… is from page 337 of Marian Tupy’s and Gale Pooley’s brilliant 2022 book, Superabundance:
Human beings have been inventing and innovating for millions of years, but economic progress has been painfully slow. It has only been over the past centuries or so that economic growth has skyrocketed. A major reason for that explosive growth, we argue, is population growth combined with greater freedom to think, speak, and experiment. This beneficial combination – people plus freedom – allowed inventing and innovation to be sustainable over a long period for the first time in human history.
DBx: Yes!
Importantly, for economic growth to be real – that is, to actually improve our standard of living over time – we human beings must be free to think, speak, and experiment not only in our capacities as producers, but also in our capacities as consumers. We as consumers must be free to think for ourselves without overlords ‘protecting’ us from information that the overlords have somehow divined is mis or dis. We must be free to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to those persons who offer to sell us goods or services (and to those persons who offer to employ us). And we must be free to experiment with the purchase and use of different goods and services – free to purchase (or not) new and novel offerings, and free to purchase more of the things that we discover give us satisfaction and not to purchase things that we discover give us insufficient satisfaction.
