Marian Tupy: More People, More Ideas, More Abundance – Perth

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Is Australia getting more or less affordable? Are we heading toward resource scarcity — or an era of unprecedented abundance? Marian Tupy has spent 15 years crunching the data.

Returning to Australia following his 2023 tour, Tupy brings the ideas behind his acclaimed book Superabundance — a rigorous, evidence-based challenge to the doom-and-gloom narrative dominating Western culture. Using “time prices” — a measure of how many minutes of work it takes to buy everyday goods — resources on average became 72% more affordable between 1980 and 2018, even as global population surged. Australia tracked slightly above that average.

But not everything is getting cheaper. In Australia, housing, health, and education have become genuinely less affordable — and this is no coincidence. These are precisely the sectors where government regulation has suppressed competition and distorted prices. The solution lies not in more intervention, but in more freedom: upzoning, deregulation, and trusting markets to do what they do best.

Marian Tupy is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and co-author of Superabundance. As editor of HumanProgress.org, the world’s most comprehensive database tracking human wellbeing, he is one of the world’s leading voices challenging pessimism with hard evidence. Joined by Peter Kurti, Director of the Culture, Prosperity & Civil Society program at CIS and Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame Australia.