FIRST ASCERTAIN THE SCIENTIFIC FACTS ABOUT POPULATION ECONOMICS Julian L. Simon INTRODUCTION The letter from editor Howard Schneiderman that invited me to contribute an article to this issue of Society included an article by Lester Brown as a "springboard for your thoughts on this subject". I wrote back, Would you distribute the enclosed article from The Public Interest to other prospective participants, and I hope the piece from Challenge as well? There are two key points about Lester Brown that are relevant here: First, he has been wrong on every single prediction he has made in the past 25 years. Second, though one would conclude otherwise from reading the popular press, Brown's ideas run completely contrary to the mainstream of agricultural economists as well as of population economists. (The Public Interest article talks about that.) Professor Schneiderman then suggested that "If you wish to make the points underscored in your letter, the proper forum ... is in your contribution to this symposium". So this article will do just that, by presenting the cores of those two articles and putting them in the present context. I will first present evidence that Lester Brown has been wrong in the predictions he has consistently made in the past 30 years, and therefore he is a poor "springboard" for anyone's thoughts. Then I will document that the mainstream view of population economists is quite the opposite of what Brown and the other doomsayers proclaim. I'll end by trying to sharpen the issue by offering to wager Lester Brown or anyone else that the opposite of his gloomy predictions will take place. MALTHUS LIVES FOREVER IN WASHINGTON, D.C. In 1982, William Hudson and I responded to an article that Lester Brown had written about the future of the world's food supplies. Here follow major chunks of that response, unchanged except for the inclusion of updated graphs. It is important that everything said then is as true now as it was then, and that the extensions of the graphs since then confirm our predictions completely. In contrast, Brown's forecasting record was a hundred percent wrong then and it is a hundred percent wrong now. Yet as we shall see, he continues to say the same things now that he said then - and the press continues to report his forecasts with complete credulity, without recognizing that every reputable agricultural economist disagrees with Brown. *** As suggested by the title of his January-February, 1982, article in Challenge magazine, "Global Food Prospects: Shadow of Malthus," Lester R. Brown could hardly be more pessimistic about the world's food future. He writes: "The period of global food security is over ... the worldwide effort to expand food production is losing momentum ... world food supplies are tightening and the slim margin between food production and population growth continues to narrow."[1] We think it likely, however, that the events of the future will be exactly the opposite of what Brown predicts. If historical trends continue, the food situation will improve rather than worsen. We so predict because, in our interpretation, the data on past trends show quite a different picture from what Brown says they show; his forecasts are based on the wrong empirical premises, we judge. We shall try to present enough data for you to make up your own mind about whose predictions are better founded. And we shall refer back to Brown's earlier forecasts over almost two decades which, we believe, show that his track record has been very poor. Trends in Total World Grain Production Brown wrote (in 1982) that, "Since 1971, gains in output have barely kept pace with population growth; production per person has fluctuated widely but shown little real increase." The period between the then-peak year of 1971 and the "unusually poor harvest" (Brown's words) in 1980 enabled Brown's words to be technically true. Now look at the period between 1971 and 1980 in Figure 1, which displays Brown's own graph (produced in 1994) of the long-run data for world grain production per capita (kilograms). Why should one have compared, as Brown did in 1982, just the past decade? Only such a pick-and-choose comparison was consistent with Brown's gloomy assessment. By almost anyone's statistical or eyeball examination, these data - even when standing in 1982 - show a continued trend toward more food per person. The improvement in the world food situation is seen to be even more impressive when we look at the data in Figure 1 on food production per person, which includes not only grains but also pulses, oilseeds (a very important element in the improvement), vegetables, and fruit (measured by value rather than by weight because of the need to add apples and soybeans). The gain since the data first became available after World War II has been extraordinary - and that, remember, is the per person increase, after population growth is allowed for. Figure 1 The Trend in Food Prices Brown forecast in 1982, and forecasts again in 1994, that "inevitably real food prices will rise. The question no longer seems to be whether they will rise but how much ... rising food prices may become a more or less permanent feature of the economic landscape in the years ahead...." Figures 2a and 2b, reproduced from an earlier book of Brown's, show how he constructs graphs to apparently prove his point. But the long- run trends in Figure 3 - concerning which Brown never shows the data - indicate long-run declines in prices. And it is true whether one measures prices relative to wages in the United States (the most important for U.S. citizens); as a proportion of total income (as with the wage comparison, the fall has been sharper in the now-rich countries, but has also been proceeding in the less developed world); or even relative to the prices of consumer goods, which themselves have been produced ever more cheaply over the years in terms of basic inputs. Figures 2 and 3 Why, then, does Brown think that food prices will rise in the future if they have been falling over the long haul? Perhaps more than anything else, Brown's forecasts of price rises and other unhappy future trends stem looking at short periods in the past, and choosing to examine those short series at moments when recent fluctuations have been sharply upwards. This short view leads Brown to conclude that there has been a turning point in history, and that the long-run past trends have been reversed. For example he says, "The long postwar period of food-price stability came to an end with the massive Soviet wheat purchase in 1972. The largest food-import deal in history, it signaled the beginning of a new era." Figure 2 shows how he portrayed the course of then-recent food prices; diagrams like that are enough to lead anyone to forecast doomsday. Examination of the long-run data in Figure 3, which shows what happened after the "beginning of a new era," yields a different impression. Despite all the positive trends in the past, Brown's forecast in Figure 1 is again downwards. The extension of actual observations tells exactly the same counterfactual story as his earlier graphs. He still points to recent apparent reversals in long-term trends and interprets them as permanent reversals. And his message is still treated by the press as if it is the gospel.[1] Trends in Soil Quality Brown sees the United States as exploiting its land for short-run profit, a "sacrifice of the land's long-term productivity ... mining soils in order to meet the ever growing demand." He writes about "a rate of soil erosion that is draining cropland of its fertility" in the United States and perhaps elsewhere. And the Worldwatch Institute, which he heads, has raised much public concern about this issue. Brown does not cite any supporting data. And the aggregate data we know of suggest that the opposite of ruination is happening. Nobel prize-winner Theodore Schultz recently wrote a long article debunking the present scares about soil erosion, following on a discussion by Leo V. Mayer of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA): "There have been two national soil surveys, the first in 1934 and the second in 1977. These surveys provide no support for the many dire pronouncements that soil erosion has been going from bad to worse. On the contrary, the proportion of our cropland with only slight erosion increased 47 percent in 1934 to 77 percent in 1977. To the extent that this evidence is reliable, it is a remarkable achievement. I know of no compelling reasons why this favorable secular tend cannot be continued." Three nationwide survey inventories of land use in 1958, 1967, and 1975 were conducted by the Soil Conservation Service. Their findings were that, "The quality of cropland has been improved by shifts in land use." A larger proportion of the cropland recently has been in the best "capability" classes, and a smaller proportion in the worst capability classes, than in earlier years. Schultz adds: "I am a bit harsh on those who are arguing erosion is catastrophic. It simply isn't true" (letter of March 25, 1982). Figure 4 compiles the data documenting that the U. S. farmland has become less rather than more eroded with the years. Figure 4 Productivity Trends As of 1978, Brown was writing in the New York Times that "per-acre yield of all cereals in the United States peaked in the early '70s." But his own data on corn yields from 1866 to the present in Figure 5 even as of 1978. Given this evidence that productivity continued to rise, Brown warned in 1982 about a "slower rate of yield increase." But even that was not supported by the data at the time Brown wrote. Agricultural economist Earl Swanson showed that yield had continued to rise at the same amount of yield per year; "Both corn and soybean yields in Illinois are still trending upward. Nothing in this study indicates that there is a leveling off, contrary to predictions a few years ago" (Swanson, 1980, p. 9). Overall U.S. agricultural productivity continues to increase. Figure 5 Trends in Food Storage Brown sees "growing food insecurity" in the trends of world stocks of food reserves. It should be useful to note that he has seen the situation in the same way for quite a while. In 1974 he titled a section of his book, In the Human Interest, "Growing Global Food Insecurity." And he presented a graph as shown in one of the lines Figure 6, which purports to show a combination of "global reserve stocks of grain" with the "grain production potential of idle cropland," combined as "world grain reserves." Figure 6 Just as did the data he showed in 1982, the 1974 graph showed (1) things apparently getting worse, and (2) the data for the first years charted as the best years, and the last years charted as the worst years. Yet the food situation has gotten better and more secure, rather than worse and less reliable. Why did Brown go wrong on this, and why do we think he is again headed in the same wrong direction? We (Bill Hudson and I) differ from Brown in that he looks only at an index combining idled farmland and food stocks, whereas we think food stocks alone are the more meaningful measure. Nevertheless, in our 1982 article, Hudson and I included both sorts of data - as far back as data exist - as seen (along with the graph Brown drew (see Figure 6). They reveal again that Brown shows a false picture by focusing on only selected years of data. And for completeness we show the data to the present in Figure 7, confirming that no bad long-run trend has been taking place. Figure 7 One may see in the food-storage data some long-run trend downward. But in our view this is a good sign, reflecting increased efficiency in worldwide grain storage, just as increased efficiency in industrial inventory control leads to lower inventories and less cost for keeping them. Trends in Idle U.S. Cropland Brown was writing in 1982 that "for the first time in a generation, there is no cropland idled under U.S. farm programs," a key statement of his analysis. But Figure 8 shows the vast amount of potential production, considered as a stock of food- producing capacity, that has continued to exist. Whom Should You Believe? At this point, the reader naturally wonders: Whom should I believe? You can rest assured that the data we offer here are the only data that exist, stemming from the United Nations and the USDA; there is no discrepancy between our data and Brown's, because Brown does not offer trend data pertaining to most of the issues in dispute. But Brown and the Worldwatch Institute are surely the most quoted sources on agricultural matters in the U.S. press, and they are the source of many of the current scary stories on soil erosion, urbanization of land, and world desertification. Is it even possible that they might be completely wrong? It should be illuminating to know that Brown has changed his mind completely on these matters, and not just once but twice. When he began his public career he argued that the food situation was frightening. Beginning in 1964, he worked with Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman as advisor on foreign agricultural policy and as Administrator of the International Development Service, the technical assistance arm of the Department. His point of view is captured in the opening line of a statement he prepared for the Secretary of Agriculture in 1965: "The less developed world is losing the capacity to feed itself." Then came the "new, high-yielding cereals and the men who developed them...I am fortunate to have had a front-row seat in this historic drama," he wrote. Brown was so impressed that his 1970 book, Seeds of Change, "tells the story of the turnaround on the food front." He became so optimistic that his main worry became whether the poor countries would be able to export all the food they would grow. "The pivotal question is whether the rich countries ... are prepared to open their internal markets to cereal exports from the poor countries." Then his view changed again--despite the fact that there had been no basic change in the food-supply trends of the previous two decades and more--and he again became exceedingly pessimistic, as we have seen. This was not the double-flip-flop of an amateur or casual observer. Brown has been deeply involved in food and agriculture as a professional since 1964. All honor to a person who can change his or her mind, and all admiration for a person who has the courage to reverse his or her public stand. But as Arthur Schlesinger wrote in another context: "How many times does an expert have to be wrong before he loses his reputation for expertise?" The View in 1994 The story of food and doomsayers described above could be re-written almost word for word with respect to every other natural resource, including energy. Every single trend in material scarcity shows increased availability and improvement in supplies, rather than the increased scarcity the doomsayers expect. The graphs of falling prices for every natural resource look similar to those shown above for food. AN UNREPORTED REVOLUTION IN POPULATION ECONOMICS In the 1980's a revolution occurred in scientific views toward the role of population growth in economic development. Revolution is usually the most newsworthy of events. Yet this revolution has gone unreported in the popular press, and conventional ideas therefore continue as before the revolution. The lack of news of this revolution is itself newsworthy. Erroneous belief about population growth has cost dearly in material terms. It has directed attention away from the factor that we now know is central in a country's economic development, its economic and political system. Economic reforms away from totalitarianism and central economic planning in poor countries probably would have been faster and more widespread if slow growth was not explained by recourse to population growth. And in rich countries, misdirected attention to population growth and the supposed consequence of natural resource shortage has caused waste through such programs as synthetic fuel promotion and the development of airplanes that would be appropriate for an age of greater scarcity. Our anti-natalist foreign policy also is dangerous politically because it risks being labeled racist, as happened to us when Indira Ghandi was overthrown because of her sterilization program. Furthermore, misplaced belief that population growth slows economic development provides support for inhumane programs of coercion and the denial of personal liberty in one of the most sacred and valued choices a family can make -- the number of children that it wishes to bear and raise -- in such countries as China, Indonesia, Vietnam. Given the nearly uniform blanket of assertion and belief, who would believe that scientists who study these matters have reversed their views from the earlier consensus that population growth is a key force holding back economic development? Yet this has indeed happened. By now, the economics profession has turned almost completely away from the previous view that population growth is a crucial negative factor in economic development. There is still controversy about whether population growth is even a minor negative factor in some cases, or whether it is beneficial in the long run. But there is no longer any support for the earlier view which was the basis for the U. S. policy and then the population policy of other countries. The "official" turning point came in 1986 with the publication of a report by the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences, entitled Population Growth and Economic Development, which almost completely reversed an earlier report on the same subject from the same institution. The 1971 report said at the beginning of its "Overview": "[A] reduction in present rates of population growth is highly desirable from many points of view, because high fertility and rapid population growth have seriously adverse social and economic effects (p. 1)...Rapid population growth slows down the growth of per capital incomes in less developed countries (p. 2)." And it then proceeded to list the supposed ill effects upon savings, investment, food supplies, unemployment, modernization, technological change, industrialization, social effects, education, health and child development, and the environment. (It is worth noting, however, that -- in a pattern now familiar in such reports -- many of the background chapters exhibit far less alarm, and state many more qualifications, than does the summary. The biased summary is an example of how science has been perverted in the service of zealous belief that population growth is a demon to humanity, and must be suppressed at all costs.) Compare the 1986 report. On the specific issue of raw materials that has been the subject of so much alarm, 1986 NRC- NAS concluded: "The scarcity of exhaustible resources is at most a minor constraint on economic growth (p. 16)...the concern about the impact of rapid population growth on resource exhaustion has often been exaggerated (p. 17)." And it was quite unworried about most of the other effects that caused alarm in the 1971 report. The general conclusion goes only as far as "On balance, we reach the qualitative conclusion that slower population growth would be beneficial to economic development for most developing countries...(p. 17)" That is, 1986 NRC-NAS found forces operating in both positive and negative directions, its conclusion does not apply to all countries, and the size of the effect is not known even where it is believed to be present. This is a major break from the past monolithic characterization of additional people as a major drag upon development across the board. The background paper on macroeconomic-demographic models for the NAS-NRC report by Dennis Ahlburg concluded: It is widely believed that population growth has an adverse effect on economic growth in developing nations...However, a group of scholars have recently argued that the effects of population growth are neutral or may even be positive (no date, p. 2)... The early models found a very large negative impact of population growth on economic development. Subsequent models have found that while the short-run impact is negative it may not be as large as previously thought (Barlow-Davies, Bachue-Kenya, Simon, Kelley- Williamson) and may even be positive in the very long- run (Simon, Mohan). Other models have shown that demographic effects can vary widely across countries (Wheeler) and that population change has had little impact on the degree of urbanization in developing countries (Kelley-Williamson, Mohan). On the basis of this review of economic- demographic models, we concur with Preston that "population growth is not so overwhelmingly negative a factor for economic advance as to swamp the impact of all other influences. That is a worthwhile lesson that bears repeating, but it is no argument for faster demographic growth".(p. 47) Even earlier "establishment" recognition came in the 1984 report of the World Bank. That institution for many years has been the strongest and shrillest voice calling for reduction in the rate of population growth on the grounds that the world is running out of natural resources. In its 1984 World Development Report, however, the World Bank did an about-face and said that natural resources are not a reason to be concerned about population growth. The revolution in economic-demographic thought is evident in n mjan outpouring of scholarly "reviews". Though the reviews vary in whether they consider the shift to be important but not revolutionary, or completely revolutionary, they all agree that what has come to be called the "revisionist" viewpoint cannot be ignored. To all, the view that population growth is either neutral or favorable to development in the long run is at least a controversial pole in a legitimate debate. And there is consensus that if population growth has a negative effect in any given country, it is not a factor of overwhelming importance. From the Introduction to a United Nations Expert Group Meeting on "Consequences of Rapid Population Growth in Developing Countries", August, 1988 (pre-published June, 1989): [T]he majority of popular writings during the 1970's portrayed population growth as a major obstacle to achieving economic development in the Third World. A major exception was the more balanced view found in the second edition of the Determinants and Consequences of Population Growth", published by the United Nations in 1974. During the 1980's, this more balanced view emphasizing the complexity of demographic-economic interrelations has re-emerged. The negative effects of population growth are now portrayed as less important than had been asserted during the previous decade, and some scholars have even indicated that potentially favourable effects may be non-negligible" (p. 1). From Geoffrey McNicoll of the Population Council in that organization's Population and Development Review: [T]here was a casual assumption by many that early efforts to model economic-demographic relationships had wrapped up the subject, demonstrating to general satisfaction the net adverse results of rapid population growth for the development effort...The assumption that the various studies of the consequences problem have cumulatively settled the matter might be plausible were there a reasonable consensus on where the balance of growth consequences lies. Such a consensus probably did exist in the 1960's, but is much less evident today. In the last decade a revisionist stream of thought has emerged that seems to cast doubt on the previous orthodoxy; rapid population growth, according to scholars of this persuasion, is often a neutral and can even be a positive factor in development. Hence the odd current situation of fundamental disagreement about the net impact of one of the most profound changes in social circumstances in the modern world -- a disagreement found, moreover, not in variant political or philosophical premises but in economic modeling and in readings of the empirical record (1984, pp. 177-178). From a recent article by T. N. Srinivasan entitled "Population Growth and Economic Development": Much of the concern about the deleterious effect of a rapid growth of population on economic development is based largely on the view that either household fertility decisions are exogenous or if endogenous, pervasive and significant externalities distort them. It is argued that this view is mistaken and that many of the alleged deleterious consequences result more from inappropriate policies and institutions than from rapid population growth. Thus policy reform and institutional change are called for, rather than policy interventions in private fertility decisions to counter these effects...(1987, abstract) To conclude, most of the arguments for a policy intervention in private household fertility decisions appear to be based either on an inappropriate association of undesirable social consequence due to other distortions in the society with individual fertility choices, or on associations that cannot be ruled out in theory but are empirically weak, if not exaggerated (p. 25). From "Population Growth Versus Economic Growth" by David E., Horlacher and F. Landis MacKellar: Contrary to the [earlier views of Coale and Hoover], this paper will advance the thesis that population growth has both beneficial and adverse effects and that we remain relatively uncertain concerning its net effect on development (1987, p. 1). The principal author of the 1986 NAS-NRC report, Samuel Preston, recently summarized the situation as follows: "Discussions of the role of population growth in economic progress have become markedly less alarmist in the past decade" (1897, p. 1987). Allen Kelley recently reviewed the reviews, as well as the literature as a whole, for the American Economic Association's "official" Journal of Economic Literature. He finds that the recent work converges at a position much like that of the 1986 NRC-NAS, and he adds the interpretation that "in a number of countries the impact of population was probably negligible, and in some it may have been positive" (1988, p. 1715). Here as elsewhere he endorses the view that there has been a "revision" in thinking about the consequences of population. (In fact, he may be the person who coined the term.) Kelley himself has broadly shared this general view since at least 1970, one of the very few demographers who has done so. The fallback position of some of the population-control enthusiasts says that the "revisionist" shift is due to the shift of larger political forces rather than to new discoveries of facts and theory -- "just politics". For example, Barbara Crane writes that "There is no doubt that the relatively sudden reversals we have seen in recent years reflect the influence of the New Right with the Reagan White House as well as in Congress" (1989, p. 126). But then why should one not think that previous positions were also "just" politics, especially given the huge political organizations maintained by the population and environmental organizations in Washington and elsewhere? What Crane et al. are saying is: When government agencies agreed with us, that was because what we said was the scientific truth. But when the government no longer agreed with us, that is due to the other side's political machinations. Indeed, Hodgson (1988) extends this sort of analysis to the rise of the population-control orthodoxy, too. Orthodoxy's emergence is attributed to two sets of factors: first, the inability of demographic transition theory to explain several postwar demographic trends; second, the manner in which the Cold War, decolonization, and the influx of funds for fertility control changed American demographers' approach to the study of population trends. The recent rise of revisionism is attributed both to orthodoxy's difficulty in digesting the favorable economic and demographic trends of the 1970s and to the changes in the political and funding environments within which American demographers work (Abstract, p. 759). Please note that "revisionism" is treated in the above quote as simply a fait accompli. This indicates, I think, that it is not necessary to further multiply the quotations to prove that this shift in thinking has surely occurred. The issues that have been subject to revision include all the purported negative effects with which the doomsaying authors and organizations have taxed population growth -- income growth slowing, reduction in saving and investment, natural resource exhaustion, worsening of the food supply, hindering the supply of education -- the works. In each case, examination of the evidence leads to complete or near-complete exoneration of population growth and size. There has even been some "revisionist" research rebutting the charge that population growth promotes violence and war (Zuk, 1985; Simon, 1989, Cuhsan, forthcoming). The scientific U-turn does not seem to matter to makers of policy and public opinion, however. The president of the same World Bank, Barber Conable, was still saying at the 1988 annual meeting of the World Bank that "curbing excessive population growth" is one of the key elements of the Bank's strategy with respect to world poverty. He said that it is "imperative that developing countries renew and expand efforts to limit population growth" (1988, p. 753). The commitment of the official organizations to the old beliefs and policy is evidenced in this comment by the then-head of AID's population program quoted in a Science article on the 1986 National Academy of Science work. Steven Sinding "said he felt enormous 'relief' at the [NAS] committee's conclusions". That it, AID was pleased that the report was sufficiently ambiguous that it could be interpreted as a warrant for business as usual. Twenty years after the first great spasm of environmental concern, the arena is again in the hands of the yahoos, the same people with the same ideas that have been discredited by events and by scientific research since then. The educated public and the journalists seem even more credulous than ever, and there are large numbers of professors on campuses who have been raised in this movement and now teach it as professionals, in comparison to the amateur zealots who powered the movement two decades ago without professional stake in carrying on. An incredible 80 percent of the U. S. public now agree that "protecting the environment is so important that requirements and standards cannot be too high, and continuing environmental improvements must be made regardless of cost," up from about 40% in 1981. And in Britain, the proportion who "say the environment is one of the most important issues facing Britain" jumped from about 5 percent to about 35 percent from December, 1988 to July, 1989, extraordinary testimony to the power of modern communications. (The Economist, September 2, 1989, p. 4). The weight of these numbers is overwhelming. WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE? Because argument on these matters has proven inconclusive over the past two decades - indeed, for the past 200 years - I have turned with some regret from the classical form of theory plus data to another form of discourse as a way to sharpen the matter. This less esthetic form is the wager. At every opportunity I offer to bet with doomsayers that their forecasts will not come to pass, and that improvement in human material conditions will come about instead. But since a bet I made with Paul Ehrlich and two of his colleagues in 1980 that came due in 1990 - and that I won across the board - I can get no takers. For example, Lester Brown says he believes that the food supply will be shorter in the future because of "China..." and other reasons. Therefore I offer to bet Brown that the food supply in any future year in China or any other part of the world will be better than now rather than worse. But Brown declines my offer. (Lester: Here's another chance. How about it?) Lester Brown believes that the fish supply will decline. I offer to bet that it will increase. I could repeat this refrain about deforestation, resource prices, grain prices and calories, life expectancy, infant mortality, telephones per person - you name it, I'll bet on it.. That is, pick any measure of material human welfare, pick any geographically-specified group of people such as a country, pick any year in the future (beyond the next year or two), and I'll bet a week's or month's pay (winnings go to research) that that measure shows improvement rather than deterioration. But neither Lester Brown nor any of the other doomsayers will bet with me. Should you not draw some conclusion from that fact? Does it make sense to take the work of Lester Brown as the "springboard" for one's thinking? CONCLUSION In the long run, the inevitable forces of progress will roll over these intellectual obstacles. Population will grow, knowledge will increase, economies will develop, liberty will flourish. But the meantime there will be innumerable avoidable tragedies because the good news goes unreported. How sad that is. **FOOTNOTES** [1]: Challenge, November/December 1982, pp. 40-47 (with William J. Hudson). [1]: For example, Brown appears with extraordinary frequency in The Washington Post, which I read as my daily newspaper, and frequently receives their support in editorials. To illustrate, from the period during which this is being written, the forecast of catastrophic food shortage in Brown's 1994 book, from which the chapter sent to authors of this symposium was extracted, was reported at length in the scientific "Findings" column on page 2 on August 14, 1994, under the title "Book Predicts Food Shortages"; reported again in the same section on August 25, 1994, headlined "Less Grain for China"; and then a long article by Brown entitled "How China Could Starve the World" was published starting in the right-hand column of page 1 of the Sunday "Outlook" section; these are just the items my casual clipping collected, and there surely have been still others. Such extended coverage, which would not be given to any scientific discovery short of a Newtonian or Einsteinian revolution, is commonplace for the output of Brown's Worldwatch Institute, even though all of it - as will be shown - has been wrong in every past utterance, and is completely opposed to the overwhelming consensus of agricultural economists. page 1 /article4 popsocie/October 8, 1994 REFERENCES Ahlburg, Dennis A. "The Impact of Population Growth on Economic Growth in Developing Nations: the Evidence from Macroeconomic-Demographic Models ," no date. Coale, Ansley, and Edgar M. Hoover, Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries (Princeton: PUP, 1958). Cuhsan, Alfred G., "Demographic Correlates of Political Instability in Latin America: The Impact of Population Growth, Density, and Urbanization", forthcoming in Review of Latin American Studies. Demeny, Paul, "Population and the Invisible Hand", Demography, vol 23, November, 1986, 473-488 -----"Demography and the Limits to Growth", Population and Development Review, forthcoming, 1989. Hodgson, Dennis, "Orthodoxy and Revisionism in American Demography", Population and Development Review, 14, December, 1988, 541-570. Horlacher, David E., and F. Landis MacKellar, "Population *Growth Versus Economic Growth (?)", xerox, 1987 Kantner, John F., "Population Policy and Political Atavism," Demography, volume 19, November, 1982, pp. 429-438 Kelley, Allen C., "Economic Consequences of Population Change in the Third World", Journal of Economic Literature, Dec, 1988, 1685-1728) Kelley, Allen C., "The National Academy of Sciences Report on Population Growth and Economic Development," Xerox, April 10, 1986. Lee, Ronald, "Economic Consequences of Population Size, Structure and Growth," International Union for the Scientific Study of Population Newsletter No. 17, January-April 1983, pp 43-59. -----, review of World Development Report 1984, Population and Development Review, 11, March, 1985, pp. 127-130. McNicholl, Geoffrey, "Consequences of Rapid Population Growth: An Overview and Assessment", Population and Development Review, Volume 10, June, 1984, 177-240. National Academy of Sciences, Rapid Population Growth: Consequences and Policy Implictions (Baltimore: The Johns Hop- kins Univ Press, 1971). 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) Piotrow, Phyllis, World Population Crisis (New York: Praeger, 1973). Preston, Samuel H., "The Social Sciences and the Population Problem", Sociological Forum, Vol 2, Fall, 1987, pp. 619-644. Simon, Julian L., The Economics of Population Growth (Princeton: PUP, l977). _____, "Resources, Population, Environment: An Over-supply of False Bad News," Science, 208, June 27, 1980, pp. 1431-1437. _____, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton: PUP, l98l). _____, "Lebensraum: Paradoxically, Population Growth May Eventually End Wars," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 33, No. 1, March 1989, pp, 164-180. Sirageldin, Ismail and John F. Kantner, "Review," Population and Development Review, March, l982, pp. l69-l73. Srinivasan, T. N., "Population Growth and Economic Development", xerox, August, 1987. United Nations, Expert Group, "Consequences of Rapid Population Growth in Developing Countries", xerox, June, 1989. Zuk, Gary (1985) "National Growth and International Conflict: A Reevaluation of Choucri and North's Thesis," in The Journal of Politics, Vol. 47, pp. 269-281. page 2 /article4 popsocie/October 8, 1994