TGIF: Why the Scarcity of News about Our Increasing Abundance?

Living standards keep getting better.

You may not have heard, but according to The Simon Abundance Index 2026, the “Earth was 536.4 percent more abundant in 2025 than in 1980.” Yet the world’s population had increased by 85 percent in that time—from 4.44 billion to 8.21 billion people. Or: “For every one percent increase in population, global resource abundance increased by 6.31 percent.”

That’s astounding! Why isn’t it in the news?

The Index, named for the late, rationally optimistic economist Julian Simon, is the creation of Marian L. Tupy and Gayle L. Pooley, whose Human Progress project at the Cato Institute is indispensable for understanding the improving material state of mankind. As you can see, despite the best efforts of meddling governments and illiberal activists of many stripes, the material requirements of life are becoming easier to come by every day.

Exactly, what do Tupy and Pooley mean? And how can they be right, considering the incessant bombardment of gloom-and-doom messages? Here’s what they say:

The Simon Abundance Index (SAI) measures the relationship between resource abundance and population. It combines the per-person abundance of 50 basic commodities with the size of the world’s population into a single number. The index began in 1980 with a base value of 100. In 2025, the SAI stood at 636.4, indicating that resources have become 536.4 percent more abundant over the past 45 years. All 50 commodities in the dataset were more abundant in 2025 than they were in 1980. The global abundance of resources increased at a compound annual growth rate of 4.20 percent, thus doubling every 17 years….

Resource abundance can be understood at two levels: personal and population-wide. Think of the world’s resource supply as a pizza. Personal abundance measures the size of each individual slice. Population-level abundance measures the size of the entire pie. The pie can grow in two ways: the slices get larger, or the number of slices increases. Between 1980 and 2025, both happened simultaneously.

This will be counterintuitive. The quantity of matter is fixed. The quantity of people is not. So prices should be rising for everything as we run out of resources. This is the old Malthusian bugaboo. But what Simon taught us from the 1970s onward is that, in the human-action-relevant sense, resources are neither natural nor fixed.

In nature we find all kinds of stuff. The problem is that it comes without instruction manuals. Solution: reason, imagination, and human ingenuity—“the ultimate resource” in Simon’s lexicon. As that wise man wrote, “The ultimate resource is people, especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty, who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so inevitably they will benefit the rest of us as well.” It is especially worth noting that Simon emphasized the benefits of population growth and free immigration. (I was honored to collaborate with Simon on a short article in 1996, “The State of Humanity: Good and Getting Better.”)

In other words, resources are manmade. We cannot run out of natural resources because there never were any to begin with! Stuff becomes a resource only when people figure out how to harness it for human purposes. “While the quantity of atoms on Earth is finite, the frontiers of undiscovered knowledge are infinite,” Tupy and Pooley explain. As thinkers in the Simon tradition say: more people →more ideas → more potential for innovative combinations → enhanced well-being for all.

If enterprising people aren’t smothered by government, they will continue to transform stuff into resources. Individuals will also continue to discover how to make more with less. Think of the implications: if industry doubled its efficiency, say, in using oil, that would effectively equate to a doubling of the supply of oil. As innovators improve technology and make capital investments, previously unreachable or prohibitively expensive sources of raw materials will become accessible. There is no practical limit. In short, innovative, profit-seeking entrepreneurs will raise the standard of living.

That explains why Simon won his famous 1980 bet with the late doomsaying biologist Paul Ehrlich over whether the price of five metals chosen by Ehrlich would rise or fall over the following decade. (Read about it in Tupy’s “Earth Day’s Bad Bet Against Humanity.”)

Tupy and Pooley measure abundance using “time-prices” instead of problematic inflation-adjusted money prices. As they explain:

A time price tells you how long you must work to earn enough money to buy something. If you work less time this year than last year to afford the same good, your standard of living has risen. Time prices are elegant, intuitive, and universal. They can be used to compare the cost of bread in France in 1900 with the cost of bread in France in 2000, or the cost of milk in China with that in the United States in 2025. Because time prices always divide nominal prices by nominal hourly wages, they do not require any adjustment for inflation.

This is important. If today, compared to the past, you need to work only half the time to earn the money for a television, in effect, you’ve acquired half of the television for free! (Actually, you’ve done better than that because it will be a better television.) And you have the time to acquire other things or enjoy leisure. This is more or less true for everyone whose society is amenable to freedom of enterprise, the division of labor, and world trade.

They continue:

Between 1980 and 2025, time prices for the 50 basic commodities fell by an average of 70.9 percent. That figure has a concrete meaning. What required an hour of work in 1980 now requires approximately 18 minutes. Put differently, the same hour of work that bought a single unit of a typical commodity in 1980 buys 3.44 units in 2025, a 244 percent increase in personal resource abundance. The personal abundance of resources increased at a compound annual growth rate of 2.78 percent, thus doubling every 25 years.

“What required an hour of work in 1980 now requires approximately 18 minutes.” Behold what human ingenuity and capital investment have wrought!

This is just a sample of what Tupy and Pooley demonstrate on their website. This is more than fascinating; it is vital for understanding how freedom benefits everyone, both the rich and not-quite-as-rich. Governments today impede free people and free enterprise in all sorts of ways, but despite constant attempts to impede it even more, enough freedom has survived to allow for the creation of the prosperity that Tupy and Pooley document. That should not make us complacent. Look around: government intervention—taxation, regulation, prohibition, central-bank monetary inflation, war—could set back our prosperity and prevent recovery at any time. Progress is not a natural fixture of the landscape. It’s the product of human intelligence and, crucially, freedom. Thus, for life’s sake, we must steadily shrink the state (ideally to nothing).

“The message remains the one Julian Simon spent his career advancing,” Tupy and Pooley write. “Human beings are not a drain on the resources of this planet. They are the mechanism by which atoms become resources, by which constraints are discovered and dissolved, and by which each generation inherits a world more abundantly supplied than the one before it.”

TGIF—The Goal Is Freedom—appears on Fridays.