It's the Small Stuff: Look Around At Our World of Wonders

I've long loved Don Boudreaux's metaphor of the prosperity pool. Every new innovation, convenience, or increase in output is a drop in the prosperity pool: "a modern, prosperous market economy... is largely the result of many small innovations, each of which is not very significant but the massive accumulation of which produces our unprecedented modern prosperity." Pool noodles. Barbie Dolls. Star Wars. At Thanksgiving one year, our daughter said she was thankful for Harry Potter and Harry Potter audiobooks. Two distinct categories. People whoo know me know I don't like spending money on things. The butterbeer at Universal Studios' Wizarding World of Harry Potter? Magical, and worth every penny. There's butterbeer fudge, butterbeer ice cream, frozen butterbeer, regular butterbeer...I need to stop writing about this before I make some bad food choices.

There's magic and frustration in all this. The magic: we live in a world of wonders everywhere, all the time. The frustration: people miss the point, like Donald Trump with his infamous comments about how your kids might not have thirty dolls but just three or four, and they might cost a lot more. "Oh, boo-hoo, your toys are more expensive," people sneer as they poke a hole in the prosperity pool. But again, they're missing the point. The prosperity pool is filling rapidly enough that it can sustain a few leaks here and there--but if we poke enough holes in it, it starts to drain faster than it fills--and with enough holes, the whole thing bursts.

Would you be OK with fewer dolls and less butterbeer? Sure. You're fine now with whatever else we would have had if our ancestors hadn't throttled innovation so regularly, as, for example, by piling regulation upon regulation upon regulation with lower growth as a consequence. That kind of cavalier attitude is unwise. Instead of poking more holes in the prosperity pool, how about patching it up?