Movie entertainment at home has become 25,700 percent more abundant in the last 10 years

Compared to 2011, you get 258 movies for the price of one.

In 2011 you could rent your favorite two-hour movie at the neighborhood Blockbuster for $4.99, putting the cost at $2.49 per hour. This cost does not include the overhead time to pick up and drop off your video or the potential late fees (Ouch). The average unskilled worker in 2011 earned $10.40 an hour, so the entertainment time price was around 14.4 minutes of work per hour of entertainment.

Today a Netflix subscription costs $8.99 a month and provides access to over 5,000 movies that you can stream 720 hours per month. This puts the per hour cost at around 1.25 cents. The average unskilled worker today earns $13.43 an hour, so the entertainment time price is around 3.35 seconds of work per hour of entertainment.

Since 2011, the time price of movie entertainment at home has decreased by 99.6 percent from 14.4 minutes to 3.35 seconds. For the time it took to earn the money to watch one movie in 2011, you can watch 258 today. Home entertainment has become 25,700 percent more abundant, increasing at a compound rate of around 74 percent a year. Moore’s Law suggests that computer chip technology increases from 41 percent to 100 percent a year. The Blockbuster to Netflix abundance curve fits comfortably within Moore’s law. Netflix is the product of relentless innovation in computer chips and fiber optic and wireless bandwidth.

As George Gilder notes in Knowledge and Power, entrepreneurial creativity converts scarcities into abundances. Human intelligence and innovation transcend the limits of physics and atoms. Knowledge is not subject to thermodynamics.

Enjoy a good movie tonight with your family. And thank the entrepreneurs and the freedom they have to experiment and learn and generously share their creativity.

Excerpt from our forthcoming book, Superabundance.

Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member at Human Progress