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TagScarcity

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population of a small planet

Gale Pooley on the Humanize Podcast

Are we really living on a dying planet?

Are we living on a dying planet? Are the doomsday prophecies of scarcity and widespread starvation due to population growth real? It’s the mainstream assumption, parroted by a number of influential voices. But not everything has taken the bait. Dr. Gale L. Pooley, senior fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty and co-author of the groundbreaking 2022 book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing, talked with Wesley J. Smith on the Humanize podcast on his work in economics and the ideas behind the book. Pooley co-wrote Superabundance with Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute. Smith and Pooley enjoyed a conversation pushing back against the widespread pessimism that is inherent in the scarcity narrative. Their Read More ›

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Countering Doom with Superabundance

Marian L. Tupy challenges the ideology of scarcity and promotes a refreshing new perspective on human innovation and population

The idea that the higher the human population the scarcer earth’s resources become is prevalent and mainstream. It is behind many of the doomsday alarmist calls for population control and influences much of economic theory and practice. But what if it’s wrong? Marian Tupy, co-author with Gale Pooley of the 2022 book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, offers a different account. The earth’s resources and innovation actually increase the more people there are on the planet. Bringing their innovation and creativity to the table, joined with earth’s resources, humans find ways to create “superabundance.” Marian Tupy spoke at the COSM Conference back in November 2022, and his lecture on his Read More ›

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Senior couple watering seedlings in their garden

Scarcity? We have the same resources as Neanderthal Man!

What we do with our resources is different. Economics professor Gale Pooley has spent his career lifting our spirits about the state of the world

COSM 2021 is fast approaching. On the weekend of November 10-12, titans of the tech world will descend on Bellevue, Washington, to discuss the future of technology. Topics to be covered include blockchain, NFTs, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and Big Questions like “Is Technology Soaring or Slumping?” This year, COSM will include Discovery Institute’s own Gale Pooley, senior fellow at the Center on Wealth & Poverty. This isn’t Pooley’s first round at COSM. He addressed the COSM crowd in 2019 with a talk entitled, “Killing Thanos – Defeating the Ideology of Scarcity” (video posted at the end of this article). This November, Pooley’s topic is “The End of Inflation.” The economics professor has spent his career lifting our spirits about Read More ›

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NFT Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs are unique assets that cannot be replicated underpinned by blockchain technology

What Makes NFTs Valuable? What Does It Mean To Own One?

In the case of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain, actual ownership with legal standing is never in fact transferred for the underlying digital file

Introduction: At Expensivity.com, Bernard Fickser explains that a non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique token in cryptography that represents, say, real estate or art rather than money. Because the tokens have unique identities (non-fungible), they can be bought or sold while reducing the risk of fraud. So how do they work?: The series is called How Non-Fungible Tokens Work: NFTs Explained, Debunked, and Legitimized (July 30, 2021). In Part 5, we looked at how scarcity, central to the economic value of works of art, can be created in the digital world, where copying is generally quite easy. Now, we look at what makes NFTs valuable and what it means to own them: 6 Value and Ownership of NFTs In this Read More ›