to borrow a term that American Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006) first used: the “fixed pie fallacy.”34 Since the size of the resource pie is supposedly fixed, the fewer people there are, the larger portion of the pie they will enjoy.

eco-anxiety as “a chronic fear of environmental doom” in 2017 and noted that climate change’s effect on mental health can manifest as “trauma and shock, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, aggression, reduced feelings of autonomy and control, feelings of helplessness, fatalism, and fear.”

The researchers found that, on average, 83 percent of respondents thought that “people have failed to care for the planet.” Seventy-five percent thought that the “future is frightening.” Fifty-six percent thought that “humanity is doomed.” Fifty-five percent thought that they will have “less opportunity than [their] parents.” Finally, 39 percent

The American economic commentator George Gilder argues that wealth is knowledge, growth is learning, and money is time. From these three propositions, we have derived a theorem, which states that the growth in knowledge—which is to say innovation, productivity, and standards of living—can and ought to be measured with time.

many “anti-natalists believe that a world without humans, or with significantly fewer of them, would eventually revert to a pollution-free paradise with abundant natural resources. As one human extinction proponent put it in January 2020 in a letter to his local paper, ‘In approximately 20,000 years after human extinction, this magnificent

Nordhaus estimates that “innovators are able to capture about 2.2 percent of the total social surplus from innovation.”

Measured in time prices (i.e., the time it takes to earn enough money to buy something), many commodities became 99 percent cheaper. Remember that a 99 percent decrease in time price means that the time it took to earn enough money to buy 1 item at the start of the analysis gets the buyer 100 (i.e., 9,900 percent more) items at the end of the

We hope that those readers who made it to the end of this book will appreciate how far humanity has come and the sheer improbability of what it has accomplished. Struggling against conflict, hunger, and disease, we have managed to gradually gain the upper hand. In a world trending toward entropy, we have succeeded in creating a complex and

Where houses have gotten significantly more expensive, they have usually done so due to highly restrictive zoning and regulatory requirements, which have artificially raised the price of land. On average, however, we are getting much more house for much less effort.