I'm Caleb Brown host of the Cato Daily Podcast and I'm taking this time to ask you during the month of December to financially support the Cato Daily Podcast and the broad mission of the Cato Institute to advance liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.

Visit Cato.org, slash podcast sponsor and support us this holiday season.

This is the only time of the year when I make this request, so I'm adding something.

If you support Cato to the tune of $1,000 or more,

I'll give you a shout out on the podcast, or you can designate someone else to receive all the benefits of that donation.

Just visit Cato.org slash podcast sponsor to get started and thank you.

This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 6, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's a question that sparked the famous bet between Paul Erlich and Julian Simon.

Are we running out of resources?

A new paper argues that no.

And in fact, if you measure resource availability properly,

the world is becoming more abundant all the time. Marion Tupi is co-author of the the We see a lot of indexes floating around about economic freedom.

There are indexes that look at how often U-Hauls are used to move people into or out of states.

There's economic Freedom Index,

the Cato Institute produces the Human Freedom Index.

So what distinguishes this from all of these other indicators

that tell us about the relative state of humanity?

Well, there is a misconception that's been around for a very, very long time going all the way back to antiquity, that when you

have an increase in population, resources will get run down, they will get depleted and eventually

humanity runs out of resources. And so even today a lot of the skepticism about economic growth and

development centers on this question of running out of things and what we have tried to do in this study

...