IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

The history of innovation and the "time prices" Tupy and Pooley calculate give the lie to the materialist superstition.

To get around the fact that there is no objective standard of value, Tupy and Pooley calculate "time prices." As George Gilder points out in his forward:

The ultimate test and measuring stick of wealth is time. What remains scarce when all else becomes abundant is our minutes, hours, days, and years. Time is the only resource that cannot be recycled, stored, duplicated, or recovered. Money is most fundamentally tokenized time.

To update Simon's analysis, they "calculate the hours and minutes needed to earn the money to buy goods and services" and discover that over time, people have been getting progressively more for the sweat of their brows. Even this understates the real change: work has gotten progressively more pleasant and less strenuous. Tupy and Pooley, therefore, are calculating a lower bound on growing superabundance.

Tupy and Pooley document how resources have become more abundant. They also borrow from scholars and commentators like Joel Mokyr, Deirdre McCloskey, and Matt Ridley to explain why. In short, we got the institutions right (secure private property rights, free markets, and the rule of law), and we got the ideas and rhetoric right (liberty and dignity for entrepreneurs and innovators).

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