RESOURCES, ENVIRONMENT, AND POPULATION GROWTH Julian L. Simon Many natural scientists such as physicists Murray Gell-Mann, William Shockley, and Andrei Sakharov worry about human population size and growth. Henry Kendall, speaking for the Union of Concerned Scientists (including 99 Nobelists), asks nations to "stabilize population growth". A 1993 Science Summit on World Population, organized by the U. S. National Academy of Sciences with 59 other scientific academies (including Albania, Cuba, and Mongolia) stated: "Humanity is approaching a crisis point with respect to the interlocking issues of population, environment, and development" because "The Earth is Finite". The recent The State of Humanity (Basil Blackwell, 1996) contains 50 articles showing the long trends in these matters. These are some findings with (in parentheses) the period during which rapid improvement has taken place following millenia of almost no improvement: On average, people throughout the world live longer and eat better than ever before (improving over the past 200 years in rich countries, 50 years in poor countries). Fewer people die of famine than in earlier centuries (100 years). The real prices of food and other raw materials are lower than in earlier periods, showing increased natural-resource availability rather than scarcity (200 years). The major air and water pollutions in the advanced countries have been lessening rather than worsening (40 years). Maximum transport speeds have zoomed upwards (200 years), and maximum message speeds went from 30 miles an hour to the speed of an electrical impulse (mid-19th century). Income and wealth rose above subsistence for more than a small minority for the first time in human history (200 years ago). In brief, almost every measure of material and environmental human welfare in the United States and in the world has been improving rather than deteriorating. Many assert that these benign trends cannot continue indefi- nitely because of some physical limit. One supposed limit is the land area for agriculture. But this constraint may well be loosening rather than tightening, and less land may be needed even as population continues to grow, making more land available for recreation and wilderness. Best commercial practice now uses land millions of times more efficiently than did early humans. On a single acre (0.4 hectare) a hydroponic farm using artificial light raises a ton of food every day, enough to feed a thousand people. And if land were to become more expensive, one could choose to build the factory 100 stories high rather than a single story, and multiply the output per acre by 100. And so on, without practical limit. Another commonly-mentioned limit is energy, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is cited. But the Second Law is only meaningful within some bounded space. And it is quite clear that the relevant bounded space includes our sun, whose lifetime is not relevant on an human time-scale. To epitomize the matter, I have a standing offer to wager a week's or month's pay that any trend in material human welfare will improve rather than get worse. You pick the trend, the country, and the future year. Anything I win goes to fund research. Some ecologists criticize economists' thinking about limits because it seems to violate common sense. "[T]o a scientist [these ideas] are in the same class as the idea that Jack Frost is responsbile for ice-crystal patterns on a cold window", writes Paul Ehrlich. He laments the "blunders... economists... commit when they attempt to deal with problems of population, resources, and environment". Economists think that the whole world is just a market system, and that free goods are infinitely supplied. They are a discipline built on transparent mistakes, from the point of view of a physicist or a biologist. Concerning common sense, Hermann Bondi wrote: Common sense refers to the tremendous amount of experience we gain in early life that tells us such an enormous amount about the world we live in and the objects that surround us... the bulk of common sense is distilled experience. ... We do not gain any common sense appreciation of the behavior of gas at a million degrees because we do not meet that kind of thing in ordinary life. Nor do we gain any appreciation of the view of the world one would have if one were speeding through the countryside at 100,000 miles a second, simply because this does not happen to us... [But] one would not expect common sense to apply [at very high speeds]. In fact, common sense would then be an unwel- come intruder making it more difficult for us to adapt ourselves to these new circumstances than it might otherwise be. And so it is with the economics of population growth; common sense can lead one astray. Indeed, common sense is more dangerous here than in physics because one is less willing to acknowledge that one's daily experience does not apply than with respect to gases or small particles. With natural resources, for example: it makes perfect sense that there is a fixed stock of them, and as some are used up there must be less left. Yet natural resources become less and less scarce economically with every passing decade and century. Here we apply to resource scarcity the operational definition that Einstein taught us with respect to the concepts of time, space, and simultaneity: the scarcity of a resource is defined by its price, just as time is defined by the hands on a clock. The theory of impending scarcity is falsified by all the data from the past. And across-nations comparisons do not show a negative effect of population growth upon economic growth; population density is even correlated positively with economic growth. If physicists will inspect and respect the data, perhaps they will reject the discredited common-sense theory - first- edition Malthusianism based on fixed physical limits, a theory that Malthus himself abandoned in his second and subsequent editions. As the great 19th century economist F. Y. Edgeworth noted: "The treating as constant what is variable is the source of most of the fallacies in Political Economy". The following theory fits the data: Population growth and increase of income expand demand, forcing up prices of natural resources. The increased prices and the opportunities for productive research trigger the search for new supplies. Most seekers fail, but eventually some succeed, and new sources and substitutes are found. These discoveries leave humanity better off than if the shortages had not occurred. Hence humans beings create more than they destroy, on balance. Bob Park asked: Have not the doomsayers helped produce a better environment? I answer: Those who warn against real trouble help. Even if the warning is wrong, I do not criticise unless the warner is willfully ignorant or dishonest. But some forecasts are knowingly exaggerated or false. Atmospheric scientist Stephen Schneider says; we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have...Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I know of no evidence that false warnings of doom on balance are beneficial. And in the absence of such evidence, I continue to believe that professing the truth is humanity's best hope. page 1 articl96 parkrobt February 21, 1996 from \ultres\tchar38.prnFor Schneider ref, ses \ultre\refsadd or new footnote 33? in chap 40 <1> Borlaug, 1971, pp. 8-9: "the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise, the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only." Wilson quoted in Time, August 1, 1977, p. 58: "It would be foolish, he says, to rear as many healthy children as possible in today's crowded world." Asimov in Jewish News, September 23, 1975, p. 32: "natural re- sources are being haphazardly drained and the population is allowed to grow unchecked ... the population is increasing faster than the capacity to provide material and food for the growing numbers of people." Gell-Mann, "The Population Crisis: Rising Concern at Home," Science, November 7, 1969, p. 723: "We are all of us appalled at man's ravaging of his environment. The problem comes about as a product of three factors: population, the pro- pensity for each individual to destroy the environment, and his capacity to do so through being armed with technology. All of these are increasing; all must be worked on in an effort to find some way to control the trend and ultimately make it level off or reverse." Andrei Sakharov, 1978, p. 6. Wilt Chamberlain and David Shaw, 1973, Wilt (New York: Warner Paperback): "I was especially hoping I would convince Richard [Nixon!] to take the lead in trying to solve the overpopulation problem - probably the biggest problem in the world today, as I see it. I figured that if he would throw the prestige of his office and the power of this country behind some sweeping birth-control progrmas in the more backward countries, we might make some real progress in that area." Landers, Chicago Sun-Times, June 23, 1970, p. 40: "Dear Ann Landers: It is now abundantly clear to even the most empty- headed fools that something drastic must be done within the next decade to limit the size of families or we are all doomed." The writer then called for sterilization as a remedy. Landers re- plied, "Yes, I'm with you." "Dear Abby," Champaign-Urbana News Gazette, May 9, 1974, p. 34: "When the writers of the Good Book implored us to go forth and multiply, the world needed more people. Not so today. Quite the contrary." Rockefeller in Newsweek, March 30, 1970, p. 87. Raffi, Sic; The Washington Post, May 31, 1992, G1. Hammond World Atlas, 1976, p. E-14. Leontief, Population-Environment Balance, fundraising letter, no date. Gore, The Washington Post, July 17, 1992, p. A28; AmStat News, February, 91, p. 6. Steven Schneider quoted by Schell, Jonathan, "Our Fragile Earth," Discover, October 1989, p. 47 Kendall: Science 27 Nov 1992, p. 1433 Edgeworth quoted by Morgenstern, The Limits of Economics, 1937, p. 6 Morgenstern, Oskar, The Limits of Economics (London: William Hodge and Company, Limited, 1937). "The treating as constant what is variable is the source of most of the fallacies in Political Economy." -- F. Y. Edgeworth. (Morgenstern, 1937, p. 6.) Ehrlich on economists: from ultres chap 15. (Steward McBride, "Doomsday Postpooned", The Christian_Science_Monitor, Aug. 26, 1980, ppB10 and B11) Bondi, Hermann, Relativity and Common Sense: A New Approach to Einstein (Dover, 1961/1964).(Bondi, 1961/1964, pp. 62-3.) Obfuscation by calculation -- exponentials, linear func- tions, power functions, logistic functions; you name it, people have been awed and befuddled by it. Concept of finitude. The 7 billion joke. I do not describe any magnitued as "infinite". I only say that the quantities of resources are increasing. Perhaps this distinction is similar to that between an infinite universe and an expanding universe. see popenv? More People... Where other short acct? TRS exec sum? Some deny that "those who have been trained in modern `economics' actually deal with economic realities." <2> Paul Ehrlich laments the "blunders... economists... commit when they attempt to deal with problems of population, resources, and environmnt"[<3> Schneider, <4> A bet epitomizes the matter. In 1980, Paul Ehrlich and two associates wagered with me about future prices of raw materials. We would assess the trend in $1000 worth of copper, chrome, nickel, tin, and tungsten for ten years. I would win if resources grew more abundant, and they would win if resources became scarcer. At settling time in 1990, the year after the twentieth Earth Week, they sent me a check for $576.07. A single bet proves little, of course. Hence I offer to repeat the wager, broadened as follows: A week's or month's pay that just about any trend pertaining to material human welfare will improve rather than get worse. S/he picks the trend - perhaps life expectancy, a price of a natural resource, some measure of air or water pollution, or the number of telephones per person - and chooses the area of the world and the future year. If I win, my winnings go to non-profit research. Barry Ripin, 301 209 3233 fax 301 209 0865 **ENDNOTES** <2>: Clark, 1989. <3>: Ehrlich, 1981, p. 45. <4>: In Discover, quoted by A. Wildavsky, forthcoming, p. 112. page 2 articl96 parkrobt February 21, 1996