What Simon Said Was Right
by Timothy W. Maier
Insight Magazine
December 20, 1999
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 un-checked, 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 best-seller 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 improvement 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.
Ehrlich is convinced the world is in trouble. "Unless we have a big increase in the death rate, all of the projections, even the most optimistic, show us adding another 2.5 billion people," he told Insight last year. "It is slowing, but we are already in a situation of near disaster."
Simon laughed at that. After all, it was Ehrlich who predicted "famines of unbelievable proportions" occurring by 1975 and "hundreds of millions of people starving to death" in the 1970s as the world moved into a "genuine age of scarcity" in the 1980s. Time proved all of these scenarios to be dead wrong.
Despite his false predictions, it was Ehrlich, and not Simon, who made headlines and appeared on the Johnny Carson Show to spread his doomsday scenarios. The same year Ehrlich lost his bet with Simon, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Ehrlich one of its "genius awards," which Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute says "tells you more than you probably want to know about the MacArthur Foundation."
Nearly nine years later, Ehrlich got his comeuppance when Fortune magazine listed Simon among the "150 Great Minds of the 1990s" and Ehrlich, as Wattenberg points out, "didn’t make the cut."
But it still is the doomsayers who get most of the media attention. In Hoodwinking the Nation, Simon cites "a funding incentive for scholars and institutions to produce bad news about population, resources and the environment." Indeed, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.N.’s Fund for Population Activities disburse more than $100 million each year to try to stop population growth. "Much of this money goes to studies and publications that show why fertility decline is a good thing," says Simon. "There are no organizations that fund studies having the opposite aim. For the media, bad news sells books, newspapers and magazines." Good news, Simon notes, is not half as provocative and therefore doesn’t make headlines.
Simon also takes a stab at Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance, as well as the vice president himself, whom Simon refers to as "the hoodwinker in chief." Gore’s book leans primarily on the work of Ehrlich and Lester Brown of the Washington-based World Watch Institute. Gore even promoted Ehrlich’s 1990 sequel to The Population Bomb, writing for the jacket blurb, "The time for action is due, and past due. Ehrlich has written the prescription" -not the best choice of words for Gore, considering that Ehrlich recommends dumping chemicals in the water supply to control population.
Gore’s own book is full of factual errors, Simon reports. For instance, the vice president writes, "The statistics about forests can be deceptive too: Although the United States, like several other developed nations, actually has more forested land now than it did a hundred years ago, many of the huge tracts have been converted from diverse hardwoods to a monoculture of softwood."
Simon counters that "the same U.S. Forest Service statistics that showed Gore the total volume of trees is increasing also show that the volume of hardwood trees is going up, rather than being driven out by softwoods. Just who is deceiving whom?"
Simon is appalled by the Gore book. He reports that the vice president "would like to tax the use of new raw materials to force more recycling, establish higher mileage requirements for cars, require efficiency standards throughout the economy – all of which would raise costs and increase government intervention in people’s lives." And all of this, Simon says, "on the basis of beliefs he holds that are utterly contradicted by the solid scientific facts."
Simon offers Gore a bet: "I’ll bet a week’s or a month’s pay with Mr. Gore, or anyone else, that I’ve got the above matters right and he does not. And I’ll go further: I’ll bet that just about any broad aggregate trend pertaining to human welfare will improve rather than get worse – health, standard of living, cleanliness of our air and water, natural-resource availability, you name it – and you pick any year in the future. First come, first served."
While Gore may be siding with those who wish that 6 billionth baby were never born, Simon would have cherished the birth. As Wattenberg says in the foreword of Simon’s book, "Fifty years from now readers who peruse Earth in the Balance by Albert Gore and Hoodwinking the Nation by Julian Simon will giggle at one of them. Let’s bet which."
© 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
