Dr. Gale L. Pooley on the Ideology of Scarcity and the Potential to Achieve “Super Abundance”
In his first term as California’s governor, Jerry Brown famously said back in 1975, “There is no free lunch. This is an era of limits and we all had better get used to it. Small is beautiful.”
Was Brown right? These days, it seems that establishment thinking and most of the content on mainstream media believes it is so. Threats from climate change, overpopulation, and environmental degradation, we are told, now force us to reduce consumption and limit growth in order to save the planet and ourselves.
Wesley’s guest in this edition of Humanize takes a radically different and far more optimistic view. Gale L. Pooley has co-authored a book entitled Super Abundance in which he and co-author Marian L. Tupy argue that contrary to the roaring pessimism about the human future so often espoused these days, our earthly resources are actually unlimited and indeed, that population increases and innovation are the keys to growing our prosperity and extending our freedoms.
Gale L. Pooley is an associate professor of business management at Brigham Young University-Hawaii. He has taught economics and statistics at AL Faisal University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Brigham Young University-Idaho, Boise State University, and the College of Idaho.
Dr. Pooley earned his BBA in Economics at Boise State University and completed his PhD at the University of Idaho.
He has published articles in National Review, Human Progress, The American Spectator, the Utah Bar Journal, the Appraisal Journal, Quillette, and RealClearMarkets.
Dr. Pooley is a Senior Fellow with the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth and Poverty and serves on the board of HumanProgress.org. He also serves on the Foundation for Economic Education Faculty Network and is a Scholar with Hawaii’s Grassroot Institute. His major research activity has been the Simon Abundance Index, which he co-authored with Dr. Marian Tupy.
Economics | Discovery Institute (wealthandpoverty.center)
Review of “Superabundance,” by Marian L. Tupy & Gale L. Pooley (city-journal.org)
After 96 Years, TV Abundance Continues to Flourish | Economics (wealthandpoverty.center)