Summary: Iceland has long thrived through innovation and freedom. Its history is one of transforming scarcity into strength and discovery. Joining the European Union could trade entrepreneurial vitality for bureaucratic constraint and regulation. Iceland’s story proves that wealth flows not from the ground, but from the boundless resource of human imagination.

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Iceland, a country of about 390,000 people. The place feels like a mash-up of Hawaii and Alaska, with a land area roughly the size of Kentucky. Iceland has around 130 volcanoes, with about 30 considered active. Along with the volcanoes there are around 500 earthquakes per week. Many of these are microquakes (below a magnitude of 2.0) that go unnoticed, but about 44 a year register a magnitude of 4.0 or higher within 180 miles of the island.

The International Monetary Fund projects Iceland’s GDP per capita to reach $81,220 in 2025, adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP). This compares to $89,110 for the US and $64,550 for the European Union (EU).

The purpose of my visit was to talk about why Iceland should or should not join the EU. The event was hosted by Students for Liberty Europe and RSE, the Icelandic Centre for Social and Economic Research. What does this topic have to do with our book, Superabundance?

In our book we argue that we’re experiencing a period of superabundance, where personal resource abundance is increasing faster than population growth. This period started about 200 years ago after millennia of stagnation. We attribute this in large part to people recognizing that the freedom to innovate lifts humanity out of poverty. Innovation is the discovering and sharing of valuable new knowledge in markets. Around 1820, the planet’s dormant entrepreneurs began to blossom and bear fruit. But Iceland has been innovating much longer than 200 years.

Iceland can be considered a creation of entrepreneurs. It was first settled around 874 CE by Norse explorers, primarily from Norway, led by Ingólfr Arnarson, who is traditionally recognized as the island’s first permanent settler. He established his homestead in what is now Reykjavík (“Smoky Bay”), named after the steam rising from nearby hot springs.

Throughout history, the creators have fled the takers—escaping oppression to found new realms of freedom where ideas could multiply and wealth could grow. This is the ancient rhythm of renewal that gave birth to America. The settlers of Iceland were largely Vikings, along with some Celtic slaves (it was typical of the times to enslave defeated peoples) and settlers from the British Isles. Drawn by the island’s fish and grazing land, they sought independence from Norway’s consolidating monarchy.

By 930 CE, the settlers established the Althing, one of the world’s oldest parliaments, at Þingvellir, creating a system of governance where chieftains met annually to settle disputes and make laws. This marked the start of the Icelandic Commonwealth, a decentralized society without a king.

The population grew to around 50,000 by the 11th century, sustained by farming, fishing, and trade. The Commonwealth lasted 332 years, until 1262, when internal conflicts and external pressure from Norway led Iceland to pledge allegiance to the Norwegian crown, ending its independence. This set the stage for centuries of foreign rule, first by Norway and later Denmark. Iceland finally achieved full independence 682 years later, in 1944, establishing the modern Republic of Iceland.

Wealth Is Knowledge and Growth Is Learning

Superabundance is based on the ideas of Julian Simon and George Gilder. Two of the book’s key principles are that wealth is knowledge and growth is learning. These apply directly to Iceland—a nation that turned scarcity into strength and desolation into discovery. With little arable land and few natural endowments, Icelanders learned that the ultimate resource was not in the soil or the waters but in the capacity to imagine and create.

When oil shocks hit in the 1970s, Iceland had little domestic energy. Rather than surrender to scarcity, Icelanders turned to what they had in superabundance. They drilled not for fossil fuels but for fire beneath the earth, turning volcanic fury into light and heat. Today, nearly all of Iceland’s power flows from geothermal and hydroelectric abundance—proof that energy, like wealth, begins not with matter but with knowledge.

And from this same well of ingenuity emerged a national symbol—the Blue Lagoon. The world-famous pools and spa were born from the overflow of the Svartsengi geothermal power station, where geothermal brine spilled into a lava field and transformed an industrial by-product into a national treasure. What began as an accident became an emblem of Icelandic creativity—a living harmony of mind and matter, fire and water.

The Blue Lagoon reminds us that wealth is not drawn from the ground but flows from the fountain of human imagination, where even the castoffs of creation can shimmer with new light. In Iceland, energy is not merely harnessed—it is redeemed.

In the early 20th century, Iceland was a country primarily reliant on imported coal to meet its energy needs. The first hydropower station was built in 1904, and today there are 15 stations producing 73 percent of the nation’s electricity. Geothermal represents the other 27 percent.

Abundant, affordable, and reliable energy is one of the fountainheads of modern civilization, turning ingenuity into prosperity. Yet Europe’s leaders, in their zeal to perfect nature, have turned against the very forces that sustain it. By dismantling coal, nuclear, and gas in favor of windmills and solar panels, they are not advancing progress but reversing it, replacing mastery with dependence and innovation with austerity. The continent that once ignited the Industrial Revolution now flirts with a new age of scarcity—an empire of entropy cloaked in virtue. The great tragedy is the belief that prosperity can be preserved by suppressing the freedom that created it. Prosperity follows those who dare to learn from the world, not those who try to silence it.

For Iceland to thrive, it must continue to unleash its creative energy—to innovate, to speak, and to let knowledge flow as freely as its geothermal springs. Iceland is proof that wealth is not in the ground but in the mind. When faced with the scarcity of matter, Icelanders discovered the infinite power of knowledge.

That same spirit of redemption drives Iceland’s modern economy. From deCODE genetics, which unlocked the secrets of the Icelandic genome, to Össur, whose prosthetics restore mobility with grace and precision, Iceland exports ideas more than goods. Its renewable energy now powers data centers and digital frontiers, where bits replace barrels and imagination fuels growth. And in the northern village of Ísafjörður, Kerecis has turned the skin of cod—once discarded as waste—into a life-giving biomaterial that heals human wounds across the world.

Iceland reminds us that every economy is a learning system, and every act of enterprise a revelation. Growth is not a race for resources but a search for truth—the discovery of new knowledge that multiplies as it is shared. In this sense, Iceland has learned its way into wealth, proving that in the long dialogue between man and nature, the mind is the great multiplier.

The story of Iceland is the story of civilization itself. Every act of creation is an act of learning, a small echo of the divine mind that made the world intelligible. Wealth in its truest form is not measured in metals or markets but in moments of revelation—when knowledge transforms scarcities into abundances. Iceland proved the eternal law of creativity: that human learning, illuminated by faith and freedom, can turn even the coldest rock—or the humblest fish—into a beacon of light.

Choose Wisely

So why would a nation of entrepreneurs and innovators want to be subject to a union of regulators and bureaucrats? As of 2024, the number of staff working for the European Commission is over 80,000 across all 76 EU bodies. That would be one regulator for every 4.8 Icelanders. The future of Iceland lies with leaders like Thor Jensen, Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson, Fertram Sigurjonsson, Heiðar Guðjónsson, and Bala Kamallakharan, not armies of Brussels bureaucrats.

To secure its future, Iceland must remain a beacon of open inquiry and energy creativity. It should champion innovation over ideology—embracing every technology that multiplies human capability rather than constrains it. By coupling free markets with free minds, Iceland can continue to illuminate a path from scarcity to superabundance, showing the world that the greatest renewable resource is human creativity itself.

Choose wisely, Iceland. Your history is watching.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

Summary: In just two centuries, humanity has turned light from a rare luxury into one of the most abundant resources on Earth. What once demanded hours of labor now costs a fraction of a second’s work, thanks to relentless innovation and human creativity. From candles to LEDs, the story of light reflects a larger truth: when people are free to invent and exchange ideas, they transform scarcity into abundance and darkness into illumination.

Our book Superabundance (2022) was inspired in part by the work of Nobel Prize–winning economist William Nordhaus, who conducted an extensive analysis on the “time price” of light over the span of human history. He called time prices the true prices. Light can be measured in lumens. Comfortable reading light is around 1,000 lumens. Nordhaus reported that in 1830, earning sufficient money to buy the candles necessary for one hour of light at 1,000 lumens required around three hours of labor. A candle generates around 12 lumens; therefore, one would need 83 candles to generate 1,000 lumens.

Innovation replaced candles with kerosene lamps and then with incandescent lighting and then LED lighting. Today, for 75 cents, one can buy a Cree J Series 5050C E Class LED that generates 228 lumens per watt. By increasing the wattage to 4.4 watts one can, therefore, generate 1,000 lumens of light. Electricity prices are currently around 17 cents per 1,000 watt hours, commonly known as kilowatt hours or kWh. One watt hour costs 0.017 cents; thus, the 4.4 watts to power the Cree LED for one hour would cost a mere 0.0745 cents. The average worker earns $36.53 an hour, or slightly more than a penny per second. Working for around 0.0735 seconds, therefore, the average worker earns enough money to buy 1,000 lumens for one hour.

The light that cost 10,800 seconds in 1830 costs only 0.0735 seconds today. The time price has dropped by 99.99932 percent. For the time it took to earn the money to buy 1,000 lumens for one hour in 1830, workers today earn 146,980 hours of light today. That’s a 14,697,900 percent increase. Light abundance has been increasing around 6.3 percent annually on a compound basis, doubling every 12 years.

Calculating Changes in Global Light Resources

Over the last 195 years (1830-2025), the world’s population rose from 1.2 billion to 8.2 billion—a factor of 6.83, or a 583 percent increase. To measure how humanity’s resource base has changed, we calculate the size of the global resource “pie” by multiplying personal resource abundance by population. That reveals how much “total abundance” exists across humanity at a given moment.

As we already saw, during the 195-year period, personal light abundance rose by a factor of 146,980. Assuming for argument’s sake that everyone in the world enjoys American prices of LEDs and energy, combined with the 6.83-fold increase in population, the global light abundance factor would amount to 1,004,360. In other words, the global light pie has grown by 100,435,912 percent—from an index value of 1 in 1830 to 1,004,360 today.

Light abundance would have grown at a compound annual rate of roughly 7.3 percent for almost two centuries, doubling about every 9.8 years. What was once scarce, flickering, and expensive has become nearly boundless—flowing at the speed of electrons and photons across the planet.

Resource Elasticity of Population

In economics, elasticity compares the percentage change in one variable against the percentage change in another. Between 1830 and 2025, global light resource abundance increased by 100,435,912 percent. During same period, the world’s population increased by 583 percent. Dividing 100,435,912 percent by 583 percent gives us 172,176. Every 1 percent increase in population thus corresponds to a 172,176 percent increase in global light abundance.

Let There Be More Light

We have witnessed an exponential efflorescence of light—an illumination not merely of our cities but of the human spirit itself. More people with light has meant more minds, more ideas, and more ventures into the unknown. When free to imagine and innovate, humans transform scarcity into abundance—and ignorance into insight. Over the past two centuries, we have converted the darkness of want into the radiance of wealth, beginning with light itself. From the barbarous glow of whale oil to the humble candle, and from the flicker of gas and kerosene to the steady blaze of electricity and the brilliance of silicon, each technological leap has kindled new horizons of discovery. Every advance has multiplied the possibilities for the next. The ultimate source of growth is not material—it’s the human mind set free.

The next time you turn on a light switch, please take a moment to appreciate the great work of free and creative people toiling to bring us out of the darkness. Compared to the abundant light of today’s world, our ancestors really did live in the “dark ages.”

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

Summary: Fearing job losses and loss of control, some politicians are calling to halt technologies like driverless cars and artificial intelligence. Yet history shows that efforts to “protect” people from innovation only delay progress and raise costs. Automation inevitably disrupts, but it also saves lives, boosts efficiency, and expands opportunity.

Some US conservatives want to slam the brakes on progress, quite literally. At the recent US National Conservatism conference, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri declared: “Only humans ought to drive cars and trucks.”

His techno‑scepticism runs deeper than opposing driverless vehicles. “Every so‑called innovation the tech class has delivered in recent decades operates as a power transfer … from us to them,” he warned. “Us” meaning the honest “common man”. “Them” being Silicon Valley transhumanist elites and their job-killing code.

We must take this urge to ban driverless cars and smother AI seriously. Not because Hawley is right, but because his anxieties are commonly held here. A recent survey by the Schwartz Reisman Institute found just 8 per cent of Britons are strongly positive about artificial intelligence, putting us last except for Australia. Only France and the US had higher negative sentiment than the UK too (33 per cent). On driverless cars, just 22 per cent of us say we’d feel safe in one. This is fertile ground for populists looking to appeal to displaced workers in our own politics.

Fears of job loss from new technology aren’t irrational. But trying to resist the tide can smother the benefits of new tech while making any eventual adjustment harder. Still, politicians can’t help themselves. Last year, in opposition, Labour’s Louise Haigh warned that automated vehicles could repeat “the ravages of deindustrialisation”. That’s Labour-speak for “government intervention required”. The tool of choice, of course, is typically “safety” regulation.

This instinct isn’t new. In 1865, parliament passed the Locomotive Act, capping self-propelled vehicle speeds at 2mph in towns and 4mph in the countryside, while requiring each be preceded by a man waving a red flag. Branded as a safety measure, it was backed by the horse-drawn carriage and rail lobbies. Maybe it spared a few pedestrians, but it certainly stunted any early car industry. Innovation was sacrificed to protect incumbents, with safety the excuse.

The US mis-stepped too. For decades, cities required human lift operators even after automatic elevators became safer and cheaper. A few thousand jobs were saved, with higher costs for building owners and slower productivity in sectors based in tall buildings. Like red flag laws, the aim of this safety regulation was really to preserve jobs in aspic.

The Hawley instinct would repeat this error. Trials of autonomous vehicle systems like Waymo in the US show 70–90 per cent reductions in crash rates compared with human drivers. In the UK, where human error is a factor in 88 per cent of collisions, industry modelling suggests autonomous vehicles could save 3,900 lives and prevent 60,000 serious injuries by 2040, with just 20-24 per cent market penetration. Studies predict less congestion, lower fuel use, and cheaper deliveries and logistics. And then there’s time freed. The average Brit spends over 120 hours per year behind the wheel, which is ripe for reclaiming for work or leisure. All these efficiencies would boost downstream sectors.

Yet the public isn’t sold. Polls show most Britons still consider driverless cars unsafe. That gives our own Hawleys an opening. Regulation to slow innovation always attracts both well-meaning safety worriers and affected workers with political allies. Labour has passed enabling legislation for automated vehicles, but seems to be dragging its feet on rollout. Meanwhile, the diffuse benefits of improved safety and efficiency get downplayed and delayed.

As AI spreads through the economy, such political battles will proliferate. Someone will always stand ready to highlight the freak accident, the displaced worker or the imperfect chatbot. And certain politicians will promise to protect workers affected.

That’s why it falls to those not wedded to the status quo to state the obvious: yes, automation is disruptive. But it’s also the path to safer roads, cheaper goods, and higher productivity. Hiding behind a modern red flag is no answer.

Progress that is delayed amounts to progress denied.

This article was originally published by The Times on 9/17/2025.

Summary: The International Court of Justice has suggested nations could be held liable for historic greenhouse gas emissions, opening the door to lawsuits over centuries of industrial activity. Yet this approach risks punishing the very innovations that lifted billions out of poverty and advanced human health and flourishing. Lasting progress on climate challenges will come not from courtroom battles, but from technological solutions and continued economic development.

The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion purporting to establish legal grounds that would allow nations to sue one another over climate damages represents judicial overreach that ignores economic history and threatens global development. While the opinion was undeniably legally adventurous, the framework it envisages would be practically unworkable as well as economically destructive.

The ICJ’s ruling suggests countries can be held liable for historical emissions of planet-warming gases. That creates an accounting nightmare that no legal system can resolve. How does one calculate damages from coal burned in Manchester in 1825 versus emissions from a Beijing power plant in 2025? How does one stack up the harm caused by a warming world against the benefits of industrialization?

Britain began large-scale coal combustion during the Industrial Revolution, when atmospheric CO₂ concentrations were 280 parts per million and climate science did not exist. Holding Britain liable for actions taken without knowledge of consequences violates basic principles of jurisprudence. The same applies to the United States, whose early industrialization occurred during an era when maximizing economic output was considered unambiguously beneficial to human welfare.

Critics of historical emissions ignore what those emissions purchased. British coal combustion powered textile mills that clothed much of the world, steam engines that revolutionized transportation, and factories that mass-produced goods previously available only to elites. American industrialization followed, creating assembly lines, electrical grids, and chemical processes that form the backbone of modern civilization.

These developments were not zero-sum exercises in resource extraction. They created knowledge, infrastructure, and institutions that benefited everyone. The steam engine led to internal combustion engines, which enabled mechanized agriculture that now feeds 8 billion people. Coal-powered steel production made possible skyscrapers, bridges, and the infrastructure that supports modern cities, where most humans now live longer, healthier lives than their ancestors.

The data on human welfare improvements since industrialization began are explicit. Global life expectancy increased from approximately 29 years in 1800 to 73 years today. Infant mortality rates fell from over 40 percent to under 3 percent. Extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $2.15 per day in purchasing power parity terms, declined from over 80 percent of the global population in 1800 to under 10 percent today.

Nutrition improved dramatically. Caloric availability per person has increased by roughly 40 percent since 1960 alone, while food prices relative to wages fell consistently. Height, a reliable indicator of childhood nutrition, increased significantly across all regions. Educational attainment expanded from literacy rates below 10 percent globally in 1800 to over 85 percent today.

These improvements correlate directly with energy consumption and industrial development. Countries that industrialized earliest experienced these welfare gains first, then transmitted the knowledge and technology globally. The antibiotics developed in American and European laboratories now save lives worldwide. The agricultural techniques pioneered in industrialized nations now feed populations that would otherwise face starvation.

The International Court of Justice’s liability framework threatens to undermine the very mechanisms that created these welfare improvements. Innovation requires investment, which requires confidence in property rights and legal stability. If successful economic development subjects countries to retroactive liability, the incentive structure tilts away from growth and toward stagnation.

Consider current developing nations. Under this legal framework, should India or Nigeria limit their industrial development to avoid future liability? Should they forgo the coal and natural gas that powered Western development? That creates a perverse situation where the legal system penalizes the exact processes that lifted billions from poverty.

The framework also ignores technological solutions. The same innovative capacity that created the Industrial Revolution is now producing renewable energy technologies, carbon capture systems, and efficiency improvements that address climate concerns without sacrificing development. Market incentives and technological progress offer more promise than legal blame assignment.

Which emissions count as legally actionable? All anthropogenic CO₂ remains in the atmosphere for centuries, making every emission since 1750 potentially relevant. Should liability begin with James Watt’s steam engine improvements in 1769? With the first coal-fired power plant? With Henry Ford’s assembly line? The temporal boundaries are arbitrary and politically motivated rather than scientifically determined.

Similarly, which countries qualify as defendants? The largest current emitters include China and India, whose recent emissions dwarf historical American and British totals. China alone now produces more CO₂ annually than the United States and Europe combined. Any coherent liability framework must address current emissions, not just historical ones.

And where would the money go? This aspect of the case was brought up by Vanuatu. If the island nation receives compensation from the UK and the US, should it not be obliged to pay the British and the Americans for a plethora of life-enhancing Western discoveries, including electricity, vaccines, the telephone, radio, aviation, internet, refrigeration, and navigation systems?

Climate adaptation and mitigation require technological innovation and economic growth, not legal warfare between nations. The countries that industrialized first possess the technological capacity and institutional knowledge to develop solutions to today’s problems. Channeling resources toward litigation rather than innovation represents a misallocation that benefits lawyers while harming global welfare.

The ICJ opinion reflects wishful thinking rather than practical policy. Legal frameworks cannot repeal economic reality or reverse the historical processes that created modern prosperity. Instead of seeking retroactive justice for emissions that enabled human flourishing, policymakers should focus on technologies and institutions that sustain development while addressing environmental concerns. The alternative is a world where legal systems punish success and innovation while offering nothing constructive in return.

The original version of this article was published in National Review on 8/12/2025.