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There
are those who insist that
humans
are destroying themselves
and
the world. And then there was
Julian Simon.
Julian Simon is dead. While many will not recognize his
name, his recent death is a particular loss to those combating environmental
dogma, because Julian Simon stood for common sense,
for basing decisions upon facts, and for the courage to stand behind the
truth, qualities often missing in
today’s world, and especially, it seems, among the intellectual community.
Simon, a professor of economics at the University of
Maryland, first came to the attention of many when he challenged Stanford
professor Paul Ehrlich, author of doom-and-gloom books such as The Population
Bomb, which was required reading in one of my college classes. Ehrlich was a
proponent of one of the original doom-and-gloomers, Robert Malthus, who held
that since the world consisted of finite resources, its growing population would
soon eat itself out of house and home, resulting in massive starvation. Malthus
lived two hundred years ago. Despite the fact that widespread starvation is
usually limited to areas impacted by flood, drought, or other natural
catastrophes in Third World countries, or by wars or government policies which
disrupt production and transportation, move people to unsustainable areas, or
cause them to migrate en masse, throughout those two centuries there has existed
a vocal minority which believes that population will ‘soon’ outgrow the
carrying capacity of the earth.
The
Population Bomb Was A Dud
Ehrlich wrote well, and convincingly. I remember telling my father in 1972 that something now
unremembered wouldn’t matter, because soon we would all be going through
starvation and food riots. After all, Ehrlich said in The Population Bomb
that the 1970s would be the decade of massive, worldwide starvation. I believed
it. I believed him. He was one of the gurus often quoted in Mother Earth News,
the magazine devoted to helping us readers survive the impending catastrophe by
becoming self-sufficient. He was respected. He was extremely intelligent and
far-seeing. He was infallible.
Fortunately, he was not infallible. Ehrlich’s massive
starvation did not occur, which made me grow a little wiser and a lot less
gullible. As the world’s population grew, advances in agriculture more than
compensated for the extra mouths to feed. More food is now grown per acre than
ever before in history, and there is still plenty of land that can still be
converted to agriculture if needed. Estimates are that world population will
level off at about 8 billion people. With current technology, we can easily feed
10 billion.
Our
most precious resource, according to Simon,
is
that of human intelligence.
Simon’s name was relatively unknown outside of
academia until Ehrlich accepted his standing challenge. Simon had offered to bet
any of the hysteria-mongers that any natural resources they claimed we were
running out of would be cheaper in the future, indicating that they were not
scarce. Ehrlich was the perfect taker. After all, he had written that “before
1985, mankind will enter an age of scarcity” in which ‘the accessible
supplies of many key minerals will be nearing depletion.”
In 1980, the bet was made. Ehrlich chose several
natural resources, including tin, chromium, copper, nickel, and tungsten, and a
time period of ten years. At the end of the agreed-upon decade, Ehrlich lost,
totally and completely. Every one of his choices had declined in value. It was
the triumph of optimism over pessimism, the victory of the view that human
capabilities can improve the world instead of destroying it.
From
Whale Oil To Petroleum
Nonetheless, Ehrlich still has a large following of
true believers who refuse to let the facts interfere with their worldview.
Ehrlich ended up being given forums on national television to espouse his views;
Simon was seldom invited to participate in the national arena. Ehrlich packed
lecture halls; Simon’s audiences often numbered in the dozens. Ehrlich
believes that government mandates should stabilize resources: Simon felt that if
the government resists the temptation to interfere, in most cases market forces
will find alternatives for temporary scarcities. Ehrlich views the earth as a
closed system; Simon looked at it as flexible and capable of expansion. Ehrlich
was able to turn his pessimism into a lucrative career as an environmental
advocate; Simon’s belief in people’s abilities to solve environmental
problems with minimal impacts to humans was not a best-seller.
As Resource Roundup noted in a previous article,
scarcities of resources simply result in new technology. A local shortage of
bronze resulted in the Iron Age. A shortage of whale oil spurred the development
and cost-effective usage of petroleum, which had previously been perceived as a
nuisance substance. The use of petroleum reduced demands upon the world’s
forests for heating, cooking, and other energy. After the new technology is
accepted, there is reduced stress on the previous resources.
The
World Gains In Brains
Our most precious resource, however, is that of human
intelligence, according to Simon, and the growing population and prosperity
would enable increased health and an increasingly cleaner environment. Those
being born today may find the answers to untold numbers of problems, ways to do
more with less, ways to do something new and exciting with previously unknown
resources, he believed. And although a growing population may mean more mouths
to feed, it also means more brains to solve problems.
Despite the fact that world population has increased,
more people are healthier and wealthier, infant mortality has declined, and life
expectancy has increased, even in Third World countries. Julian Simon was right.
Today’s workers can buy more with an hour’s labor than ever before. There is
no widespread worldwide starvation, even though population has increased beyond
1970s levels. Neither have Ehrlich’s other prophecies come true.
Doomsayers
Less Hesitant Now To Set Specific Dates
Ehrlich predicted that hundreds of million of people
would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s, that killer smogs would devastate
Los Angeles, that chronic oil shortages would exist by now, and that rising sea
levels would swamp cities in the 1980s. None of those have occurred, and it is
doubtful that his prediction that England will not exist by 2000 will come true.
Though he predicted that much of America would be starving by 1980, America’s
‘major food problem’ is instead obesity!
Still, although
Ehrlich seems a little less hesitant nowadays to affix specific dates to his
portended catastrophes, he has not admitted defeat. “Look at the new
problems:” he stated in a New York Times magazine article by John
Tierney, “the ozone hole, acid rain, global warming.
I have no doubt that in the next century, if we let the ecological
systems keep running downhill, we could have a gigantic population crash.”
No
Shame In E-land
Wait... not a population explosion but a population crash?
This sounds suspiciously like the global cooling theory that somehow changed in
two decades to the global warming theory, espoused by the exact same people. Is
there no shame in environist-land?
No, there is not. And the world has suffered a loss in
the death of Julian Simon, nicknamed ‘Doomslayer’ for his propensity to drag
out the facts that refute the doomsayers of this world. Julian Simon, who set
out to learn the facts about overpopulation in the 1960s so that he could become
an learned advocate for strict population control programs, was hit by the facts
during his studies of those issues. And
instead of closing his eyes and ignoring the truth, as do so many people when
the facts are unpopular, Julian Simon fought back by trying to spread that truth
to the world. His death did not rate big stories in the national media. If
his well-researched facts, his legacy of truth, and his courage of
convictions spread to others, it will be a fitting tribute to a man devoted to
battling hysterical environmentalism with the stark reality of facts.
(Sources:
People for the West!, May, 1997; “A BET ON PLANET EARTH”, by John
Tierney, New York Times Magazine, as excerpted in Reader’s Digest,
March, 1991; “He fought nonsense”, by Thomas Sowell, Rapid City Journal,
February 15, 1998.
(Julian Simon wrote about
20 books, including The Ultimate Resource 2. Check your local library or
bookstore for the wisdom of Julian Simon. In addition, readers who seek more information about the
world’s capacity to support its population and common-sense solutions to
environmental problems should also enjoy Conservative Environmentalism,
by James R. Dunn and John E. Kinney, Quorum Books. -Ed.)
Simon
Says
Julian Simon says the glass is half full and -- even more important --
getting more full rather than more empty. PFW
put together Mr. Simon’s thoughts on the following subjects through various
magazine articles about him, passages from his books, and conversations with
him.
On the quality of life:
“Every measure of material human welfare in the
United States and the world has improved rather than deteriorated...
“People are living longer than ever before.
They are eating better than ever before.
Air and water quality have improved, not declined.
The real prices of energy, raw materials, and food are lower than ever...
“The years have been good for humanity, and there is
stronger evidence than ever to believe the progressive trends will continue past
the year 2000, past the year 2100 and indefinitely.”
On the availability of
resources:
“Taken in large, an increased need for resources
usually leaves us with a permanently greater capacity to get them, because we
gain knowledge in the process. And
there is no meaningful physical limit -- even the commonly mentioned weight of
the earth -- to our capacity to keep growing forever...
“Resources come out of people’s minds more than out
of the ground or air. Minds matter
economically as much as or more than hands or mouths. Human beings create more than they use, on average.
It had to be so, or we would be an extinct species...
“We are not running out of resources because fear of
shortages induces people to use their imagination and talents to increase the
supply or develop alternatives. People
are the ultimate resource, and because of them, natural resources are not finite
in any meaningful sense...
“One of the worst things we can do is pull in our
horns and stop producing and creating and growing and using because ‘we’re
going to run out.’ That’s exactly the wrong solution.
If we pull in our horns we will keep ourselves from creating new and
better solutions...”
On endangered species:
“Fear is rampant about the rapid rates of species
extinction, but the fear has little or no basis.
“The highest rate of observed extinctions (others go
unobserved, certainly) is one species per year, in contrast to the 40,000 per
year some ecologists have been forecasting for the year 2000. Most important, the observed rate has not been rising.”
(Simon likes to quote 19th century economist Henry George:
“Both the jayhawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jayhawks, the fewer
chickens, while the more men, the more chickens.”
On the forecast for
worldwide famine:
“Worldwide, people are eating better than ever
because yields per acre are skyrocketing. Without any technological marvels --
only the transfer of existing methods from highly to less productive areas --
agriculture can feed tens of billions of people.”
On the role of grassroots
activists in helping set the record straight about America’s resources and
injecting common sense into the environmental debate:
“Can the amount of false bad news be reduced?
Can erroneous beliefs in present and future crisis be countered?
“In fact, the situation has improved in the
past two decades, because there are now at least some voices and organizations
that work to refute false bad news about the environment and social issues.
“The core of the problem is this: The public does not
hear the true facts about environment, population, and various social issues,
but the public does hear the doomsaying messages... The people who know the
truth too seldom speak out. And
Edmund Burke said, ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good
men do nothing’.”
The key to continued
improvements in the quality of life:
“(Improvements in mankind’s lot) happened in the
context of a competitive-enterprise system that worked to produce what was
needed by the public. The key elements of this framework are economic liberty,
respect for property and fair and sensible rules of the market that are enforced
equally for all.”
(Excerpted from People
for the West? May, 1997)
“We get ever more ingenious at finding and extracting
(mineral resources). So far they have all, without exception, grown cheaper and
more abundant, century after century. The
dire predictions of ecologists ever since Robert Malthus that food, oil, water,
and metal would get steadily scarcer and more expensive have been consistently
wrong for 200 years. There is no reason to suspect they will suddenly be right
next year or even next century.”
(Matt Ridley, reviewing The
Ultimate Resource 2, by Julian Simon, Princeton
University Press - 609/258-4900).
“Sing, dance, be merry -- and work. But instead we see gloomy faces.
They are spoilsports, and they have bad effects.
The spoilsports accuse our generation of having a party -- at the expense
of generations to come. But it’s those who use the government to their own
advantage who are having a party at the expense of others -- the bureaucrats,
the grant-grabbers, the subsidy-looters. Don’t
let them spoil our merry day.”
(Julian
Simon in
The Ultimate Resource 2, Princeton University Press
(609/258-4900).
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