The Simon Abundance Index, 1980–2025

Over 45 years, the index climbed from a base value of 100 to 636.4, a more than sixfold increase. The line does not climb smoothly. The SAI declined in the early 2000s, as a rapidly growing global economy led to elevated demand for resources. It fell again during the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted production and supply chains around the world, and following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which spiked energy prices. In both cases, the index recovered. By 2024, it had reclaimed its pre-pandemic trajectory, and 2025 extended that recovery, returning near the all-time high of 700.8 reached in 2020.

This year’s interactive version of Figure 1 adds a capability not available in prior editions: country-level exploration. Readers can select any of the 42 countries accounting for 85.9 percent of global gross domestic product and 66.3 percent of the world’s population, and see how much resource abundance has increased for that country’s citizens relative to 1980. They can also view the ranking of 42 countries by cumulative resource abundance between 1980 and 2025 and compare them. Results show that no country’s citizens in this dataset experienced less resource abundance in 2025 than in 1980.

Individual Commodity Changes Between 1980 and 2025

The SAI uses “time prices” to measure changes in resource abundance. A time price tells you how long you must work to earn enough money to buy something. If you work less time this year than last year to afford the same good, your standard of living has risen. Time prices are elegant, intuitive, and universal. They can be used to compare the cost of bread in France in 1900 with the cost of bread in France in 2000, or the cost of milk in China with that in the United States in 2025. Because time prices always divide nominal prices by nominal hourly wages, they do not require any adjustment for inflation.

Between 1980 and 2025, time prices for the 50 basic commodities fell by an average of 70.9 percent. That figure has a concrete meaning. What required an hour of work in 1980 now requires approximately 18 minutes. Put differently, the same hour of work that bought a single unit of a typical commodity in 1980 buys 3.44 units in 2025, a 244 percent increase in personal resource abundance. The personal abundance of resources increased at a compound annual growth rate of 2.78 percent, thus doubling every 25 years.

How We Measure Overall Abundance: The Rectangle Explained

Resource abundance can be understood at two levels: personal and population-wide. Think of the world’s resource supply as a pizza. Personal abundance measures the size of each individual slice. Population-level abundance measures the size of the entire pie. The pie can grow in two ways: the slices get larger, or the number of slices increases. Between 1980 and 2025, both happened simultaneously.

The box chart below makes this point intuitive. Draw a rectangle for 1980. Index both the width, representing global population, and the height, representing per capita resource abundance, to a value of one. That is the amber box. Now draw a second rectangle for 2025, scaled to reflect actual changes. The width has expanded to 1.850, reflecting an 85.0 percent increase in the world’s population, from 4.44 billion to 8.21 billion people. The height has risen to 3.44, reflecting a 244 percent increase in what the average person on earth can buy with a given amount of work. (We assume average abundance growth rates in economies we do not track – a conservative assumption given that the GDP per person in many of these developing countries grew at a faster pace than that in our dataset, a contributing factor to the well-documented dramatic decline in global income inequality in recent decades.) That is the teal box.

The area of the 1980 box is 1.0. The area of the 2025 box is 1.850 multiplied by 3.44, which equals 6.364. That is a 536.4 percent increase. That is the SAI. Put differently, the world’s population grew by 85.0 percent, but population-level resource abundance grew by more than 536 percent. Every 1-percentage-point increase in global population corresponded to roughly 6.3 percentage points of growth in population-level resource abundance.

This relationship, in which resources grow far faster than the population consuming them, is what we call superabundance.

Individual Commodity Changes from 2024 to 2025

In 2025, the SAI stood at 636.4, up 17.2 points from 619.2 in 2024. That was a 2.78 percent increase. Of the 50 commodities in the index, 27 became more abundant, and 23 became less abundant. The range of one-year change was wide, from a 65.6 percent increase for oranges to a 36.3 percent decline for coconut oil.

A brief clarification is in order. When time prices fall, abundance rises. Workers need fewer hours of labor to buy the same quantity of a good. When time prices rise, abundance falls. Workers must spend more of their labor to buy that same quantity.

The observed pattern of mixed annual results is normal. Some commodities rise sharply in abundance; others fall sharply. Short-term variation is a standard feature of commodity markets. Weather, disease, transport disruptions, investment cycles, policy shifts, and changes in demand all affect prices from year to year. The fact that 23 commodities became less abundant in 2025 is therefore not surprising, nor does it contradict the broader story of long-run progress.

That was one of Julian Simon’s main insights. Simon did not argue that resource prices move in a smooth downward line. He argued that, over time, human beings respond to scarcity signals. Higher prices encourage conservation, substitution, innovation, new production, and better organization. In that sense, temporary scarcity is not the end of the story. It is often the beginning of adjustment, discovery, and the sharing of new knowledge.

Oranges provide a good example of the uneven trend toward greater abundance. In earlier years, orange abundance had risen dramatically, only to reverse as disease, crop damage, and supply-chain problems pushed time prices back up. By 2024, much of the earlier gain had nearly disappeared. If one looked only at that moment, one might have concluded that the long-term trend toward greater abundance had broken down. But that would have been a mistake. In 2025, orange abundance rebounded by 65.6 percent, the largest single-year gain of any commodity in this SAI edition.

That rebound illustrates Simon’s point. Short-term setbacks are real, but they do not by themselves define the long-run trajectory. The proper way to read the index is not to expect uninterrupted annual improvement in every commodity. It is to recognize that volatility is normal, adjustment is constant, and the long-run tendency remains toward greater abundance. By that measure, the 2025 results are consistent with the larger historical pattern.

Conclusion

The SAI began its recovery from the disruptions caused by COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2023, and has continued its recovery into 2025. Despite natural disasters, geopolitical turmoil, persistent monetary inflation in some markets, and ongoing conflict in parts of the world, resources continued to become more abundant at a pace that far exceeds population growth. Over 45 years, global population grew 85.0 percent. Personal resource abundance grew 244 percent. The result is a planet that is, by this measure, more than six times better supplied per capita with the basic commodities on which human welfare depends than it was in 1980.

This year’s edition introduces a substantially more interactive and exploratory presentation than in prior years. Readers can now move between the global SAI trend, individual country trajectories, commodity-level time-price charts, and annual change rankings within a single interface.

The message remains the one Julian Simon spent his career advancing. Human beings are not a drain on the resources of this planet. They are the mechanism by which atoms become resources, by which constraints are discovered and dissolved, and by which each generation inherits a world more abundantly supplied than the one before it.

We explore these topics in greater depth in our book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. You can also visit our website at superabundance.com.

To understand changes in living standards, we should think not only in terms of quantities, such as how many loaves of bread sit on a supermarket shelf, but also in terms of prices. Economists focus on prices because prices contain more information than quantities alone. If the price of a product rises, that usually signals greater scarcity. If it falls, that usually signals greater abundance. The problem is that money prices can be distorted by inflation. To deal with that, economists often convert nominal prices into real or constant prices, but that process can be complicated, subjective, and controversial.

Time prices offer a better alternative. From the consumer’s point of view, the most important question is not simply how many dollars something costs, but how long one must work to earn the money to buy it. A time price is the money price of a good or service divided by the hourly income at the time of purchase. Because both the price and the wage are measured in current (or “nominal”) terms at each point in time, no inflation adjustment is needed. Money prices are expressed in dollars and cents. Time prices are expressed in hours and minutes. For at least seven reasons, time prices are a better tool than money prices for measuring resource abundance.

1. Time prices contain more information than money prices. Innovation tends to lower prices and raise wages. Time prices capture both effects at once. Looking only at money prices without considering earnings tells only half the story.
2. Time prices avoid the problems of inflation adjustment. They do not require conversion from nominal prices to real prices. That avoids disputes over which deflator to use, whether the Consumer Price Index, the GDP deflator, the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index, or purchasing power parity measures.
3. Time prices can be used across countries and across history. They can be calculated for almost any product, in any currency, at any time, and in any place. That makes it possible to compare the time price of milk in France in 1850 with its time price in France in 2000, or the time price of oranges in China with that in the United States today.
4. Time is a universal measure. Unlike money, which differs across countries and periods, time is the same everywhere. An hour is an hour, whether in Brazil, India, or the United States.
5. Time cannot be printed, inflated, or counterfeited. Governments and central banks can expand the money supply, but they cannot create more time.
6. Time inequality matters more than income inequality. Everyone has the same twenty-four hours in a day. What differs is how much people can produce, earn, and consume within that fixed span. Measuring how much time people must work to obtain goods often gives a clearer picture of living standards than income figures alone.
7. Time is the real cost of everything we buy. We do not ultimately pay for goods with money. We pay for them with the hours of life required to earn that money. If time could be bought and sold directly, the rich would never die.

For all of these reasons, time prices are better than money prices for measuring resource abundance. They are simple, intuitive, and grounded in the real trade-offs people face. Most importantly, they show the true cost of goods and services in the one currency that matters to everyone: time.