Marian Tupy — editor of HumanProgress.org, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and co-author of Superabundance — makes a data-driven case that human ingenuity consistently outpaces resource constraints. Presenting as the CIS Max Hartwell Scholar-in-Residence for 2026, Tupy argues that more people, given freedom, generate more ideas, more innovation, and rising living standards for everyone.

Using “time prices” — the cost of goods measured in hours of work rather than dollars — Tupy documents a dramatic expansion of material abundance across Australia and the world over the past century. He examines why most goods have become far more affordable relative to wages, while housing, health, and education have not, tracing those exceptions to government interference and restricted competition rather than genuine scarcity.

The lecture traces population pessimism from Malthus to Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, measuring those predictions against the historical record, and revisits the famous Simon-Ehrlich wager of 1980. Tupy then turns to the deeper drivers of abundance: free markets as information systems, the compounding power of knowledge, and his core thesis — superabundance equals population times freedom. The conversation also takes in declining global fertility, the limits of current AI as an engine of innovation, and what a depopulating world might mean for human progress.

The Q&A, chaired by CIS Executive Director Michael Stutchbury, explores why intellectuals gravitate toward zero-sum thinking and the ideological roots of policy failure.

This event was presented by the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, Australia, and recorded live at CIS.