CHAPTER 14 BUNKRAPT: THE CONCEPTS THAT LEAD TO SCARESABOUT RESOURCES AND POPULATION GROWTH or HOW DO GREEN RHETORICIANS OPERATE? After you show someone that all trends pertaining to human welfare - health, wealth, education, leisure, availability of natural resources, cleanliness of our air and water, you name it - have been improving rather than deteriorating, the basic question underlying this book sometimes arises in this form: Why, then, do our political leaders tell us the opposite - that life is more dangerous, our planet is "plundered" and "in crisis", we are running our of resources, pollution is increasing, that is, that things are getting worse - when they are really getting better? Why do the politicians say that there is need to "save the planet"? This chapter discusses some of the rhetorical devices used to communicate false messages of doom in prose discourse and politics. Chapter 00 [15] does the same for statistical manipulation. The tapestry of explanation for this mass belief is surely very complex, as we have seen throughout the book. This chapter focuses on the ideas that undergird the newspaper and television stories, the intellectual infrastructure that gives these stories credibility. The ideas to be discussed fall into two categories: 1) misunderstandings of the nature of resource creation and population economics, and 2) misunderstandings of the nature of a modern complex social-economic system. The essay attempts to explain why so many people are enraptured with this kind of bunk - that is, bunkrapt. MISUNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF RESOURCE CREATION AND POPULATION SIZE The Seductiveness of the Malthusian Logic Beneath the Malthusian notion of diminishing returns, we find an inter-related set of fundamental ideas that we may call a "vision." The vision underlying the thinking of today's conventional writers about resources and population is the concept of fixity or finiteness of resources in the relevant system of discourse. This idea is found in Malthus, of course. But the idea probably has always been a staple of human thinking, because so much of our situation must sensibly be regarded as fixed in the short run - the bottles of beer in the refrigerator, our paychecks, and the amount of energy that parents have to play basketball with their kids. In contrast, the vision underlying sound thinking about resources - which is now the consensus vision of economists who study these subjects (NAS, 1986), and was the vision of such predecessors as William Petty, Friedrich Engels, Simon Kuznets, Friedrich Hayek, and the main developer of the idea, Harold Barnett - is that the relevant system of discourse has a long enough horizon that it makes sense to treat the system operationally as not fixed rather than finite. We view the resource system as being as unlimited as the number of thoughts a person might have, or the number of variations that might ultimately be produced by biological evolution. That is, a key difference between the thinking of those who worry about impending doom, and those who see the prospects of a better life for more people in the future, apparently is whether one thinks in closed-system or open-system terms. For example, those who worry that the second law of thermodynamics dooms us to eventual decline necessarily see our world as a closed system with respect to energy and entropy; those who view the relevant universe as unbounded view the second law of thermodynamics as irrelevant to this discussion. I am among those who view the relevant part of the physical and social universe as open for most purposes. Which vision is better in the context of long-run decisions about resources and population is not subject to scientific test. Yet the choice profoundly affects our thinking. Academics are particularly susceptible to the notion of Malthusian (first edition) diminishing returns, perhaps because academics are more likely than are laymen to believe in abstract theories. (Academics properly spend much of their lives battling to persuade others that abstract theorizing has importance and is not just an "ivory tower" recreation). In my experience, journalists and businesspeople are less likely than academics to be taken with the simple Malthusian abstraction, perhaps because they have no professional stake in this idea (in contrast to many biologists and some economists) and perhaps because journalists are more attuned to reaching judgments and making decisions in light of the full richness of a situation - on their "intuition" - rather than upon the logical relationships in a simple model. (More generally, businesspeople and newspeople seem to be more open to new ideas than academics, perhaps because a continuous flow of creative change is more crucial in their occupations.) Another element is the dead hand of expertise. As Kuznets tells, "Experts are usually specialists skilled in, and hence bound to, traditional views; and they are, because of their knowledge of one field, likely to be cautious and unduly conservative" (in Rosenberg, l972). It is a puzzle why so many people - with biologists and physicists notable among them - are so sure that there must be some constraint to prevent humanity from growing both ever richer and ever more populous, and why theirs is the vision of unexpandable limits. One possible explanation is that each of us tends to bring our professional modes of thought to bear on other situations even if those modes are not appropriate to the situation at hand. For example, biologists liken the human population to an animal population and then apply the animal- ecology notion of "carrying capacity," though that notion is quite inapplicable to natural resources in a human context. (See Chapter 00.) Another attraction of the closed-system vision is that the closure of the system enables one to use interesting mathematics, especially the calculus and other optimization devices. From a purely physical point of view, a proposition about finiteness (or entropy) requires a bounded system. But where is the relevant boundary for our material world? Around the earth excluding the sun? Around the earth plus sun plus solar system? Around other suns? Around a "universe" which may or may not be finite or expanding in the astronomer's eye? No boundary, no finiteness. Still another root of the closed-system vision is the bewitching medieval notion of "first cause" or "ultimate cause," the idea that nothing happens which is not the result of other forces. And pushing back the causal sequence in an infinite regress, it seems as if there must have been an original causal force. This suggests a complete, and therefore closed, system. For some, the closed-system vision arises because of a natural abhorrence of the loose-endedness of an open system. An interesting example of how this vision permeates our thinking: If you say that copper might be made of other metals, hearers say "alchemy." When you point out that nuclear bombardment transmutes metals, the hearers say "not practical," implying that it never could be practical. They may be correct. But there is no logically binding impossibility theorem applicable here. One can only be sure that something is impossible or impractical if one can be sure that the state of knowledge will not change in the future, that is, that capacities are limited because knowledge is limited. But isn't this just what people said in the past about the possibility of finding smaller constituent parts within the "fundamental" electron? And about the possibility of obtaining the vast amounts of energy that we get from a small pile of stuff called uranium? Or for that matter, getting vast amounts of heat out of the black rocks that we call coal? The example of copper and "alchemy" is interesting for the infra-thinking that it brings into the open. The psychologies of open-system and closed-system thinking must be complex and deep-rooted. Perhaps the latter is related to focusing on the social equality of distribution of a fixed pie, rather than on expanding the amount of pie to the possible neglect of equity considerations; this focus often stems from the emotion of envy (Schoeck, l969). But whatever the roots, it is most puzzling why people who are themselves creative and imaginative should lack faith in others' capacities to respond to problems and shortages with limit-expanding ideas. How can people as powerfully creative as John Bardeen (the only two-time Nobel-winning physicist) and George Mitchell (the Texas oilman and developer) share this vision of limits with the non-doers?<1> Misunderstanding and Misapplication of the Slogan "There is no free lunch." The slogan "There is no free lunch" seems to imply that we have to pay for everything we get. This is another case of a good thought going wrong by being applied to situations for which it was not designed. This slogan was originally intended to suggest that the government cannot supply free lunches to all of us, that there is no magic trick by which we can increase our total national resources by passing laws and setting up bureaucracies; rather, we as taxpayers have to pay indirectly, sometime. In other contexts, however, there are free (or below full cost) lunches all the time. None of us always pays the full cost of production for what we get. In the modern world each generation gets its lunch at a lower cost of labor than did earlier generations, because earlier generations responded to their economic problems with ingenuity and energy. Our ancestors bequeathed us the intellectual wherewithal to get our lunch, if not entirely free, at least much cheaper than if we had to start from scratch. Compare what we "pay" to what Europeans had to "pay" for lunch and the other meals a few hundred years ago. They paid most of every day's work, whereas we can buy the same amount of raw food with a small fraction of the work time it cost them. And there is no economic or physical force, and no concept in standard economic theory, that suggests that this progressive reduction in the cost of lunch cannot continue indefinitely. We eat our cheap lunch courtesy of the sweat of our ancestors' brows in mental as well as physical labor. Lack of Historical Perspective, and Propensity to Compare the Present to an Idealized State Rather Than to the Actual Past It is not surprising that most people are not aware that real prices of resources were higher in past years than now; this requires adjusting for inflation, and necessitates knowledge of data back to (say) l900 or l800. Hence it is not surprising that views about impending resource scarcity are not informed by the contrary long-run trend of increasing availability. It should surprise us, though, when mature experienced journalists in high positions, write that conditions are bad now without reference to how conditions were in the past. In l980 columnist James Reston of the New York Times could write about "the civilized world that is now in such deep trouble," saying that "you can hardly pick up a paper these days without wondering what's wrong" and decrying our lack of leadership. Can this man have lived through the depression of the l930s, Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War? And ex- senior editorial writer John Oakes of the same august newspaper reproduced the pessimistic findings of the Global 2000 Report (see chapter 4) almost word for word, like a press-conference handout. How could he have lived through the disastrous times of the past, when the environment was much more degraded and the materials more scarce, and continue to write as if the world is headed straight toward doom? Lack of Distinction Between the Long Run and the Short Run The distinction between the long run and the short run is crucial to the economics of population. In the developed world, additional people - babies or immigrants - are a burden in the short run. And focusing only on the short-run burden leads to a negative judgment about population growth. But in the long run, more people mean a higher standard of living for others. So the judgment about whether more people are good or bad economically depends on how one trades off the present versus the future. By most of my calculations, the discount rate would have to be quite high for additional people not to have a positive present value. Furthermore, short-run costs are inevitable and obvious, whereas long-run benefits are hard to foresee. If your neighbor has another child, surely your school taxes will go up and there will be more noise in your neighborhood. And when the additional child first goes to work, per-worker income will be lower than otherwise, at least for awhile. It is, however, more difficult to foresee and to understand the possible long-run benefits. Because the increase in knowledge created by more people is non- material, it is easy to overlook. Writers about population growth usually mention a greater number of mouths coming into the world, and sometimes note more pairs of hands, but never mention more brains arriving. This emphasis on physical consumption and production may be responsible for much unsound thinking and fear about population growth. Disbelief in the Relationship Between Population and Knowledge Creation To many people, it is implausible that additional people cause more technical knowledge and advance in productivity, ceteris paribus. One source of misunderstanding is the common belief that new technical knowledge usually arises spontaneously, and without connection to social needs. But there now is ample evidence that increased output and investment in a given industry induce more inventions to be made and applied. This "demand-side effect," as economists call it, can be seen in systematic studies of learning-by-doing, where the time required to complete an airplane or ship decreases as more units are made. The effect can also be seen in systematic studies of comparative productivity in the industries in the U.K. and in Canada that are relatively large and relatively small compared to the same industries in the U.S. (see Simon, 1981, 2nd edition forthcoming, Chapter 14). And Bernal in Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century (l953/l970) provides additional evidence - case studies of steel; electricity, light and power; chemistry, bacteriology and biochemistry; and the theory of heat and energy in the l9th century - showing that innovations respond to economic demand. In the case of electricity, for example, "The barrier, or rather the absence of stimulus to advance, was economic. Electricity developed quickly when it paid, not a moment before (p. l3l)." And a large population size and density imply higher total demand, ceteris paribus, which is why Edison's first street lighting was in New York City rather than in Montana. It is also clear that countries with more people produce more knowledge, assuming income is the same, e.g., Sweden vs. the U.S. And Bernal shows how the power of final demand works indirectly, too. "Once electric distribution on a large scale was proved feasible and immensely profitable, then came a demand for large efficient power sources (p. l29)," leading to the development of turbines. And the development of light bulbs led to advances in creating vacua, after the subject "had stagnated for about two hundred years.... Here was another clear case of the law of supply and demand in the development of science and technology (p. l25)." On the "supply side" there is also much misunderstanding, especially the belief that the number of potential inventors does not matter. One source of this misunderstanding for some is the idea that, to paraphrase, "One need only contrast innovation and creativity in tiny Athens in the Golden Age with monstrous Calcutta" now, or Calcutta with Budapest of the l930's, to see that more people do not imply more technical knowledge being produced. This argument leaves out the all-things-equal clause; Calcutta is poor. And, underlying this argument is the implied (but unwarranted) assumption that Calcutta is poor because it has so many people. If we make more appropriate comparisons - comparing Greece to itself and Rome to itself during periods with different population sizes and growth rates, and industries of various sizes in different countries now - we find that a larger population is associated with more knowledge and productivity, because there are more potential inventors and adopters of new technology. Graphs that plot the numbers of great discoveries, and the population sizes in various centuries in Greece and Rome, bring out this conclusion very nicely (Simon, 1980, or 1981, pp. 200-201). On the related question of whether material well-being can be improved through there being more ordinary persons - not geniuses - who contribute to our knowledge in their everyday work, the story of electricity and power production is again illuminating. Bernal describes the "stumbling progress of the first fifty years from l83l to l88l... the effort put into the development (l83l- l88l)...was small." The people who made the necessary technical developments "were not geniuses...and others no more gifted could have hit upon these ideas earlier if the field had attracted enough workers (pp. 130-131). As said by Soichino Honda, the inventor and founder of the Japanese motorcycle and auto firm bearing his name, "Where 100 people think, there are 100 powers; if 1,000 people think, there are 1,000 powers" (The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 1, 1982, p. 15.) Confusion Between Trends and Levels, Between Whether Things are Getting Better or Getting Worse and Whether They are Good Now A frequent and crucial error in the thinking of the doomsayers is neglect of the lessons that experience teaches. And often the doomsayers criticize their opponents on the grounds that we are extrapolating from the past on the assumption that the past usually bears some resemblance to the future. These critics prefer that we form our conclusions purely by analysis of the structural elements, physical and otherwise, that they decide are the most important variables. This is ironic, because to the extent that we have knowledge of each of these elements, our knowledge is based upon experience - systematic and otherwise - of the operation of those elements in history and in scientific experience. As Macaulay put it 150 years ago, if we cannot learn from history, what can we learn from? This is not to say that the future is simply an extension of the past; the number of horses in the U.S. did not continue growing throughout the 20th century (although I have read that there are more horses alive in the U.S. now than at the turn of the century). I am not downplaying the key role of theory, which is a generalized and formalized structure that embodies our accumulated experience in a particular field. Rather, I am saying that to assume that the future will bear no resemblance to the past in a particular context, without extraordinarily weighty reasons to believe that there has been a turning point, is to court serious error. Many make an unwarranted logical leap from the fact that things are not good in some places to the fact that things are getting worse everywhere. This leap is coupled with a lack of historical perspective - for example, a sense of how much worse- off Mexico City and its inhabitants were twenty or fifty years ago compared to today. And when the doomsayers cannot avoid admitting that at least some of the trends in the past have not been toward things getting worse, but rather toward things getting better, they often reply: But history is not a good guide in this connection, because we are now at a turning point in history. For example, when I say that the history of humankind is the history of people responding to existing and impending problems with solutions that leave us better off than if the solution had never arisen, others sometimes poke fun at the notion that experience of the past is a sound basis for forecasting the future. The issue of whether we are now at a turning point needs some close attention to dispatch it satisfactorily (see Simon, 1984, also in Simon, 1990, Selection 47). But all throughout history people have felt that they are at a turning point in history, and it hasn't turned out to be so. More generally, if we cannot base our judgments about the future largely upon past experience, in conjunction with reasonable theoretical explanations of that experience, then all of our experience is without value. I doubt that many people really do wish to reject experience as a teacher in this manner. Belief That What is in Print and What is Said "Officially," Must Be Right Consider this statement from a recent letter concerning the issue discussed in Chapter 1, the urbanization of farmland: [Y]ou said that the transformation of farmland to urban use is far less than society is led to believe. I find this very outraging because I think you made a very blind statement. You have given many people the idea that we're not really losing that much farmland than what the Government or Department of Agriculture or Farmers claim. I have enclosed a pamphlet [from the "official" National Agricultural Lands Study] which is proof to my claim. Well, you might say, the writer doesn't sound very sophisticated. But the "official" label which gives statements the full authority of the federal government was prominent in most newspaper and television stories about the "Vanishing Farmland Crisis" of the early 1980s. If that document (and the report of the National Agricultural Lands Study) had displayed a government label, they probably would never even have appeared in print, let alone been discussed in national publications, because their level of technical competence and scientific proof was so low. Differences in Conceptions of Human Nature The main interest of David Hume and Adam Smith was human nature, and they came to study economics as an outgrowth of that interest. Differences in conceptions of human nature are at the root of much disagreement about economic issues, and evidence about the validity of these different views is relevant to decisions about the economic issues themselves. (Unfortunately for the discipline of economics, that explicit focus of attention has been lost in the mathematics that constitutes so much of modern "sophisticated" and "rigorous" and "elegant" economics.) For example, the doomsayers who desire more government intervention in the production and consumption of natural resources, and the optimists who argue for non-intervention of the government in resource markets, differ in their views of how individuals and private enterprises behave in the face of economic opportunity; they also differ in their views of the performance of government personnel and agencies when entrusted with economic tasks. This thought first struck me as I was out jogging one morning near Asheville, N. Carolina, and I found myself on "Old Toll Road" going up a secluded mountain. Long ago, private enterprisers must have built that road in hopes of making a profit from traffic in that difficult country. And the end result of their private desires was a benefit for the public that continues until today. Interventionists are likely to believe that if government does not provide such services, they will not be provided at all. I am not suggesting that government should play no role in our economy. Extra-terrestrial space certainly would have been explored later without government action (or without competition between countries, perhaps), which might (or might not) have been an economic loss. But given opportunity, private enterprises will supply more ventures than doomsayers expect, more quickly, and at less cost to public - especially in the field of natural resources - partly because individuals rather than taxpayers bear the costs of the failing ventures. Concerning the difference in views of public and private performance: I imagined a conversation with a (say) potato-chip distributor about possible competition by a government agency. I guessed that his/her first reaction would be to laugh at the possibility that a government bureau could even come close to her/his prices and quality without massive subsidies. But then she/he would reflect that if a government agency got into trouble because it could not compete, it could lower its prices to the competitive level, lose money, and then reach into the public pocket to make up the losses. That would be less funny, and not unrealistic; indeed, it is an accurate description of socialist enterprise East and West. Another difference in views of human nature concerns its changeability. Reformers, starting perhaps most vividly with William Godwin (to whose writing Malthus' Essay on Population was a response) usually believe that human nature is quite malleable - for example, that self-interested behavior can be re-channeled by the proper social environment. This belief is very important in Marxism; it implies that one can design a social system that has particular desired properties, and then expect people to be molded to fit that system. In contrast, the Scottish moralists - David Hume, Adam Smith, and their teachers and friends - tended to see human nature as relatively immutable, which implies choosing a social and economic system that produces the best results given that fixed human nature. MISUNDERSTANDING OF THE NECESSARY NATURE OF AN EFFICIENT MODERN SOCIAL SYSTEM WITH MANY PARTICIPANTS, GOODS, AND PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES2 People Yearn for an Organization of Society That Reflects the Best Aspects of the Mode of Organization of the Family In a family, members share goods out of love and altruism, and their decisions about individual and family activities are (at least sometimes) affected by caring thoughts for one another. But this mode of social organization cannot work nearly as effec- tively when a) individuals cannot know the preferences of all others in the society, b) their capacity for empathizing with another is diminished by lack of intimate relationship, c) there is no accepted hierarchy in society as there is between parents and children, and d) the number of goods and possible transactions is very large. But many persons find it abhorrent to turn over the function of distribution to the impersonal market. And market distribution seems especially abhorrent when the goods seem to have (though they may well not have) a particularly inelastic supply and are especially important to physical survival - for example, food, land, and clean air and water. Belief in the Need for Centralized Control of Important Activities Hayek (1952) thought that the belief in centralized control of economic activity in society is a misplaced analogy to the way engineers plan a dam or bridge, and he traced socialist theory back to the creation of the great engineering schools in France at the turn of the l9th century. Whether or not his account of intellectual history is correct, Hayek's analysis of the contemporary sources of the belief in the need for control surely is sound. Many people believe that without planning and controls, the system just cannot work well. For example, in a debate over whether Champaign County, Illinois, should permit rezoning of farmland for industry, people were heard to say, "I'm for growth, but for controlled growth, of course." When you ask them why growth must be controlled by a planner or an agency, they look at you blankly, as if you are lacking in elementary intelligence. Many seem to fear that anarchy is the inevitable result of lack of centralized control. Hayek argued that this belief in the need for control is related to lack of understanding of how a large group of people, acting without any pre-arrangement, can develop an orderly structure of production and exchange based on individual desires and perceptions of other's desires and intentions. He also mentioned the common failure to understand the difficulty of organizing an economy nearly as well by central planning, even with the aid of unlimited computing capacity and the most detailed imaginable information gathering, as with a market. These are subtle ideas, not easy to grasp, so it is not surprising that even well-educated laypersons often have not thought them through and do not understand them. There are still two other aspects of a market-directed economy that often are not understood, and whose lack of understanding leads to the call for a directed society and to worry about resources in a market society: a) the capacity of markets to deal with the future; and b) the capacity of correctly structured markets to deal with externalities. This is not the place to explain these matters, however. Another possible reason people believe in the need for a centrally-directed society is the belief that others who are not so well-educated and intelligent cannot figure out how to conduct self-supporting lives that will also thereby contribute to economy and society. The belief that welfare support will be necessary for immigrants - who are often thought (wrongly) to come to the U.S. with little education and knowledge of English - stems from the arrogance of educated people. Beckmann and others have suggested that this view fits with intellectuals' desire to be needed by the society, and with their belief that their trained intellects should therefore achieve for them places of special importance and reward in the economy and society. As Beckmann says about a capitalistic society, "The highly skilled jetliner pilot and the lowly cleaner of sewage systems get a reward beyond dollars - the heady knowledge that they are voluntarily supported because they are genuinely needed. Such a reward is unknown to the professor of Turkish medieval poetry" (l978).3 In Western civilization this idea is found in Plato. As Popper put it, Plato "charmed all intellectuals with his brilliance, flattering and thrilling them by his demand that the learned should rule" (l966, p. l99). Along with this lack of belief in poor people's capacities to run their own lives well is likely to come disbelief that others - and especially the uneducated and poor - can really create resources by way of creating new ideas. Perhaps this disbelief is due in large part to popular lack of understanding of how such human intervention lies behind the resources that we take for granted, e.g., the fertile Midwestern prairie that was a malarial swamp before settlers drained it at great expense in lives and material resources. Belief That Externalities of Self-interested Actions are Usually Bad Environmentalists worry that the unintended by-products - the "externalities" - of humankind's economic activities (especially those that affect the environment) are malign even if the direct effects of production and trade can be benign. But I believe a case can be made that even activities that are not intentionally constructive usually leave a positive legacy to subsequent generations. That is, even the unintended aspects of humans' use of land (and of other raw materials) tend to be profitable for those who come afterward. Take as an example the "borrow pits" by the sides of turnpikes, from which earth is taken for road-building. At first the pits seem a despoliation of nature, a scar upon the land. But borrow pits turn out to be useful for fishing lakes and reservoirs, and the land they are on is likely to be more valuable than if the pits had never been dug. Another example is garbage disposal. Later generations may find garbage dumps profitable sources of recyclable materials. Even a pumped-out oil well - that is, the empty hole - probably has more value to subsequent generations than does a similar spot without a hole. The hole may be used as a storage place for oil or other fluids, or for some as-yet-unknown purposes. And the casing that is left in the dry well might be reclaimed profitably by future generations. The explanation of this general phenomenon is that humans' activities tend to increase the order and decrease the randomness of nature. We tend to bring like elements together - to concentrate them. This property can be exploited by subsequent generations. Furthermore, humans perceive order, and create it. One can see this if one looks from an airplane for the signs of human habitation. Where there are people (ants, too, of course) there will be straight lines and smooth curves; otherwise, the face of nature is not neat or ordered. Many acts that we tend to think of as despoiling the land actually bestow increased wealth upon subsequent generations. Of course this proposition is hard to test. But perhaps a mental comparison will help. Ask yourself which areas in central Illinois will seem more valuable to subsequent generations - the places where cities now are, or the places where farmlands are? One sees evidence of this delayed benefit in the Middle East. For hundreds of years until recently, Turks and Arabs occupied structures originally built by the Romans 2,000 years ago. The ancient buildings saved the late-comers the trouble of doing their own construction. Another example is the use of dressed stones in locations far away from where they were dressed. One finds the lintels of doorways from ancient Palestinian synagogues in contemporary homes in Syria. A related trait of mind is appropriate for safety engineers but paralyses the social will and causes rejection of new technical possibilities when misapplied to thinking about natural resources and the environment. This way of thinking focuses only upon the dangers of a projected line of activity, and urges us to "play it safe." When discussing a social scheme, a game theorist and I kept disagreeing about whether particular systems would work or not. Finally we discovered that I focused upon the aggregate effects on average, whereas he focused upon "worst-case analysis," which he said is characteristic of his trade. And worst-case analysis causes one to reject as not attractive many possibilities that on average are desirable. Much of the thinking of the environmental movement seems to be worst-case analysis. Another analogy in another context: Nathan Leopold, of the Loeb-Leopold murder case, wrote in his fascinating autobiography that it is extraordinarily difficult to persuade prison administrations to accept new ideas for running the prison because they know that a thousand pairs of eyes are looking for the slightest loophole in the new setup which can be exploited for escape or other troublemaking. But as Einstein said about nature, God may be tricky but he (sic) is not malignly trying to do us in. And our situation with respect to resources and the environment is not like that of a prison, and we need not think as do prison administrators or safety engineers. Nuclear power debates provide many instances of what we might call the Leopold-safety engineer syndrome. Those who are against nuclear power point to scenarios conceivably leading to, say, 50,000 deaths. Proponents of nuclear power point out that the risk of such a scenario occurring is minuscule, and the "expected number of deaths" - using "expected" in the statistical sense - is very small. The anti-nukes are not impressed by such a probabilistic argument, saying that the worst case has a meaning to us that cannot be treated as part of any set of averages. Nor are anti-nukes impressed by other examples of similarly large worst-case risks that we routinely accept, such as those of power-providing dams that might break and kill hundreds of thousands of people, or airplanes falling from the sky into stadia seating 70,000 people where all might be killed - risks that are probabilistically greater than those from nuclear energy. There seems to be a value judgment at the bottom of the argument, a value that cannot be rebutted logically any more than other values can be rebutted logically. But it is possible to point out costs of such policies that are being neglected in the discussion. It is appropriate for a safety engineer not to be concerned with the costs of avoiding a dangerous activity, because the cost/benefit calculation will be made at higher levels of management. But in discussion of such activities as nuclear power, it would seem that all discussants have an obligation to have a balanced view and not just focus on one side of the matter, because there is no arbiter in a court of public opinion who will take into account all sides of the matter, as higher levels of management are responsible for doing in an industrial setting. Also, it seems appropriate to point out in such discussions that if we routinely follow such a line of thought, lives will be shorter and poorer, and fewer people will get a chance to enjoy life, because of the life-shortening effects of air pollution from coal and the industrial accidents that kill so many people in coal-mining and petroleum operations. The case of hydroponic vegetable growing may sharpen the argument. Hydroponics is now a profitable operation around Washington, D.C., for a good many farmers during the months when vegetables are not grown outdoors nearby (Shelley Davis, "Roots Under Water", The Washington Post, April 15, 1984, pp. D1, D4). Hydroponic farming takes up only about one twelfth as much land as does ordinary agriculture, the article points out. Shortage of cropland for growing food is one of the common arguments why population growth should slacken now and must eventually cease. But the mention of hydroponic farming usually evokes a long series of what-if objections. What if there will be a shortage of water? Of chemicals? Of sunlight? Of glass to build greenhouses? And on and on. It is impossible to rule out every imaginative scenario without detailed analysis. And of course there is always the seemingly-unrebuttable objection: This cannot go on forever. We would even run out of room on earth for hydroponic farming. (Of course there is plenty of room in space for spaceships carrying hydroponic farms, a possibility for which the technology is already available without even waiting for further developments. And hydroponic farms can be operated as multi-story plants with artificial light.) Each of these questions is offered as argument against change and growth; the questioner would have us proceed as if hydroponic farming is not a real option. page 1 /mediabk bunkr14m/November 6, 1996 REFERENCES Beckmann, Petr, What Attracts Intellectuals to Socialism? (Boulder, Colo: Golem Press, Box 1342, Boulder, Colo 80306, 1978). Bernal, J. D. Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, l953/l970) Ehrlich, Paul R., and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Population Explo- sion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990) Gore, Albert, Jr., Earth in the Balance Hayek, Friedrich, The Counter-Revolution of Science (Glen- coe: The Free Press, 1952) Kristol, Irving, Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978). Meadows, Donella H.; Dennis L. Meadows; Jorgen Randers, and William W. Bahrens III. The limits to growth. (New York, Potomac Assoc., 1972) Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, and Jorgen Randers, Beyond the Limits (Post Mills, Vermont: Chelsea Green. 1992). National Academy of Sciences, Population Growth and Economic Development (Washington: National Academy Press, 1986). Popper, Karl R., The Open Society and Its Enemies, 5th ed., (Princeton: PUP, 1966) Rosenberg, Nathan, Technology and Amcrican Economic Crowth (New York: Harper, 1972) Schoeck, Helmut, Envy (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1969). Simon, Julian L. The Ultimate Resource (Princeton; PUP, 1981, 2nd edition forthcoming) _____ "Does Doom Loom?" Reason, April, 1984, pp. 31-35; _____ "Resources, Population, Enviroment: An Over-supply of False Bad News," Science, 208, June 27, 1980, pp. 1431-1437. _____, Population Matters (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transac- tion, 1990) United Nations Fund for Population Activities, Population, Resources, and the Environment (New York: UNFPA, 1991) von Mises, Ludwig, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality (South Holland, Ill., Libertarian Press, 1972) page 2 /mediabk bunkr14m/November 6, 1996 FOOTNOTES 1. Much of the unsound thinking about the nature of natural resources and their supply, and about the effect of addi- tional people upon environment, resources, and the living standard, is discussed in my 1981 The Ultimate Resource, and therefore will not be repeated here. More generally, I have drawn upon my various writings for words and thoughts contained here without troubling either reader or writer with quotation notes or citations. In an important sense, the heart of the economics of population and resources is the kind of thinking that is brought to bear upon the subject - what we might call the "meta- economics". The needed kind of thinking - focusing on the indirect, long-run, diffuse influences rather than on the immediate and direct effects - does not excite the mind as do those two old bewitchers, exponential growth and diminishing returns. That perhaps explains why so many persons become and remain bunkrapt about population and resources. 2. This section is heavily influenced by Hayek's works. There also is a fair amount of common ground here with the literature on why people are attracted to socialism (e.g., Kris- tol, l978; Beckmann, l978; Mises, 1972), because resources and environment are part of the "economic problem" that socialism purports to "solve." 3. Consider this remark about summer work cleaning up garbage from Lake Michigan beaches: I remember the mornings when the beach was particularly filthy - the Fifth of July was always the worst - and halfway through the job, looking back and seeing only the bare golden sand where before there had been a half-ton of garbage. I learned that summer the palpable satisfaction of doing a job well, even if that job is picking up garbage. (R. Simon, l982, p. 7) **ENDNOTES** <1>: Both of these statements were made within my hearing. page 3 /mediabk bunkr14m/November 6, 1996