Marian Tupy—Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and co-author of the new book, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet—shares a view with Elon Musk world more likely faces an “underpopulation” problem than an overpopulation problem. As the world population closes in on 8 billion, Marian challenges the notion that the world faces an overpopulation problem that threatens humans with resource scarcity. Analyzing the global time prices of resources (how long you must work to afford something), he found that the global time prices of resources “fell by 84 percent between 1960 and 2018. The personal resource abundance of the average inhabitant of the globe rose from 1 to 6.27 or 527 percent. Put differently, for the same time of work that he or she could buy one item in the basket of resources we looked at, he or she can now get more than six. Over that 58-year period, the world’s population increased from 3 billion to 7.6 billion.”
Does the World Face an Underpopulation Problem? (townhall.com)