Doomslayer

Lately there have been a series of "news" stories popping up under the Yahoo! headlines, talking about the Kyoto treaty and bemoaning the impending global disaster of global warming and the depletion of resources, especially oil. I won't even bother to link to them, you can find them easily yourself if you care to waste your time on them.

In the comments at an article at Belmont Club on growing Chinese demand for oil, was a link to an article on Julian Simon, the Doomslayer, whom I had first heard of several years ago.

It is worth reading in full.

As someone who grew up in the 1970s, I recall being pummeled by "educational" films and readings in grade school that were teaching us about impending global doom, as resources ran out, energy sources disappeared, and pollution forced everyone to live in domed cities -- if they were lucky -- or to wear breathing apparatus to go outdoors! One film had a mocking narrator who taunted a young boy who ran around a spooky carnival, as the rides were all shutting down around him for lack of electricity (anybody elese remember such a film?). This all of course was intended to make us hate our civilization. For some, it apparently took root, leading to the political situation today.

But back to the Doomslayer:

I first met "doom-slayer" Julian L. Simon at the University of Illinois in the spring of 1980—at just the time when the environmental doomsday industry had reached the height of its influence and everyone knew the earth was headed to hell in a hand basket. We could see the signs right before our very eyes. We had just lived through a decade of gasoline lines, Arab oil embargoes, severe food shortages in the Third World, nuclear accidents, and raging global inflation. Almost daily the media were reporting some new imminent eco-catastrophe: nuclear winter, ozone depletion, acid rain, species extinction, and the death of the forests and oceans.

The Club of Rome had just released its primal scream, Limits to Growth, which reported that the earth was rapidly running out of everything. The most famous declinist of the era, biologist Paul Ehrlich, had appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to fill Americans with fear of impending world famine and make gloomy prognostications, such as, "If I were a gambler, I would bet even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."
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It was back in the midst of that aura of gloom that by chance I enrolled in Simon’s undergraduate economics course at the University of Illinois. After the first week of the course, I was convinced that his multitude of critics were right. He must be a madman. How could anyone believe the outlandish claims he was making? That population growth was not a problem; that natural resources were becoming more abundant; that the condition of the environment was improving. That the incomes of the world’s population were rising. Simon made all of those bold proclamations and more in his masterpiece The Ultimate Resource, published in 1980. I read the book over and over—three times, in fact—and I came to the humbling realization that everything I had been taught since the first grade about population and environmental issues had been dead wrong.
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(After reading Earth in the Balance, Julian was convinced that Gore was one of the most dangerous men and one of the shallowest thinkers in all of American politics.)

Simon argued that we were not running out of food, water, oil, trees, clean air, or any other natural resource because throughout the course of human history the price of natural resources had been declining. Falling long-term prices are prima facie evidence of greater abundance, not increasing scarcity. He showed that, over time, the environment had been getting cleaner, not dirtier. He showed that the "population bomb" was a result of a massive global reduction in infant mortality rates and a stunning increase in life expectancy. "If we place value on human life," Simon argued, "then those trends are to be celebrated, not lamented."

Simon’s central premise was that people are the ultimate resource. "Human beings," he wrote, "are not just more mouths to feed, but are productive and inventive minds that help find creative solutions to man’s problems, thus leaving us better off over the long run." As Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute explained in his brilliant tribute to Simon in the Wall Street Journal, "Simon’s central point was that natural resources are not finite in any serious way; they are created by the intellect of man, an always renewable resource." Julian often wondered why most governmental economic and social statistics treat people as if they are liabilities not assets. "Every time a calf is born," he observed, "the per capita GDP of a nation rises. Every time a human baby is born, the per capita GDP falls." Go figure!

The two trends that Simon believed best captured the long-term improvement in the human condition over the past 200 years were the increase in life expectancy and the decline in infant mortality (see figures). Those trends, Simon maintained, were the ultimate sign of man’s victory over death.
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The ultimate embarrassment for the Malthusians was when Paul Ehrlich bet Simon $1,000 in 1980 that five resources (of Ehrlich’s choosing) would be more expensive in 10 years. Ehrlich lost: 10 years later every one of the resources had declined in price by an average of 40 percent.

Julian Simon loved good news. And the good news of his life is that, today, the great bogeyman of our time, Malthusianism, has, like communism, been relegated to the dustbin of history with the only remaining believers to be found on the faculties of American universities. The tragedy is that it is the Paul Ehrlichs of the world who still write the textbooks that mislead our children with wrongheaded ideas. And it was Paul Ehrlich, not Julian Simon, who won the MacArthur Foundation’s "genius award."

Among the many prominent converts to the Julian Simon world view on population and environmental issues were Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. Despite howls of protest from the international population control lobby, in 1984 the Reagan administration adopted Simon’s position—that the world is not overpopulated and that people are resource creators, not resource destroyers—at the United Nations Population Conference in Mexico City. The Reaganites called it "supply-side demographics." Meanwhile, in the late 1980s, Simon traveled by invitation to the Vatican to explain his theories on population growth. A year later Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter urged nations to treat their people "as productive assets."

Many of his most ardent critics were government activists who believe that the only conceivable solution to impending eco-catastrophe is ever more stringent governmental edicts: coercive population stabilization policies, gas rationing, wage and price controls, mandatory recycling, and so on.

Simon’s theory about the benefits of people also led him to write extensively about immigration. In 1989 he published The Economic Consequences of Immigration, which argued that immigrants make "substantial net economic contributions to the United States." His research in the 1980s showed that, over their lifetimes, immigrants on balance pay thousands of dollars more in taxes than they use in government services, making them a good investment for native-born Americans. It was arguably the most influential book on U.S. immigration policy in 25 years. Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.), chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee, has credited Simon’s work with helping "keep wide open America’s gates to immigrants."

Well, nobody's perfect...

See also the controversial The Skeptical Environmentalist. Though peer-reviewed before publication in English by the Cambridge University Press, a concerted effort was made to have the book suppressed by the eco-left. A formal complaint lodged against the author with the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty was ultimately rejected.