One of the reasons we love money is that it makes trading easier. Everyone will take money in a trade. Much harder to trade for shoes or bread or economics lessons. Pricing things in dollars and cents gives us a quick way to calculate how products relate to each other. But money has a fundamental problem. Read More ›
Jordan Peterson’s Rule No. 4 says you should “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” Since we each get exactly 24 hours in a day and no one can buy time (otherwise rich people would never die), isn’t it better to compare differences in how we spend our time? Read More ›
We buy things with money, but we pay for them with our time. This means there is a money price, which is expressed in dollars and cents, and a time price, which is expressed in hours and minutes. A time price is simply the money price divided by hourly wages. Take, for example, the bicycle. Read More ›
Mark Perry does a great chart that illustrates the relative changes in the nominal prices of a variety of products and services. What is the difference between growing abundance and growing scarcity? In a word, government. Read More ›
On Monday, John Stossel featured Superabundance in a video titled "The Scaremongers Are Wrong," encouraging people to ignore the apocalyptic messages from climate activists and have more babies. Elon Musk reposted the video. Read More ›
Joseph (Jake) Klein recently wrote a great article about Ritz Crackers. He notes that they were introduced in 1934 at a price of 19 cents for a one pound box. There are around 8.75 crackers per ounce so a 16-ounce box would yield around 140 of the tasty wafers. Ritz outsold every other cracker their first year on the market. Read More ›
Researchers at UC Davis have documented the tremendous growth in yields for strawberries in California. Genetic gains from breeding and production advances increased yields by 2,755 percent from the early 1960s. The strawberry joins wheat, rice, and other staple crops of the Green Revolution. Read More ›
On April 21, 1787, the Congress of the Confederation of the United States authorized a design for an official copper penny, later referred to as the Fugio cent because of its image of the Sun and its light shining down on a sundial with the caption, Fugio. Fugio is Latin for “I flee/fly”, referring to time flying by. Read More ›
Transcontinental flights were once a luxury. Now they are affordable for almost everyone. Free-market entrepreneurial capitalism isn’t about making more luxuries for the wealthy, it’s about making luxuries common for the average person. Read More ›