What Simon Said Was Right

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 20, 1999 | by Timothy W. Maier

Just when doomsday propagandists thought it was safe to kick-start the rumor mill, the posthumous publication of Julian Simon's Hoodwinking the Nation blows their cover.

When it recently was announced that 6 billion people now inhabit the Earth, it was hard not to think of what doom-slayer economist Julian Simon might have said. The late University of Maryland professor certainly would have celebrated the life of that 6 billionth child rather than denounce it like the contemporary disciples of parson Thomas Malthus.

He never got that chance: His untimely death at age 65 from a heart attack came just weeks after Insight interviewed him for a cover story (see "Doomsday Postponed," Jan. 5, 1998) and a year before the birth of that 6 billionth child. But in what may have been the last interview he gave, Simon had some lasting advice: "Everything I believe -- all of which is backed up with facts -- I have written," he told Insight. "You can quote me any time by using my work."

What an invitation. And what a collection of work! His books on population include: The Ultimate Resource; The Economics of Population Growth; The State of Humanity; and Population Matters. Now, just when the population-bomb disciples thought they had heard the last of Simon, along comes his first posthumously published book, Hoodwinking the Nation. So we need not be in doubt as to what he thought about the population doomsayers.

Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute in Washington, summarized Simon's observations in a recent column published in many newspapers across the country. "As our numbers have climbed so has our well-being," Mosher wrote. "In 1800, when there were only 1 billion people, per-capita income was a mere $100. By 1900, as the population was closing in on 2 billion, it reached $500. Currently, with 6 billion people, per-capita income has soared to $5,000. In 2100, when the population will be between 7 billion and 8 billion -- and falling -- it will be $30,000 in current dollars. Driving the so-called `population explosion' has been a real explosion in health and longevity. As late as the 19th century, four of every 10 children died before reaching age 5. Today, the mortality rate for children younger than 5 is less than 7 percent. Two hundred years ago, human life expectancy was less than 30 years; today it is more than 65 years."

Simon's work touched people in many walks of life. Penn Jillette of the illusionist/magician duo Penn and Teller credits Simon for changing the way Jillette looks at the world. On the jacket blurb to Simon's latest book, Jillette asks, "Why did it take a man with this much fighting spirit and goofy charisma to get me to realize what now seems obvious? Well, this book is about just that. It's Julian Simon looking for the answer to why I (and you and just about everyone else) lived in this happy, wealthy world and still kept thinking it was trashed and getting worse."

Hoodwinking the Nation is a reminder that the good news is that (most of) the bad news is wrong. Since the 1970s Simon's message has been that technology improves people's lives as more people provide more answers and solutions to human problems. For example, Simon cites evidence that, as population increases, raw materials and energy are becoming less scarce, the world's food supply is growing and pollution in the United States is decreasing. He disagreed with British economist Malthus, who wrote in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) that, "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio" as food production increases geometrically, which, sooner or later, means there will not be enough food to feed the expanding population.

Simon says the problem with this notion is that population never increased geometrically. "It increases at all kinds of different rates historically, but however fast it increases, food increases at least as fast, if not faster. In other words, whatever the rate of population growth is, the food supply increases at an even faster rate."

This logic made Simon quite unpopular with the population-bomb doomsayers -- so much so that they often attacked him personally, suggesting that a man who also wrote a book on direct-mail marketing couldn't be a serious-enough scholar to write about population matters, a subject to which Simon had devoted a quarter-century of scholarship. And, alas for doomsayers and other polemicists, he had an eye for indisputable facts.

When Insight last spoke with Simon, he eagerly was challenging his critics to "put up or shut up." Asked about the ideas of doomsayer economics professor Paul Ehrlich, his archrival who wrote the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, Simon responded: "You pick any place in the world and a date in the future and I'll bet you the world shows im-provement rather than deterioration." Simon asked Insight to carry the message: "Let's bet! Tell Ehrlich let's bet. He won't take it."

Indeed, Ehrlich never did bet Simon again after losing a 1980 wager. That bet was simple: Simon asked Ehrlich to buy five basic commodities at $200 each and wait 10 years. Under Ehrlich's doomsday scenario there would be shortages and prices would have to increase, but under Simon's theory there would be an increased abundance and the prices would decrease. Simon won. Prices of all five commodities -- chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- were lower. In October 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07. Simon then proposed to increase the wager to $20,000, but Ehrlich would have none of that.