Summary Of Superabundance

Superabundance - The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet - A Comprehensive Summary Initially, there is a puzzle. It is 1980, and you are getting hitched. 100 guests are welcomed by your family at the wedding after-party. They spend a total of $10,000 on the gathering, or $100 per person. Quick forward to 2018. You have the opportunity to throw your child's wedding party right now. The attendance list has grown by 72%. Although some of the old timers are no longer in the area, the cousins have added to the total. That suggests that you are now serving 172 people. If the price per guest stayed the same, your bill would total $17,200. Taking everything into account, the total cost amounts to $4,816, which is not quite half of what your parents paid for you. How is this even imaginable, you inquire of the food supplier? The food source responds that the cost decreased by 1% for every 1% increase in participation. Therefore, even if the number of visitors increased by 72%, your bill decreased by 72%. In reality, I'm sure things like that don't happen. Or do they, on the other hand...? Here is a Preview of What You Will Get: ⁃ A Detailed Introduction ⁃ A Comprehensive Chapter by Chapter Summary ⁃ Etc Get a copy of this summary and learn about the book.

Generations of people have been taught that population growth makes resources scarcer. In 2021, for example, one widely publicized report argued that “The world's rapidly growing population is consuming the planet's natural resources at an alarming rate . . . the world currently needs 1.6 Earths to satisfy the demand for natural resources ... [a figure that] could rise to 2 planets by 2030.” But is that true? After analyzing the prices of hundreds of commodities, goods, and services spanning two centuries, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley found that resources became more abundant as the population grew. That was especially true when they looked at “time prices,” which represent the length of time that people must work to buy something. To their surprise, the authors also found that resource abundance increased faster than the population―a relationship that they call superabundance. On average, every additional human being created more value than he or she consumed. This relationship between population growth and abundance is deeply counterintuitive, yet it is true. Why? More people produce more ideas, which lead to more inventions. People then test those inventions in the marketplace to separate the useful from the useless. At the end of that process of discovery, people are left with innovations that overcome shortages, spur economic growth, and raise standards of living. But large populations are not enough to sustain superabundance―just think of the poverty in China and India before their respective economic reforms. To innovate, people must be allowed to think, speak, publish, associate, and disagree. They must be allowed to save, invest, trade, and profit. In a word, they must be free.

Why has democracy failed to take root in Russia? After shedding the shackles of Soviet rule, some countries in the postcommunist region undertook lasting democratization. Yet Russia did not. Russia experienced dramatic political breakthroughs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it subsequently failed to maintain progress toward democracy. In this book, M. Steven Fish offers an explanation for the direction of regime change in post-Soviet Russia. Relying on cross-national comparative analysis as well as on in-depth field research in Russia, Fish shows that Russia's failure to democratize has three causes: too much economic reliance on oil, too little economic liberalization, and too weak a national legislature. Fish's explanation challenges others that have attributed Russia's political travails to history, political culture, or to 'shock therapy' in economic policy. The book offers a theoretically original and empirically rigorous explanation for one of the most pressing political problems of our time.

While some argue that this German Catholic philosopher and theologian neglected the role of procreation in marriage, this book shows that von Hildebrand's writings on reverence and superabundant finality contribute to a contemporary understanding of the significance of procreation within marriage. Schemenauer analyzes von Hildebrand's integration of conjugal love and procreation, showing him to be an insightful and parallel voice to the that of John Paul II.

Is plot a line, an arc, or a shape? None of these. Rather than thinking of plot as a sequence of events or actions put into place solely through human agency against the backdrop of setting, this book questions why we should distinguish between plot and setting—and indeed, whether we can make such a distinction. After all, plot, Yoon Sun Lee contends, cannot be disentangled from the material setting in which it takes place. In The Natural Laws of Plot, Lee connects the history of the novel and the history of science to show how plot in the realist novel is given shape by the characteristics of the physical world—and how in turn, plot serves as the avenue through which the realist novel participates in the same lines of inquiry about the world as pursued by the natural and physical sciences. Lee argues that the novel emerges and evolves in tandem with the development of scientific practices and concepts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe to investigate the idea of a unified and objective world. Drawing on readings from Defoe, Austen, Scott, and many others, Lee demonstrates how bodies, human and non-human, behave according to laws that are built into worlds by plot, and how they are subject to causes and consequences that can occur independently of individual action, social forces, or metaphysical destiny. This interest in representing and exploring how things happen sets the novel apart from other literary genres, and makes the history of science integral to the understanding of the history and theory of the novel, and of narrative. Plot, Lee shows us, is immersive and powerful, because it satisfies our wish to know how things happen in a coherent, objective, and possibly real world.

Edited by R.H. Andrews.