HUMAN PROGRESS: Introducing the Simon Abundance Index.

Marian Tupy, editor of Human Progress, and Professor Gale Pooley from Brigham Young University – Hawaii have used 37 years’ worth of data for 50 foundational commodities covering energy, food, materials, and metals to develop a new framework to measure resource availability. The authors contend that instead of making resources scarcer, population growth has gone hand in hand with greater resource abundance.

The report builds on the famous wager between biologist Paul Ehrlich and economist and Julian Simon on the effect of population growth on the Earth’s resources. While Ehrlich warned that population growth could deplete resources and lead to global catastrophe, Simon saw humans as the “ultimate resource” who could innovate their way out of such shortages. The Ehrlich-Simon wager tracked the real price of a basket of five raw materials between 1980 and 1990, finding as Simon hypothesized, that all measured commodities decreased in price by an average of 57.6 percent, despite a population increase of 873 million.

Tupy and Pooley expand on Simon’s original insight by increasing the basket to 50 commodities and analyzing a longer time period; between 1980 and 2017. Over this time, they find the real price of their basket of commodities decreased by 36.3 percent.

Read the whole thing.