Drone Abundance
For the time price of one drone in 2013, unskilled workers get almost 20 today.
In 2013, DJI launched the Phantom—one of the first drones designed for consumers—at a price of $629. At the time, unskilled workers earned an average of $10.89 per hour, putting the time price for one of DJIs drones at 57.8 hours.
Today, Amazon sells the Bezgar BD101 drone for just $50—an entry-level model that significantly outperforms the original Phantom. With unskilled wages now averaging $17.17 per hour, the time price for one of Bezgar drones is only 2.9 hours.
This means for the time it took to earn the money to buy one DJI Phantom in 2013 you can buy 19.8 Bezgar BD101s today. Drone abundance has been increasing at a compound annual rate of 31.2 percent—doubling in abundance every 27 months. This rate comes close to Moore’s Law, which predicts a doubling every 24 months.
DJI founder Frank Wang was a 26-year-old student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology when he and three friends launched the company in 2006. By 2017, he had become Asia’s youngest tech billionaire—and the world’s first drone billionaire—with an estimated net worth of $5.4 billion.
Free-market capitalism drives this kind of progress, where competition lowers costs and improves quality and variety. While DJI accounted for over 90 percent of the world's consumer drone market as of June 2024, it now competes with dozens of Chinese rivals who sell consumer and kid friendly drones for under $50.
The freedom to innovate lifts us all out of poverty. Imagine how many potential Elon Musks and Thomas Edisons remain dormant around the world because local politicians protect their cronies from creativity and innovation instead of supporting rising talent.
Learn more about our infinitely bountiful planet at superabundance.com. We explain and give hundreds of examples why more people with freedom means much more resource abundances for everyone in our book, Superabundance, available at Amazon.
Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, and a board member at Human Progress.
I could let you "drone" on all day about freedom and abundance! We don't hear enough of it in the MSM or the schools.
"The freedom to innovate lifts us all out of poverty. Imagine how many potential Elon Musks and Thomas Edisons remain dormant around the world because local politicians protect their cronies from creativity and innovation instead of supporting rising talent." If we only knew that our technology
and civilization are CENTURIES behind because of politicians and companies burying advancements. When the lost 10 tribes return, they will destroy all our best military weapons as easy as breaking a pie crust.