On a recent flight from Utah to Washington DC I made a new friend when I told him that I was going to give a presentation on how our planet was infinitely bountiful. Most people are shocked when you tell them that resources will be fine but that there’re not enough people. They’ve been told all their lives that we live on a finite planet with finite resources and that if life left is “unchecked” life will cease to exist. We had a great discussion for four hours, during which he made an important observation: products today don’t seem like they last as long as they used to. Read More ›
Walmart sells the Goodyear Reliant 195/60R15 88V All-Season Tire for $77. Unskilled workers today are earning around $17.17 an hour, indicating a time price of 4.46 hours. For the time it took to earn the money to buy a single tire in 1920, you get 20 of them today. Read More ›
What underpins this understanding of economics is what George Gilder calls the "materialist superstition." From the capitalism of Adam Smith and David Ricardo to the socialism of Karl Marx, classical economics to socialist economics rest on the assumed pillar of Newtonian determinism and static materialism. There is also only so much matter to go around, the materialist superstition has us believe, therefore, no amount of incentives and technological innovation can avoid the fact that we will run out of material goods. Read More ›
Kevin Hoover suggests that William Nordhaus relied on the labor theory of value in his paper on light (Letters, April 24). Yet Nordhaus actually used knowledge, not labor. He offered a method to measure innovation: the discovery and sharing of valuable new knowledge. Nordhaus measured the amount of knowledge per unit of time and observed that knowledge about light was growing exponentially, surpassing traditional measures of economic development. It is the time price over time that truly deserves our attention. Read More ›
How can the laws of enterprise and business consulting diverge so significantly from the accepted wisdom of economic analysis and political rhetoric? More baffling, how is it that products are becoming simultaneously more expensive and more affordable? This paradox is possible because while we buy things with money, we actually pay for them with our time—not in dollars and cents but in hours and minutes of work. Read More ›
In 1800, the U.S. Census Bureau recorded a population of 5.3 million. Roughly half — about 2.65 million — were farmers. Today, the U.S. population is nearing 340 million, yet the number of farmers has risen only slightly to 2.72 million. Back then, one farmer fed just two people. Today, each farmer feeds 125. Read More ›
In 1981 George Gilder wrote about supply-side economics in his book "Wealth and Poverty." Ronald Reagan read it and embraced its message, enabling decades of technology-led growth. Also, Mr. Gilder was one of the first to talk about abundance. His most important economic axiom, for me anyway, is "waste what's abundant to make up for what's scarce." Silicon Valley lives by this. Read More ›
