Please reply to:
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                                           After June 18, 1990



        Mr. Timothy Taylor, Managing Editor
        Journal of Economic Perspectives
        Department of Economics
        Stanford University
        Stanford, California 94305-6072

        To the Editors:

             It was late at night and I'd had a beer.  My attention was
        drawn to lines in a journal that lay open on the table:  "We
        believe that the main focus of aid to developing countries should
        be to encourage responsible policies towards the environment,
        population growth, and other areas where third world actions
        create externalities.  Mexico's population explosion, Colombia's
        drug enforcement program, and Brazil's policies towards
        deforestation will have a far greater impact on northern welfare
        in the next century..."

             Gadzooks, I thought, a sign that the twentieth anniversary
        of Earth Week is coming up.  I wondered:  Who is the author of
        this suggestion -- Paul Ehrlich in the new revision of The
        Population Bomb?  Pope John Paul II in a recent encyclical?  The
        Natural Resource Defense Council in a fund-raising blurb?

             But -- gasp -- say it ain't true, Joe.  Could it be that
        this third-world debt reduction policy suggestion, with no cost-
        benefit study to support it, is passing as analysis in an
        esteemed economics journal?  But yes, it really is economists
        Jeremy Bulow and Kenneth Rogoff writing in JEP (1990, p. 39).
        Indeed, as editor of the entire section, in his introduction,
        Bulow hardens the obiter dictum into the phrase "rewarding good
        behavior in habitat preservation, population control and drug
        interdiction" (p. 3).

             Humor evaporates.  The authors not only did not support
        their assertions with analysis, but they proceed as if the views
        they suggest have not been discredited by several decades of
        empirical and theoretical literature.  On population growth I
        suggest they consult the 1986 report of the National Academy of
        Sciences, Population Growth and Economic Development (1986), or
        the review by Allen Kelley in a recent Journal of Economic
        Literature (1989).  On deforestation, they might examine Roger
        Sedjo and Marion Clawson (1984).  On the environment as a whole
        they could look at any standard source such as Robert Dorfman and
        Nancy Dorfman (1977) or William Baumol and Wallace Oates (1979).

             It is not a matter for concern that a couple of full
        professors at fully-accredited institutions goes (sic) off the
        rails this way.  What does matter is that they could only publish
        such loose thoughts in an atmosphere of general professional
        permissiveness and approval of such "environmental" views,
        especially in an important and official journal whose editors are
        as sensible as I have had recent experience to learn that JEP's
        three are.

             Does this signal a return to the professional bankruptcy of
        the years around 1970 when economists turned their backs on their
        entire intellectual heritage, and swallowed whole the trendy idea
        that we were running out of natural resources?  (See e. g. Paul
        A. Samuelson, 1975, p. 538.)

                                           Sincerely,



                                           Julian L. Simon




        page 1 /article0 jeconper/June 18, 1990


                                   REFERENCES

             Baumol, William J., and Wallace E. Oates, Economics,
        Environmental Policy, and the Quality of Life (Englewood Cliffs:
        Prentice Hall, 1979).

             Bulow, Jeremy, and Kenneth Rogoff, "Cleaning up Third World
        Debt Without Getting Taken to the Cleaners", The Journal of
        Economic Perspectives, 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 31-42.

             Dorfman, Robert, and Nancy S. Dorfman, Economics of the
        Environment , Second edition (New York: Norton, 1977).

             Kelley, Allen C., "Economic Consequences of Population
        Change in the Third World", Journal of Economic Literature,  Dec,
        1988, 1685-1728).

             National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council,
        Committee on Population, and Working Group on Population Growth
        and Economic Development, Population Growth and Economic
        Development: Policy Questions (Washington, D.C.: National Academy
        Press, 1986).

             Rogoff, Kenneth, "Symposium on New Institutions for
        Developing Country Debt", The Journal of Economic Perspectives,
        4, Winter, 1990, pp. 3-7.

             Samuelson, Paul A., "The Optimum Growth Rate for
        Population", International Economic Review, 16, December, 1975,
        531-538.

             Sedjo, Roger, and Marion Clawson, "Global Forests", in
        Julian L. Simon and Herman Kahn (eds.), The Resourceful Earth
        (New York:  Basil Blackwell, 1984).



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