All of gpooley's Comments + Replies
I think what surprised me the most was how expensive things used to be. Bicycles have become 22 times more abundant today compared to 1910. In 1955 Bill Haley and the Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ sold 3 million singles at 65 cents each. Unskilled workers at the time were earning around 97 cents an hour. This would put the time price of a song at 40 minutes. Today a student can get access to 90 million songs for $5.99 a month. Unskilled workers are earning around $14.53 an hour, so the time price is around 25 minutes. In 1955 it was 40 minutes for one s... (read more)
Julian Simon was lucky because human population has been lucky for the last 150 years. And taking a long perspective is what is necessary if you really want to discover the underlying trend versus short-run market fluctuations. (You can always find a 10-year period to show prices going up or down.)
To understand what's happening, we looked that the time prices of the Simon-Ehrlich five metal basket bet (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) from 1900 to 2018. For blue-collar workers the average time price fell by 89.2 percent. This means that f... (read more)
Consider Cesar Hidalgo's work in this analysis: Why Information Grows and his new paper Knowledge is non-fungible.
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)