MYERS-SIMON DEBATE CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Is a big wheat harvest a good thing? Sometimes we read headlines such as "Good harvest, bad news" -- the bad news being for wheat farmers, who face low prices. On balance a big harvest surely is better for society as a whole than a small harvest. Still, the headline is negative, as if a bad thing has happened. Is the trend of black infant mortality rate discouraging? Take a look at Figure 1-1 and make your judgment, please. My own judgment is that the overall picture is good for blacks as well as for the community as a whole, because many fewer babies are dying nowadays than in earlier years and many fewer parents need to grieve. Unless you focus only on the relative situation of the two groups, there seems slim basis for judging the situation as bad, unless you enjoy being morally indignant. Figure 1-1 -- Black and White Infant Mortality This is the point of these examples: viewing the same facts, one person may be optimistic while the other is pessimistic. The contradiction often happens because persons judge from different points of view. Frequently the root of the difference is the length of the period you focus on -- the short run or the long run. For many issues -- and especially issues related to econom- ic and population growth -- the long-run effect is the opposite of the short-run effect. More people are an economic benefit in the long run, though they are a burden in the short run. My central proposition here is simply stated: Almost every trend that affects human welfare points in a positive direction, as long as we consider a reasonably long period of time and hence grasp the overall trend. In this introduction I will first review some important absolute trends in human welfare. To repeat, my thesis is that just about every important measure of human welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries. * * * Let's start with some trends and conclusions that have long represented the uncontroversial settled wisdom of the economists and other experts who work in these fields, except for the case of population growth. On that latter subject, what you read below was a minority viewpoint until sometime in the 1980s, at which time the mainstream scientific opinion shifted almost all the way to the position set forth here. Length of life The most important and amazing demographic fact -- the greatest human achievement in history -- is the decrease in the world's death rate. In Figure 1-2 we see that it took thousands of years for life expectancy at birth to increase from just over 20 years to the high 20's. Then in just the past two centuries, the length of life you could expect for your newborn child in the advanced countries jumped from perhaps 30 years to about 75 years. (See Figure 1-3.) It is this decrease in the death rate that is the cause of there being a larger world population nowa- days than in former times. Is this not the greatest change that humankind has ever experienced? Then starting well after World War II, the length of life one could expect in the poor countries leaped upwards by perhaps fifteen or even twenty years, caused by advances in agriculture, sanitation, and medicine. Are not these trends remarkably benign? Figures 1-2 and 1-3 Agricultural Labor Force The best simple measure of a country's standard of living is the proportion of the labor force that works in agriculture. If almost everyone works at farming, there can be little production of non-agricultural goods. In Figure 1-4 we see the astonishing decline over the centuries in the proportion of the population working in agriculture in Great Britain to only about one person in fifty, and the same story describes the United States. This has enabled us to increase our consumption per person by a factor of twenty or forty over the centuries. Figure 1-4 -- Agricultural Labor Force Raw Materials During all of human existence, people have worried about running out of natural resources -- flint, game animals, what have you. Amazingly, all the evidence shows that exactly the opposite has been true. Raw materials -- all of them -- are becoming more available rather than more scarce. Figures 1-5a and 1-5b clearly show that natural resource scarcity -- as measured by the economically-meaningful indicator of cost or price for copper, which is representative of all raw materials -- has been decreasing rather than increasing in the long run, with only temporary exceptions from time to time. In the case of copper we have evidence that the trend of falling prices has been going on for a very long time. In the l8th century B.C.E. in Babylonia under Hammurabi -- almost 4000 years ago -- the price of copper was about 1000 times its price in the U.S. now, relative to wages. And there is no reason why this downward trend might not continue forever. Figures 1-5a and 1-5b The trend toward greater availability includes the most counter-intuitive case of all -- oil. The price rises in crude oil since the 1970's did not stem from increases in the cost of world supply, but rather cartel political action. The production cost in the Persian Gulf still is perhaps 25 - 50 cents per barrel (1993 dollars). Concerning energy in general, there is no reason to believe that the supply of energy is finite, or that the price of energy will not continue its long-run decrease forever. I realize that it seems strange that the supply of energy is not finite or limited, but if you want a full discus- sion of the subject, I hope that you will consult another of my books (1981, or 2nd edition forthcoming, Chapters 1-3). Food Food is an especially important resource. The evidence is particularly strong for food that we are on a benign trend despite rising population. The long-run price of wheat relative to wages, and even relative to consumer products, is down, due to increased productivity. (See Figures 1-5 and 1-6). Figures 1-6a and 1-6b Famine deaths have decreased during the past century even in absolute terms, let alone relative to population, which pertains particularly to the poor countries. Food consumption per person is up over the last 30 years (see Figure 1-7). Africa's food production per person is down, but by 1993 few people still be- lieve that Africa's suffering has anything to do with a shortage of land or water or sun. Hunger in Africa clearly stems from civil wars and the collectivization of agriculture, which period- ic droughts have made more murderous. Figure 1-7 -- Food Consumption Human Life and Labor There is only one important resource which has shown a trend of increasing scarcity rather than increasing abundance -- human beings. Yes, there are more people on earth now than ever be- fore. But if we measure the scarcity of people the same way that we measure the scarcity of other economic goods -- by how much we must pay to obtain their services -- we see that wages and sal- aries have been going up all over the world, in poor as well as rich countries. The amount that you must pay to obtain the services of a manager or a cook has risen in India, just as the price of a cook or manager has risen in the United States over the decades. The increases in the prices of peoples' services are a clear indication that people are becoming more scarce even though there are more of us. Cleanliness of the Environment. Ask an average roomful of people if our environment is becoming dirtier or cleaner, and most will say "dirtier". The irrefutable facts are that the air in the U. S. (and in other rich countries) is safer to breathe now than in decades past. The quantities of pollutants have been declining, especially particulates which are the main pollutant. Concerning water, the proportion of monitoring sites in the U.S. with water of good drinkability has increased since the data began in l96l. Our environment is increasingly healthy, with every prospect that this trend will continue. (See the data in Figures 1-8). Figure 1-8 Population Growth The effects of population growth are discussed at some length in Chapter 2; this has been the central issue in all my work for decades. Species Extinction Species extinction is discussed at some length in Chapter 3, because it is the core of my debate opponent Norman Myers' best- known professional work, and I have replied to his central asser- tion. The Vanishing Farmland Crisis The supposed problem of farmland being urbanized has now been entirely discredited, out-and-out disavowed by those who created the scare. This saga serves to illuminate many similar environmental issues, and therefore it is discussed in detail in Chapter 4. The Greenhouse Effect, The Ozone Layer, and Acid Rain. What about the greenhouse effect? The ozone layer? Acid rain? I'm not a technical expert on the atmosphere. I can say with confidence, however, that on all of these issues there is major scientific controversy about what has happened until now, why it happened, and what might happen in the future. All of these scares are recent, and there has not yet been time for complete research to be done and for the intellectual dust to settle. There may be hard problems here, or there may not. Even more important for people is that no threatening trend in human welfare has been connected to those phenomena. There has been no increase in skin cancers from ozone, no damage to agriculture from a greenhouse effect, and at most slight damage to lakes from acid rain. It may even be that a greenhouse effect would benefit us on balance by warming some areas we'd like warmer, and by increasing the carbon dioxide to agriculture. Perhaps the most important aspect of the greenhouse-ozone- acid-rain complex, and of their as-yet-unknown cousin scares which will surely be brought before the public in the future, is that we now have large and ever-increasing capabilities to re- verse such trends if they are proven to be dangerous, and at costs which are manageable. Dealing with greenhouse-ozone-acid- rain would not place an insuperable constraint upon growth, and would not constitute an ultimate limit upon the increase of productive output or of population. So we can look these issues squarely in the eye and move on. Chapter 5 discusses the atmos- pheric issues. Chapter 6 concludes with discussion of why people believe false bad news about resources and environment, and ends with a brief conclusion. Are These Predictions Sure Enough To Bet On? I am so sure of all these upbeat statements that I offer to bet on them, my winnings going to fund new research. Here is the offer: You pick a) any measure of human welfare - such as life expectancy, infant mortality, the price of aluminum or gasoline, the amount of education per cohort of young people, the rate of ownership of television sets, you name it; b) a country (or a region such as the developing countries, or the world as a whole); c) any future year, and I'll bet a week's or month's pay that that indicator shows improvement relative to the present while you bet that it shows deterioration.