Ascertaining whether material well-being is improving or worsening is not a particularly complicated matter. And you don’t need the Worldwatch Institute or any other lobby with an axe to grind to do so. Simply pick up a copy of the Statistical Abstract of the United States (published annually by the Economics and Statistics Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce) and flip to any of its 1,000 or so pages. You’ll find that, wherever trends in the data are presented, the long-run trends are positive. Want to look outside the United States? Then check out the data tables in the annual World Resources Report published jointly by the World Resources Institute, the U.N. Environmental Programme, the U.N. Development Programme and the World Bank. Or the Human Development Report published annually by U.N. Development Programme. Or the World Development Report published annually by the World Bank. Once again, wherever trends in concrete measures of human welfare (life expectancy, infant mortality, caloric intake, whatever) are presented, they are moving in a positive — not a negative — direction.
We can tell whether resources are becoming more abundant or more scarce by examining inflation-adjusted price trends. Whether we examine timber prices, food prices, energy prices or whatever, we see falling prices indicating increasing resource abundance. Why? Because resources are not like “buried treasure” that we go out and find and then use up. Resources are simply inert “stuff” (like petroleum) that is useless until human ingenuity discovers a way to harness it for human benefit. As our knowledge base grows, our ability to discover and create resources grows with it.