Ask someone to close their eyes and picture the future of humanity. Chances are they’ll imagine something bleak: melting ice caps, crowded cities, empty supermarket shelves. This isn’t simply pessimism — it is the almost gravitational pull of what psychologists call a scarcity mindset. This mindset is a deeply wired cognitive tendency. It causes people to see the world as a finite pie, where every gain for one person means a loss for another. Scarcity shapes policy debates, fuels anxiety, and quietly governs how billions of people make decisions every single day.

Into this intellectual landscape steps Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Replenishable Planet by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley. This book does not merely challenge our economic assumptions. It strikes at something far deeper. It examines the psychological narratives we use to make sense of human existence. Viewed through a psychological lens, Superabundance is not primarily about commodities or GDP. It is about the stories we tell ourselves about human nature, about limits, and about what it means to flourish.

The Scarcity Mindset: A Feature, Not a Bug — Until It Isn’t

Evolutionary psychology gives us good reason to expect and think scarcity. For the vast majority of human history, resources were scarce. The humans that worried, were vigilant, and hoarded food and money survived. The humans that assumed abundance often did not.

A scarcity mindset involves focusing attention on immediate resource threats. It leads to discounting the future and viewing competition as the default relationship between people. It was an exquisitely rational adaptation.

The landmark research of Mullainathan and Shafir demonstrates just how powerfully this mindset operates today. When people experience scarcity — of money, time, or food — cognitive bandwidth narrows. They make worse long-term decisions. Not because they are less intelligent. It happens because the psychological weight of scarcity consumes the mental resources needed for deliberative thinking. Scarcity, in their formulation, captures the mind and its attention. It leaves less room and capacity for thinking deeply about other things.

Tupy and Pooley invite us to ask a destabilising question: what if the scarcity mindset has outrun its evolutionary usefulness? What if our natural inclinations generate systematic errors in our understanding of the modern world?

Time Prices and the Distortion of Perceived Reality

The book’s most concrete contribution is the concept of time price. It measures the cost of goods in hours of work needed to acquire them. Instead of using monetary cost, which typically always increases because of inflation. Yes, most things become more expensive over time based on how much they cost. But so do our wages.

We must account for wages when examining the true cost of something. Otherwise, the real purchasing power of things is obscured. The true cost needs to be considered in time price. Between 1980 and 2020, the time price of 50 basic global commodities fell by an average of 75%. For the same effort, people can now acquire approximately four times as many of these 50 basic and common commodities as they could 46 years ago.

As a psychologist, this finding resonates powerfully with research on cognitive biases in risk and probability perception.

Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory shows that humans weight losses approximately twice as heavily as equivalent gains. The availability heuristic also means that we judge the probability and significance of events by how readily examples come to mind.

Vivid stories of resource crises, food shortages, and environmental catastrophe are far more cognitively available. These are easier to recall than the slow, undramatic accumulation of abundance — a bag of grain that requires slightly fewer hours of work to buy each year.

Our perception of scarcity, in other words, is partly a media and salience artefact. The drama of shortage sells; the quiet arithmetic of progress does not. Tupy and Pooley’s time-price framework is not just an economic tool. It is a corrective lens for a systematically distorted worldview.

“The world’s resources are not limited by the number of atoms on the planet, but by the number of ideas in our heads.” — Tupy & Pooley, Superabundance

Humans as Producers: Rewriting the Core Story of Human Nature

Superabundance makes another contentious point that is psychologically significant. Tupy and Pooley call human intelligence the ultimate resource.

The Malthusian worldview positions people primarily as consumers. People are seen as mouths to feed and drains on a finite system. In contrast, the Simonian worldview championed in Superabundance positions people as creators. People are seen as brains generating ideas, solutions, and innovations that expand the resource base faster than consumption depletes it.

This is, at its core, a debate about human nature — one of the oldest and most consequential in psychology. Do humans create or destroy? Do they cooperate or defect? Superabundance’s data suggests a striking answer. The Simon Abundance Index measures this. It shows that for every 1% increase in global population, the time price of commodities typically drops by nearly 1%. More people, on balance, means more ideas and innovation, not more pressure on a fixed supply.

This aligns with what positive psychology has long argued about human motivation. Self-Determination Theory was developed by Deci and Ryan. It holds that humans have an innate drive toward growth, mastery, and contribution, not just consumption and comfort.

The scarcity narrative and Malthusian worldview both frame people as problems, and their existence as a burden on the world. If people believe these ideas, it may actually suppress their generative drive.

Superabundance and the Simonian worldview are much more hopeful. It encourages people to see their existence as a potential gift. Their ideas and innovations can help make the world a better place over time. Where the majority of people can experience a higher quality of life than their ancestors did.

Knowledge as the Infinite Resource: A Psychological Framing

The book also points out that knowledge is shareable and doesn’t need to create rivalry.

Physical objects are different. If I eat an apple, you can’t. In contrast, an idea can be shared with a million people without diminishing its value for any of them. In fact, ideas can become more valuable as they spread and combine with other ideas. This is the engine of superabundance. Ideas and innovations can keep growing and expanding over time. Especially as more people are exposed to them and contribute their own skills and perspective.

Psychologists studying creativity and insight will find this framework resonant. Csikszentmihalyi’s research on creative systems emphasises that breakthroughs rarely emerge from isolated geniuses. Instead, they come from dense networks of people sharing, contesting, and recombining ideas. Larger, better-connected populations are actually the conditions that accelerate cultural and technological evolution most powerfully.

There is also a profound implication here for how we think about meaning and purpose. Frankl argued that the search for meaning is humanity’s primary motivational force. Human beings are idea-generating machines whose collective intelligence compounds over time. Each new person added to the world is not a new burden, but another node in the network of meaning-making. They are a new source of potential for world-changing ideas.

Two Worldviews, Two Psychologies

Dimension	Scarcity Mindset (Malthusian)	Abundance Mindset (Simonian)
View of humans	Mouths to feed; net consumers	Brains to think; net producers
View of resources	Fixed pie to be divided	Expandable through innovation
Psychological orientation	Threat-focused; defensive	Opportunity-focused; generative
Cognitive frame	Zero-sum: your gain, my loss	Positive-sum: growth benefits all
Motivational basis	Fear, vigilance, hoarding	Curiosity, mastery, contribution
View of population growth	Problem to be managed	Potential to be unleashed
Expected future	Collapse and scarcity	Flourishing and abundance

The Danger of De-growth: Learned Helplessness at a Global Level

Tupy and Pooley reserve some of their most pointed arguments for the de-growth movement. This movement is a school of thought that recommends deliberately slowing economic and population growth to protect planetary resources. From a psychological perspective, their critique opens a fascinating and under-explored territory.

Seligman’s concept of learned helplessness describes what can happen when people experience situations where their actions seem to have no effect on the outcome. After even a few trials, people with learned helplessness stop trying to change the situation. Even once circumstances change and new actions would lead to effective outcomes. The de-growth narrative, however well-intentioned, could inadvertently cultivate a global form of learned helplessness. Common narratives around global warming and general AI, for example, both make it seem like it is already too late for us to do something about it. Yes, the problems facing humanity are vast, and always have been. But it is not true that human agency is so destructive that the safest course is to pull back, constrain, and limit.

Snyder’s psychology’s research on hope theory offers a counterpoint. Hope, in the psychological literature, is not passive wishful thinking. It is an active cognitive process comprising agency, which is the belief that I can make a difference. It also includes pathways thinking, the ability to generate multiple routes toward a goal. A culture steeped in abundance thinking is more likely to create hopeful agency. This agency is necessary to solve environmental and social challenges through innovation. A culture steeped in scarcity and de-growth rhetoric risks foreclosing the very mental pathways that lead to solutions.

The Optimism Gap: Why Good News Doesn’t Feel Like Good News

The material conditions for humanity have dramatically improved over the past two centuries. However, surveys consistently find that people think the world is getting worse. Rosling documented this consistent global misconception in his book, Factfulness. When asked about trends in poverty, child mortality, gender equality, or literacy, most people in wealthy countries are too pessimistic. Their responses do not match the data. They often perform worse on these questionnaires than chance. Which indicates that something is leading to a consistently overly negative worldview in these countries.

Psychology offers several interlocking explanations. We’ve already discussed prospect theory and the availability heuristic. Then there is the negativity bias. It means that a single dramatic famine is cognitively louder than decades of quiet agricultural improvement. And progress blindness, or the difficulty of perceiving gradual change against a shifting baseline. It means we compare today’s problems against a nostalgic or idealised past. We do this instead of comparing them against the measurably worse past that actually existed. Steven Pinker clearly highlights this in his books The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now.

Superabundance is, among other things, a sustained effort to overcome these biases with data. The time-price framework gives readers a concrete, visceral sense of improvement. Not just in abstract statistics, but in something as relatable as hours of work. It can hopefully shift how readers genuinely perceive the world around them. It definitely did this for me.

Flourishing Requires a Story Worth Telling

Psychology has long understood that human beings are fundamentally narrative creatures. We do not experience reality directly. We interpret it through stories. McAdams has shown that personal identity is itself a story we construct and continually revise.

The scarcity mindset is, at its heart, a story. It portrays humans as the problem. Nature is shown as fragile. The only responsible response to an uncertain future is restraint and reduction. It is a story with deep psychological resonance because it maps onto ancient fears and hard-wired vigilance mechanisms.

Superabundance offers a rival narrative. Pooley and Tupy just frame it in economic rather than psychological terms. In the abundance story, humans are the solution, not the problem. Nature is a platform for endless creative transformation, not a fixed treasure to be hoarded. To respond appropriately to uncertainty, we should cultivate conditions for human creativity to flourish. These conditions include freedom, open institutions, and intellectual exchange. Retrenchment is not the answer.

The psychological stakes of this narrative competition are enormous. The stories countries tell about themselves shape the ambitions they allow. These stories influence the risks they take and the institutions they build. Ultimately, they decide the future they create. A country convinced of its own destructiveness will invest in restriction. In contrast, a country that believes in its generative potential will invest in research, innovation and discovery.

Conclusion: Mindset as Infrastructure

Carol Dweck’s foundational research on growth mindset revealed that people’s beliefs about the malleability of intelligence shapes their performance. These beliefs also powerfully influence their resilience. People who believe their abilities can grow embrace challenges. They persist through setbacks. They achieve more than those who believe their abilities are fixed.

Superabundance invites us to apply this logic at a societal and global level. A growth mindset at a societal scale is an abundance mindset. Abundance is the belief that human creativity, ingenuity, and cooperation are not yet exhausted. The greatest discoveries lie ahead rather than behind us. The appropriate orientation toward the future is engaged optimism rather than managed decline.

The book will frustrate readers looking for genuine environmental complexity. It is not without ideological assumptions worth interrogating. However, its central psychological contribution is crucial. It argues that the mindset we bring to the future can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It will partly determine our actual future. This is something no serious psychologist, educator, or policymaker can afford to dismiss.

Mindset is not merely a personal psychological variable. At scale, it becomes the invisible infrastructure upon which civilisations decline, stagnate or grow. If Tupy and Pooley are right, the most important resource we have is not oil, water, or arable land. It is the quality and direction of our collective imagination. We must decide if the best of humanity is now history and behind us. Or if it is still yet to come.

Dr Damon Ashworth

Clinical Psychologist