Saturday Magazine

22 Feb 2026

Sat, 21st, Feb, 2026: Marian Tupy, Centre for Independent Studies & visiting scholar in residence from Cato in the US: Super Abundance

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Sat, 21st, Feb, 2026: Marian Tupy, Centre for Independent Studies & visiting scholar in residence from Cato in the US: Super Abundance

Fiona and Macca are joined live on air by the controversial academic and writer, Marian Tupy, Centre for Independent Studies & visiting scholar in residence from Cato in the US: Super Abundance

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: up-zoning, deregulation, and trusting markets to do what they do best.

Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and co-author of The Simon Abundance Index. He specialises in globalisation and global well‐being and politics and economics of Europe and Southern Africa.

Tupy is the co-author of Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet (2022) and Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (2020).

His articles have been published in the Financial Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Newsweek, the U.K. Spectator, Foreign Policy, and various other outlets both in the United States and overseas. He has appeared on BBC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, and other channels.

Tupy received his BA in international relations and classics from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his PhD in international relations from the University of St. Andrews in Great Britain.