Julian Simon is a man with a track record. In 1984 he and the late Herman Kahn, in a book called The Resourceful Earth, made a Series of predictions about the shape of the world to come. The world in the year 2000, they anticipated, would be “less crowded (though more populated), less polluted, more stable ecologically, and less vulnerable to resource-supply disruption than the world we live in now…The World’s people will be richer in most ways than they are today…The outlook for food and other necessities of life will be better… life for most people on earth will be less precarious economically than it is now.”
These predictions were based on reams of hard data — Simon and Kahn reviewed everything from declining levels of air and water pollution to the fall of food grain prices — which left no doubt that the recent history of mankind is one of continual material progress. There was no reason why, they argued, these benign trends could not continue until the year 2000 and beyond, and they were not loath to say so in print.
Their critics were legion. The population controllers were upset that Simon and Kahn would acknowledge population growth and yet claim that the world was somehow becoming less crowded. The radical environmentalists, who mentally equate technology with pollution, were appalled that Simon would suggest that the sufficiently creative use of the former might forever end the latter.
The cognitive dissonance that Simon’s book generated in newspaper and televisions editors was almost palpable. While “apocalypse now” stories about the environment and population make good copy, Simon and Kahn’s thesis that things were actually getting better was a yawn, virtually guaranteed not to make you spill your morning coffee. Their views were at best dismissed as Pollyannaish, at worst as socially irresponsible. If the sky really is going to fall, then the fellow who argues against the public provision of hard hats is either a fool or a knave. In the eyes of his critics, Simon was both. A fierce polemic rained down upon him and his co-editor, and their forecast that mankind faces a better future was largely dismissed out of hand.
But, as Simon says in the introduction to his new book, The State of Humanity, [Edited by Julian L. Simon (Blackwell Publishers, London, 1995, 694 pages)] “the years have been kind to our forecasts.”
Indeed they have. The benign trends that Simon observed in the early eighties have continued up to the present day, leaving mankind better off in almost every measurable material way. “[T]here is stronger reason than ever,” he confidently asserts, “to believe that these progressive trends will continue past the year 2000, past the year 2100, and indefinitely.”
The reader need look no farther than this collection of 57 essays for the source of Simon’s optimism. These essays, all written by recognized experts in their fields, examine the material and economic “state of humanity” from almost every conceivable angle. The result is a formidable compendium of information on everything from living standards, productivity, and poverty to agriculture, food resources, land use, and water resources — and the trends are all positive.
Take the increase in life expectancy at birth, for example, which Simon characterizes as “the greatest human achievement in history.” In the past two centuries this has jumped from 30 years to around 75 Years for the advanced countries, while the less advanced countries have gained perhaps 20 years on average, since the 1950’s. Much of what is called population growth is the result of declining mortality rates, especially in the oldest cohorts, as people worldwide live longer and healthier lives than ever. China’s population has doubled since 1950 in large part because Chinese life spans have doubled, from about 35 to nearly 70.
Another reason for celebration is the decreasing scarcity of natural resources, as measured by the economically meaningful indicator of cost or price relative to wages. The price of food, perhaps the single most important resource, has fallen dramatically over the past couple of centuries, while per-person food consumption continues to increase. That Africa is still wracked by famine has nothing to do with shortages of land or water, and everything to do with endemic civil war and inept government interventions in agriculture. On every other continent, food production is rising.
This same trend holds for other raw materials as well. Despite perennial worries about running out of this or that resource, the trends are all in the opposite direction. Take the falling price of copper, which in the Babylonia of 4,000 years ago traded for about 1,000 times its price in the US now. At the time of the Roman Empire the price was 100 times higher. The price of copper, relative to wages, continues to fall.
Other trends of interest include:
- a sharp and sustained decline in infant and child mortality worldwide.
- catastrophic epidemic infection and endemic micro-parasitic infections have been banished.
- the homicide rate has consistently declined over the centuries.
- the death rate from accidents has fallen dramatically in the US in the twentieth century.
- the share of the agricultural labor force is declining, resulting in continued decreasing pressure on the world’s agricultural land.
- the standard of living in the West today is higher than it has ever been.
- since the early nineteenth century, productivity in the US economy as a whole has doubled about every 75 years.
- average black income and standard of living have increased greatly, both absolutely, and relative to whites in the US since emancipation.
- housing in the US has become cheaper to inhabit over the past 50 years.
- there is a great increase in the amount of education youths around the world receive.
- “poor” Americans are better housed and fed and own more property than did average Americans throughout much of this century.
- the price of energy has remained stable or fallen
- there is no evidence of massive or increasing rates of species extinction.
- world food output has more than doubled in the past 30 years, and food supplies per person in the Third World have risen by 25 percent.
So exuberantly self-assured of humanity’s long-run prospects is Simon that he is prepared to bet on them. As he says in his Introduction, “‘I’ll bet a week’s or month’s pay (my winnings go to fund research) that just about any trend pertaining to human welfare will improve rather than get worse. First come, first served.” But let the doomsayers beware. Several of their number have already lost bets with Simon, including Paul Ehrlich, who grudgingly handed over a check earlier this year.
Simon was able to identify only one important resource which showed a trend of increasing scarcity. His comments on this resource are worth quoting in full;
[This resource] is the most important and valuable resource of all — human beings. Certainly there are more people on earth now than ever before. 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 salaries have been going up all over the world, in poor countries as well as in rich countries. The amount that one must pa y to obtain the services of a barber or a professor has risen in India, just as the price of a barber or a professor has risen in the United States over the decades. This increase in the price of people’s services is a clear indication that people are becoming more scarce even though there are more of us.
