Ever since the English cleric Thomas Malthus published his famous Essay on the Principles of Population in 1798, scholars have argued about the relationship between population growth and resource abundance. According to Malthus, population grows at a faster rate than resources, thus worsening scarcity.
The Simon Abundance Index, which is named after the U.S. economist Julian Simon, counters the Malthusian narrative. Simon argued that population growth is a net benefit because humans produce new ideas, inventions, and innovations, which lower commodity prices, thus making all of us better off.
The Index, which includes 50 basic foods, fuels, metals, and minerals, starts in 1980 with a base value of 100. After a sharp downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and related government policies, such as lockdowns and monetary expansion, as well as the war in Ukraine, the Index is making a recovery.
In 2023, it stood at 609.4, with all 50 commodities having grown more abundant over those 43 years. All the while, the world’s population grew from 4.4 billion to over 8 billion.
The Index is measured in “time prices,” or the amount of time it takes an average worker to earn enough money to buy something. Dividing nominal prices by nominal wages in 42 countries that account for 85 percent of the world’s economic output, allows my co-author Dr. Gale L. Pooley from Utah Tech University and I to sidestep inflation, exchange rates, and purchasing power parities.
Between 1980 and 2023, the average time price of the 50 basic commodities fell by 70.4 percent. For the time required to earn the money to buy one unit of this commodity basket in 1980, he or she would get 3.38 units in 2023.
Given this 238 percent increase in personal-resource abundance and a population growth of 80.2 percent, we calculate that the global resource abundance rose by 509.4 percent. The compound annual rate amounted to 4.3 percent and every one-percentage-point increase in population corresponded to a 6.35-percentage-point increase in global resource abundance.
Moreover, Pooley and I found that resource abundance increases at a faster rate than population — a relationship we call superabundance, and discuss at length in our 2022 book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.
Every human being comes into the world not only with an empty stomach, but also a pair of hands and, crucially, a brain capable of contributing to the growing stock of human knowledge. That is why today’s population of 8 billion people is roughly 14 times richer, in real terms, than the world’s 1 billion people were in 1800. Simon, in other words, was correct: The human brain really is the ultimate resource.