Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagJulian Simon

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The forest and the trees are in the light. Concepts of environmental conservation and global warming plant growing inside lamp bulb over dry soil in saving earth concept

Business Prof: We Live in an Era of Unprecedented Abundance

If we’re not making good use of it or it’s not fairly distributed, those are different problems

At COSM 2021, business studies prof Jay Richards of the Catholic University of America spoke with Gale Pooley, also a business studies prof at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, on a fact we don’t hear much about in popular media focused on current events: Increasing knowledge and the subsequent dropping over of time prices have ushered in a vast improvement in standards of living. Many will ask, what about rising prices? Well, for example, we must compare rising prices due to various global events today to what things cost in the past: At COSM 2021, Pooley focused on the fact that, in real-world economics, the value of our time is the most critical factor we need to figure in: Brigham Young University Read More ›

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Senior couple watering seedlings in their garden

Scarcity? We have the same resources as Neanderthal Man!

What we do with our resources is different. Economics professor Gale Pooley has spent his career lifting our spirits about the state of the world

COSM 2021 is fast approaching. On the weekend of November 10-12, titans of the tech world will descend on Bellevue, Washington, to discuss the future of technology. Topics to be covered include blockchain, NFTs, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and Big Questions like “Is Technology Soaring or Slumping?” This year, COSM will include Discovery Institute’s own Gale Pooley, senior fellow at the Center on Wealth & Poverty. This isn’t Pooley’s first round at COSM. He addressed the COSM crowd in 2019 with a talk entitled, “Killing Thanos – Defeating the Ideology of Scarcity” (video posted at the end of this article). This November, Pooley’s topic is “The End of Inflation.” The economics professor has spent his career lifting our spirits about Read More ›

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red lifeboat

Business Prof: Stop It! The World is NOT Running Out of Stuff!

A famous bet between two top thinkers settled that a long time ago

Recently, Jay Richards interviewed Dr. Gale Pooley, Professor of Economics at BYU-Hawaii, on the myth that we are running out of resources and doomed to future scarcity. Even though media pundits often claim it is true, the numbers say it is a myth. The story begins with a famous bet between two professors… From the interview: The bet was whether basic commodity prices would rise between September 29, 1980 and September 29, 1990. The professors who made the bet were Stanford insect biologist Paul Ehrlich (1932–), author of bestseller The Population Bomb (1968), and economist Julian Simon (1932–1998) Ehrlich bet yes and Simon bet no. Gale Pooley: First of all, what was interesting about Julian Simon, he reads Ehrlich’s book Read More ›