Superabundance Quotes

“Contrary to what many people have been expecting, the growth of the human population from roughly 1 billion in 1800 to 7.8 billion in 2020 has not been accompanied by a lowering of living standards but by an explosion in material abundance. If you approach this volume with an open mind, you will be astounded by the progress that humanity has made, especially over the last 200 years or so. The book will affirm the moral and practical value of every additional human being, leave you appreciative of the abundance that you are enjoying today, and even hopeful about the future fate of humanity”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“The ultimate resource is people—skilled, spirited, and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so inevitably for the benefit of us all.13”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“If consumers dematerialize their intensity of use of goods and technicians produce the goods with a lower intensity of impact, people can grow in numbers and affluence without a proportionally greater environmental impact.”52”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“From the vantage point of people living in advanced societies today, most past humans faced almost unimaginable hardships. Violence, disease, and starvation, which still bedevil the lives of the unfortunates living in some of the world’s poorest countries, were compounded by deep and universal ignorance.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“Reason, we contend, is needed to reveal the quasi-religious role that the belief in the coming of an environmental apocalypse plays in the lives of many well-meaning but increasingly unreasonable individuals. Evidence, we insist, provides rational grounds for cautious optimism about the state of the planet.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“progress is not about comparing the world we live in with utopia. It is about comparing today with the past, and the past was much more violent than the present.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“Progress does not mean that we will ever reach a paradisiacal end state where everything will be optimal for everyone everywhere. New problems will arise, and they will have to be solved, however imperfectly, by future generations. As such, the world will never be a perfect place. After all, the beings who inhabit it are themselves imperfect. As the German philosopher and advocate of gradual human progress Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) observed in 1784, “From such crooked timber as humankind is made of nothing entirely straight can be made.”
― Marian L Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“The environmental left has now worshipfully adopted Malthus, not on fresh scientific evidence but on the mathematical “logic” that “resources must” be limited. (Such evidence-free logic, requiring no wearisome study of the social sciences or of social facts, might explain why a mechanical environmentalism appeals to so many physical and especially biological scientists.) Forget about Marx, says the new left of 2010. Hurrah for Malthus.93”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“Unfortunately, our negativity biases also make us underappreciate or ignore the real progress that humans have made in tackling environmental problems in the past. Furthermore, they militate against an attitude of rational optimism about our ability to solve environmental problems in the future.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“Other aspects of human capital include integrity and trust. As Warren Buffett has remarked, “I look for three things in a person: intelligence, and a high energy level, and integrity. If they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you.”47 Being worthy of trust is one of the most valuable human capital traits one can possess.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“Today, it’s clear that what separates humans from all other species is innovation.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“people without historical perspective are at a massive disadvantage. Instead of being grateful for all the good things in their lives, they are resentful because of the things that they lack but others have. Acquisition of a historical perspective is not only prudent from a logical standpoint as the best way to measure progress; it is also conducive to happiness.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“What’s needed to address current and future problems is freedom and brainpower, and that leads us to the fourth problem with neo-Malthusian thinking. Limiting population growth not only limits brain power; it also means social engineering and violence.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“The arrival of modernity was also accompanied by fundamental social changes. The end of old certainties, including rigid hierarchies that limited social mobility and religious beliefs that could not withstand the onslaught of scientific discoveries, proved profoundly disorienting to the public in general and intellectuals in particular. The rise of the bourgeoisie, and the concomitant diminution in the power and prestige of the nobility and the clergy, led to a great deal of envy and resentment. The weakening and the eventual retreat of traditional religion led to the rise of pseudoreligious fads like spiritualism and mesmerism, as well as alternative explanations of history and of “man’s role in the universe.” The void left behind by the collapse of the ancien régime would eventually be filled by a plethora of new theories, including racism, national socialism, communism, and, most recently, an increasingly militant strand of environmentalism.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“For this new battle we need a new economics. Above all we need an economics that can not only explain economic growth but vindicate it. We need an economics of mind, an economics of information grounded in the truth that the growth of recent centuries has been achieved not by ravishing “natural” resources but by regenerating them, not by accumulating matter but by replacing it with mind, not by wasting energy but by using it more ingeniously. Information theory shows that we accumulate wealth not by stealing from the earth but by adding to our store of knowledge. We need an economics of information. Superabundance is the pioneering text on this new frontier of economic truth. George Gilder”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“Only in ex-communist countries did an increase in income inequality reduce the subjective well-being of the older generation that grew up under communism, while increasing (or having no effect on) the subjective well-being of the succeeding generations.7”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“They expressed “confidence in the ability of humans and their technologies to overcome any problems—including environmental problems” and to “shape the natural world for [humanity’s] own benefit.”36 Desrochers and Szurmak identify four main arguments against population controls. First, “a larger population that engages in trade and the division of labor will deliver greater material abundance per capita.” Second, “human creativity can deliver increasing returns.” Third, “standards of living are not constrained by local resources.” Fourth, “past achievements are grounds for cautious optimism.”37”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“Our studies suggest that when the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it, and this can cause us to mistakenly conclude that it hasn’t actually gotten better at all. Progress, it seems, tends to mask itself.”133”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“the defense of free markets will remain a never-ending struggle because of the predispositions of the stone-age mind.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), a hypothesis with a large following in the field of economics, the environment worsens in tandem with economic growth until a certain income per person is reached. At that point, resources start flowing toward environmental protection, and the ecosystem is restored.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“To innovate, people need to have faith in the future. A stable currency is a vital component of a stable society. Between 1700 and 1914, to give one example, Great Britain generated an immense amount of economic progress. George Gilder pointed out that along with transforming physics and co-developing calculus, the English polymath Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) also served as the master of the mint. During his tenure, Great Britain moved to the gold standard, which ensured the stability of the pound sterling and provided the monetary structure of the British Empire during one of the greatest periods of economic growth ever experienced by the human race.55”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“people who still live in societies that are socially immobile or antagonistic to entrepreneurship are typically disincentivized from investing in their own futures. Why, for example, should a person study (invest in his or her future) if university tenure is awarded on the basis of nepotism rather than on merit? Why should a person build a business if that enterprise can be stolen by a well-connected army general? So, the organization and reorganization of human capital also depend on an idea, namely, on the idea of progress or the belief that the future can be better for individuals and their descendants.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“people test their inventions in the marketplace. An innovation, therefore, is a market-successful (or, to use Deirdre McCloskey’s term, “trade-tested”) invention. This distinction between invention and innovation is imperative. People invent a lot of things, many of which are useless or even harmful.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“we should not sacrifice technological, scientific, and medical progress on the altar of “niceness.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“The main ingredient in the secret sauce that leads to innovation is freedom. Freedom to exchange, experiment, imagine, invest, and fail; freedom from expropriation or restriction by chiefs, priests, and thieves; freedom on the part of consumers to reward the innovations they like and reject the ones they do not. Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom1”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“Child labor was once ubiquitous. Take, for example, ancient Rome. As University of Cambridge classicist Mary Beard noted in her 2015 book, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, “Child labour was the norm. It is not a problem, or even a category, that most Romans would have understood. The invention of ‘childhood’ and the regulation of what work ‘children’ could do only came fifteen hundred years later and is still a peculiarly Western preoccupation.”55”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“When basic things get more abundant, it’s the poor who benefit the most. This fact is not captured in Gini coefficients. As such, comparing the impact of changes in TPs over time on different groups of people may be much more informative than using Gini coefficients.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“As Gregory Clark noted in A Farewell to Alms, “the biggest beneficiary of the Industrial Revolution has so far been the unskilled. There have been benefits aplenty for the typically wealthy owners of land or capital and for the educated. But industrialized economies saved their best gifts for the poorest.”35 Other eminent historians concur.36”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“preoccupation with income inequality risks normalizing envy, a happiness-destroying emotion condemned by all the main religions and moral codes.”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet

“The economic historian from Northwestern University Joel Mokyr has this to say: The main logical issue here is that economic growth can be resource saving as much as resource-using, and that the very negative effects that congestion and pollution engender will set into motion searches for techniques that will abate them. Such responses may be more effective in democratic than in autocratic regimes because concerned public opinion can map better into public policy, but in the end the need for humans to breathe clean air is about as universal a value as one can find. Investment in soil reclamation, desalination, recycling, and renewable energy count just as much as economic growth as economic activities that use up resources. Whether or not wise policies will help steer technological progress in that direction, the basic notion that per capita income growth has to stop because the planet is finite is palpable nonsense.55”
― Marian L. Tupy, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet