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tv   Gale Pooley Superabundance  CSPAN  October 21, 2022 4:31pm-5:01pm EDT

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fingertips. stay current with latest episodes of "washington journal" live scheduling information tv networks and c-span radio plus a variety of compelling, podcast. front row seat to washington anytime anywhere. >> middle and high school student, it's your time to shine. participate in this year's c-span student camp documentary competition. picture yourself as the newly elected member of congress. we ask competitors, what is your top priority and why? a five to six minute video showing the importance of the issue from opposing and supporting perspectives stirred don't be afraid to take a be bold. amongst cash prizes is a $5000
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grand prize. yours must be submitted by january 20, 2023. studentcam.org for comforting rules, tips, resources in a step-by-step guide markle. >> there are a lot of places to get political information the only on c-span's to get it straight from the source. no matter where you're from or stan lee issues, c-span is america's network. unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. america is talking, power like cable. >> we are joined by professor gail, co-author of the book called superabundant. preparation growth, innovation and cuban portion on this
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bountiful planet. what you thoughts mean when you talk about superabundant. >> i will be discovered. this occurred to us when we look at this original debt between them remember in the 80s, it was a book to plaintiff this soviet future and the models said maybe i should look at the data and how the resources are. we look at these resources and
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the should be more expensive but the price of these things are goingth well, they were going dn to how could you have something more scarce and cheaper? he researchers other things the copper and extended to lumber and other resources. sellers population increased and prices actually went down so he's finding this huge contention between the two, science magazine in his article so they have a disagreement and take what you want and i'll but
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they will be cheaper in the future so petroleum, copper, nickel and they put $1000 on the table and said ten years, let's see what happens. ten years later that comes to their and the inflation-adjusted prices have fallen by 36% and it was the same decade with the highest population on the planet so population is doing this but the prices are doing that so he writes a check and says would you like to see again? 's we've always been interested in men about it was one of the most important checks of a written.
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>> how is it that population growth is? >> you think we have this guy, this pizza and keep inviting friends over, the slices get smaller and that thinking, living in a world with limited resources, that's the fundamental flaw because we recognize we do live in a world with finite economics is not about that, it's about knowledge. creation of value we add knowledge and that's where it comes down to this issue, humans are the source of knowledge. as they come and bring their knowledge, it makes it more abundant and that's the basic idea we underscore in the book.
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>> talk about oil. we thought we were going to run out of oil. >> if you go back and look at the history of oil, it's one of the first bubbling up from the ground. thinking about what it could be used for, heat up the oil. >> , when it condenses, it turns into other substances like kerosene, a valuable asset to replace whale oil because our price was doing this and people wanted to buy whale oil so we were hunting oil to get their oil to operate so kerosene comes into to substitute is cheaper. it was always there but what wasn't there was how to make
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this valuable. he makes this great observation, the difference between our patientne stone age due to the growth in knowledge. you're getting more knowledge and it is the product of free humansbe to explore and innovate and allows us to escape poverty is this open knowledge in a function of human beings so if you want more stuff got to be in favor of more human beings. >> you teach most see why you in hawaii. >> he's a senior editor, human
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progress and one of the theories you talk about time crisis so worse example? >> we buy with money but we pay for them in science why take the money and buy this thing? wehi buy things with money and y with time and major things in dollars and cents but also in hours and minutes so the cost $20 and i earn $40 an hour, it cost me 30 minutes so everything is converted for money to time and has four benefits. the first benefit is you don't
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have to worry about making adjustments for real sellers, you can avoid the inflation issue, cbi and adjustments for some real number, you can avoid ythat, just go straight to the time. then you can look at the time slice through history. what is the time price for bread in the 50s and today? even to the nation change change in that timeline. look at the change and time price over time, that we see with this true insight about resource abundance. the time goes on, it's more a
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comment. theio reason it goes down, whene have innovation will see in lower prices and higher income. with new innovation, you pay employees more money so forcefully captures innovation and the other reason, the last reason is we relate it back to this fundamental measure of time, seven measurements in science, six relate to time so
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we can take economics and related to time and we have a universal problem rise hi everybody. read on the planet has a sense of what time is so easy time priceth as the true price versus nominal cost to buy something. >> the example throughout the book, a farmer in india. >> go back to 1960 undergrad in india, how much time you spent or earned to buy the rights for the day. back then based on the price and hourly income, it's about seven or eight hours so basically i work all day to find my right. since 1960s, the price of rice has fallen income has increased because take less than an hour
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to lose 80 to 90% drop in the time price of rice so india has six or seven more hours a day. we can compare that to somebody in indiana. in 60, it took them only an hour to earn the money by the bushel of wheat. today it takes less than six minutes so their time price has fallen byy the same amount and was better off if the guy in india that has six hours for india is another 50 minutes, it shows us these time prices allow, people have more and more time. >> could talk about the issue of invasion in your book.
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his incremental? or other surprises? >> we divided, continuous innovation, three or four or 5% figure then you have this telegraph. then you have these equilibrium's but also discontinuous innovation that occurs so they are happening, is drawn to these punctuated equilibrium with abundance once every 20 years so we see it occurs at the rate of three to 4% a year so if you grow 39% a
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year, you double abundance every 20 years so growth reenactors in a year and doubling in one day. soso we are expanding it everyd. we don't know until that back and look at it. how much was i earning in 1980 an hour and what were the prices? it took me two hours to buy it and today it takes 20 minutes and that's what time prices allow you to do more time in looking at the change in time over time and reveals a new world about what is really happening in basic commodities
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and 50 basic commodities. oil, material, mineral and we put out a catalog in the 80s and went to the prices and walmart.com two of the devices in the same things, a bicycle, lender, microwave, tv and just astonishing how expensive things used to be when you look at today versus spending even in 1980s 40 years ago. for us it's like i remember 40 years ago. >> we are here in las vegas, levels were dropping, we are talking drought here. operation growth leads to more water usage, population growth leads to more co2 emissions.
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>> population growth leads to more water because issue is what is the price of water doing? if the price goes up, four things happen. p first,t, people use less. gas for example, i'm not going to use much gas for people use less. the secondso thing is the supply side, people look for substitutes and today cap these guys talk about energy so they are looking to decrease supply and also substitutes. wewe find things that are substitute for this. it is not a good substitute for water,e there's a lot of watern the planet so the issue will be figuring out how to innovate and you lower the cost and we see
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that all over the planet and places like israel that i figured out how to get water at less than 5 cents a gallon or half a cent a gallon, inexpensive today so if we trust human innovation to show up and prices go up then we can expect resources to not become more scarce the more abundant because you are applying knowledge. you say adding intelligence to atoms in the way you organize the atoms. for example, a great economist at mic, by a $2 million sports car and it's a bit of a car if you drive it off the lot and
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crash it and boom. so what happened to the value of the car? might disappear but the atoms are still there. it was the organization of atoms that made it valuable, not the atoms. this guy here, you cut 6 ounces of silicon and aluminum but what makes it so valuable is the way you organize them, the knowledge we had to the material physical world and macroeconomics is looking at it. when you walk into the store to buy local bread, how many times to count the loaves on the shelf? you ever count the loaves on the shelf? was more important, the number of loaves or the price? the price, right? intense economic thinking. what is the price, theth
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information contained in the price tells you what you should do so if you think like an economist instead of making fun of accountants, accountants like to count everything, how much oil do we have, how much do we use? we are going to run out in five years. no. the price will signal to the people in the market about changing behavior that ultimately will create abundance because the focus will be on let's discover knowledge to convert scarcity and go back to oil we are expanding oil right now but it's this fundamental, are we really running out of oil or something else affecting the price and the temporary nature? if you look at in terms of your time and the money to buy gas, it's been going like this.
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we have. of the underlying trend continuing to get lower and lower which we can say is more and more abundant. the car today is twice the car in the 1980s. we don't buy the gas, it's what it provides to the can't find oil, you can find more efficient ways to use oil and that's for the knowledge and innovation shows up in the efficiencies. >> when it comes to superabundance, how do government entities proposed for the process? >> the first one is with got to
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overcome ideology that we live in this world of scarcity, the idea that we are going to run out of stuff. we are not going to run out. the second issue is we are destroying the environment were having this effect on the environment. with knowledge and innovation that will lead us out of the environment challenges, we see humans ability to adapt and accommodate changing positions. i live in hawaii, a chain of semi- dormant volcanoes and i wake up in a got costco air conditioning, astonishing i can live there because humans are extremely adaptable to conditions, conditions change
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and we seem to be able to adapt and innovate and take liability and valuable assets rheumatism on a new book i want to quote, liberal society appeared to grow as tolerant. [laughter] >> as we m become more prospero, what we worry about? smaller and smaller things and more prosperity we enjoy the fewer things that are big we have to worry about and the intolerance of people wanting to try new things and innovate new things, take more risk, you lose the edge when your whole and
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it's like what are we going to do next? so we need to be more open to allow people to experiment with new ways of doing things. more tolerant of mistakes. let people have ago and see what they can come up with and let them have a measure of freedom that's how we characterize china. until 1980s, they were flat and started to take off like this. you give people a small measure of freedom they also knew innovation and the ability to create volume. this fundamental of argument we make is superabundant the idea that your resources are growing at a faster rate and population
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as if more people you bring not only bring their pizzas that they bring pizza to share with everybody else. 1% increase in population with the three to 4% increase personal resource of funds so these people show up on the planet and 70 i am three to 4% richer and that's what we have seen. this book was written by george gilder, you have blurbs of support of the obama administration, torah peterson, you did something right to get that group of people to agree on your book, correct? >> rimarion knows all those guys and i think what they were able to see is you have this framework looking at things with time price instead of money
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price and reveals a different picture of what's happening so we have this framework of this datata and we see a different world once you have this way of looking at things you see it different in the world we see when we look at time prices, we are experiencing superabundant where we don't see the population, increasing population will make us run out of resources, it will be more abundant and we don't see the increase in population to cause other -- we see a story about elon musk, we have these new ones they wrote this book and they say the population will be
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doing this but first you will do this and crash and that is the thinking, this virus affecting our culture that we will run out of stuff and we have it today. bill maher talks about without these communicable, aoc, okay to have children. there's never a sign on our planet where we have had more abundant toer have more children and it's really true. >> the population bomb publicly apologized for getting it wrong oror did he cut the checks? >> he cut the check in the of the day he said i wasn't extreme enough.. [laughter] well, there's still time to
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repent, i guess. >> final question, you are born in 1955, i was born in 1960, how hass our economic world changed in our lives? >> it goes back to 1960 and we can see the timeline. i am 60 years old, every 20 years my life has doubled. my standard of living is doubled every 20 years program from one to two to four. i'm really eight times better than i was in 1955. you think about your life, what did you have in 1960? at least eight times more today. you really do. i show my students this and say what did you pay for this? i'd pay $600 and i ask what i had to pay you for you to never use this again?
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that's how much you value it and i can't find a student that will doli it for less than 5 million souls likeou you have a $5 milln thing here, how rich are you? how abundant is your life? >> the co-author of this book, superabundant, the story of population growth, innovation, and intimate planet, thank you for being with us. ♪♪ >> c-span now is a free mobile app featuring your unfiltered field what's happening in washington live and on-demand. keep up with the days because the fence with live streams and for proceedings and drinks from
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