super super abundance. What are the academics saying? And what are you also hearing in the media in general? Well, we've had a number of academics review the book. We had several of our economists that Harvard had looked at the book pre-publication, the manuscript. And we were, you know, very concerned that we had made the mistake somewhere in the in the in the analytical framework of the equations or that the data wasn't sufficient. And so it's gone through pretty heavy review from academic peers. And then it was reviewed by a couple of Nobel Prize winning economists, Angus Deaton and Paul Romer. We've also had a number of other, you know, academics that looked at it. It's not. We've also had Jason Furman, who was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama. He reviewed it and gave it high marks. So I think it's really a message to everyone that, you know, irrespective of what may what political party you might be affiliated with. The story is this planet, human beings on this planet have been able to to continue to increase our abundance through all kinds of these kind of tragedies, wars or recessions. We continue to grow at about three to four percent a year. And if you can grow at that rate, you're going to double abundance every 20 years. And that's what that's what the story is that I think we need to be able to recognize this is what's been happening. And if we can continue to do this going forward, we should expect this growth going forward as well. Well, that's certainly optimistic news for the world and for those of us in Hawaii. And I want to thank you and your co-author for the work that you're doing in the book, Super Abundance. Thank you so much for being on the program again and wish you the very best. Gail, my guest. All right. All right. Thanks. Terrific. And everybody, this is Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii together. Until next time, I wish you a great aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at think.kawaii.com Mahalo.