Hi everyone, we are Gale L. Pooley & Marian L. Tupy, coauthors of Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.
Ask us anything! We will be here on Wednesday, March 1. Use the comments below to add questions, and upvote any questions you'd like to see us answer.
Gale is an associate professor of business management at Brigham Young
University-Hawaii, a Senior Fellow with the Discovery Institute, and serves on the board of
HumanProgress.org. He is also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. He has taught economics and statistics at Alfaisal University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Brigham Young University-Idaho, Boise State University, and the College of Idaho. In 1986 he founded Analytix Group, a real estate valuation and consulting firm. The Analytix Group has performed over 5,000 appraisals in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. He has held professional designations from the Appraisal Institute, the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, and the CCIM Institute. He has published articles in Forbes, National Review, HumanProgress, The American Spectator, FEE, the Utah Bar Journal, the Appraisal Journal, Quillette, and RealClearMarkets.
Marian is the editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and coauthor of The Simon Abundance Index. He specializes in globalization and global well‐being and politics and economics of Europe and Southern Africa. He coauthored Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (2020), as well as being published in the Financial Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Newsweek, the U.K. Spectator, Foreign Policy, and various other outlets both in the United States and overseas. He has appeared on BBC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, and other channels.
Gale earned his BBA in Economics at Boise State University. He did graduate
work at Montana State University and completed his PhD at the University of Idaho.
Marian received his BA in international relations and classics from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his PhD in international relations from the University of St. Andrews in Great Britain.
Get your questions in!
I have read in Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson that innovation can be modelled by a graph where create a vertex on the graph with edges on the used technologies that are combined. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn develops paradigms where they are built upon with normal science and new paradigms are created by disproving an assumption and building a new paradigm. The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christenson has a similar idea where revolutionary technologies start out as lower quality and build up over time while competitors invest in the best short term innovation (iterative technology).
What sort of mathematical /logical model do you use for modeling innovation?
These are great books. All make important contributions to how we think about lifting one another out of poverty.
Although we don't offer an explicit model for innovation, partly due to the fact that innovation always comes as a surprise and you can't model surprises (otherwise they wouldn't be surprises), we do suggest that abundance is a function of population and the freedom to innovate.
Our work is informed by George Gilder. He offers three propositions: wealth is knowledge, growth is learning, and money is time. From these propositions we c... (read more)