Superabundance Book Review

Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, with Foreword by George Gilder. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2022; xvii + 547 pages; $34.95. The central thesis of Superabundance is very simple: Malthus was wrong! What does this mean? Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) […]

11 min read

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sports inflation

Sports Salary Inflation: What Decades of Data Reveal

Professional sports stars have seen tremendous earnings growth over the past several decades. Where professional major-league athletes once had to work off-season jobs just to make ends meet, their per-season salaries and bonuses now amount to many times what the average American family can expect to earn over the course of a lifetime.  Sports salary […]

9 min read

Titans of Industry, Old and New

We all reflect the times in which we live—even the most influential and powerful among us. It is just that most lives whisper in 8-point type, in keeping with a modest place in the scheme of things, while the makers of history shout in 72-point size. For this reason, the study of “parallel lives” from […]

6 min read

Basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Basketball Inflation: 75 Years of Growth Leads to Slam-Dunk Earnings

When professional basketball in the United States was in its infancy, star players made about 2.5 times what the average family made in a year. Today, the highest-paid players in the National Basketball Association earn more than 600 times the median family’s income for the year.  In basketball, as in other sports, the salaries of […]

15 min read