A hefty tome, weighing in at 580 pages. But many of those pages are tables with row after row of data, and I hope you'll forgive me for skipping over those. Obtained by the Interlibrary Loan service at the University Near Here, from Wesleyan.
You may remember the 1980 Simon–Ehrlich wager, where techno-optimist Julian Simon bet eco-doomster Paul Ehrlich that the prices of five minerals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) would go down in real terms over the next decade. Simon won that bet. This book's authors (Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley) deem Simon their hero, and this book is their effort to expand and generalize his sunny optimism.
Their approach is to calculate the "time price" (TP) of various commodities and services; how long it would take a typical worker to earn enough money to buy them. And to see how those TPs have changed over time. Spoiler: nearly without exception, the TPs have declined over the periods they examine. I.e., the items have become more "abundant". And, in many cases, the growth in abundance has outstripped the growth in population; the authors term this "superabundance".
Reader, did your school teachers chide you to "show your work" in your math classes? And to "cite your sources" in other classes? Tupy and Pooley do so, in mind-numbing detail. Again, a lot of pages skimmed over. I trust them.
Other than those core calculations, the book is an examination of the history and causes of economic prosperity. It is a rebuke to the gloomy followers of Malthus, like Ehrlich. (And also, amusingly, Thanos, the mass Malthusian murderer from the Marvel movies.) Here, they mainly follow the arguments of folks I like too: Deirdre McCloskey, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Michael Shellenberger, and the like.
No surprise, I think the authors are largely correct in their cheerleading for technological optimism and free-market capitalism. And also that the main dangers to continued prosperity are the too-popular advocates for (various flavors of) socialism, economic degrowth, technophobia, and (generally) predictors of doom, unless we stop our sinful ways.
One small nit to pick: the phrase "infinitely bountiful planet" up there in the book's subtitle. I'm more of a fan of (Herbert) Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." (Example: Moore's Law: even its originator admitted that would eventually bump into fundamental limits.)
Also, the authors make a decent argument that innovation is driven in areas with large populations. (You want a country where Jobs has a better chance of meeting Woz, for example.) But large doesn't necessarily imply growing indefinitely; I think the authors tend to blur that distinction.
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