Category — Simon, Julian

[Editor note: Mr. Epstein, a new Principal at MasterResource, is Founder of the Center for Industrial Progress. Part I appeared yesterday.]

But what about the “environmental impact” of industrial development? Isn’t the “green” movement providing a salutary influence us by helping us combat that problem? Again, no.

The idea of “environmental impact” is what philosopher Ayn Rand called an “intellectual package-deal.” Such a concept dishonestly packages together two very different things—the impact of development on the human environment and the impact of development on the non-human environment.

Industrial development will certainly often harm various non-human environments—but it is a godsend to the human environment. By lumping together concern with the non-human environment (e.g., displacing some caribou to get billions of barrels of the lifeblood of civilization) and the human environment (e.g., air quality), anti-industrialists are able to dupe Americans into thinking that sacrificing to caribou somehow benefits them.

Historically, industrial progress brought with it a radical improvement of the human environment. Indeed, industrial progress essentially is the improvement of the human environment. The reason we develop is to make our surroundings better so that our lives are better, cleaner, healthier safer—in the face of a natural environment that is often hostile to human life.

Contrary to “green” mythology, man’s natural environment is neither clean nor safe. In a non-industrialized, “natural” state, men face all sorts of health dangers in the air and water, from the choking smoke of an open fire made using plant matter (a cause of over a million deaths a year to this day) to the feces-infested local brook that he must share with farm animals.

Industrial development gives men the technology and tools to make their environment healthier—from sanitation systems to sturdier buildings to less onerous job conditions to comfortable furniture to having healthy, fresh food at one’s disposal year round, to the wealth and ability to preserve and travel to the most beautiful parts of nature. And so long as we embrace policies that protect property rights, including air and water rights, we protect industrial development and protect individuals from pollution.

As for the “sustainability” of industrial progress, an accusation that dates back to Marx, this fails to recognize the fact (elaborated on by Julian Simon and Ayn Rand) that man has an unlimited capacity to rearrange nature’s endless stockpile of raw materials into useful resources—which is why the more resources we use, the more resources we have. [Read more →]

[Ed Note: This letter was originally published two years ago today at MasterResource with the permission of the Julian Simon family.]

“So how about it, Al [Gore]?  Will you accept the offer?  And how about your boss Bill Clinton, who supports your environmental initiatives?  Can you bring him in for a piece of the action?”

- Julian L. Simon, May 1, 1995

“EARTH DAY: SPIRITUALLY UPLIFTING, INTELLECTUALLY DEBASED”

- by Julian L. Simon

April 22 [1995] marks the 25th anniversary of Earth Day.  Now as then its message is spiritually uplifting.  But all reasonable persons who look at the statistical evidence now available must agree that Earth Day’s scientific premises are entirely wrong.

During the first great Earth Week in 1970 there was panic.  The public’s outlook for the planet was unrelievedly gloomy.  The doomsaying environmentalists–of whom the dominant figure was Paul Ehrlich–raised the alarm: The oceans and the Great Lakes were dying; impending great famines would be seen on television starting in 1975; the death rate would quickly increase due to pollution; and rising prices of increasingly-scarce raw materials would lead to a reversal in the past centuries’ progress in the standard of living.

The media trumpeted the bad news in headlines and front-page stories.  Professor Ehrlich was on the Johnny Carson show for an unprecedented full hour–twice.  Classes were given by television to tens of thousands of university students.

It is hard for those who did not experience it to imagine the national excitement then.  Even those who never read a newspaper joined in efforts to clean up streams, and the most unrepentant slobs refrained from littering for a few weeks.  Population growth was the great bugaboo.

Every ill was the result of too many people in the U. S. and abroad.  The remedy doomsayers urged was government-coerced birth control, abroad and even at home.

On the evening before Earth Day I spoke on a panel at the jam-packed auditorium at the University of Illinois.  The organizers had invited me for “balance,” to show that all points of view would be heard. I spoke then exactly the same ideas that I write today; some of the very words are the same. [Read more →]

Kudos to the Competitive Enterprise Institute for countering the anti-energy (and thus anti-industrial and anti-capitalism) campaign to keep the electricity off this Saturday night with an electricity-is-good event!

Human Achievement Hour counters Earth Hour, which is explained at Wikipedia as follows:

Earth Hour is a global event organized by WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature, also known as World Wildlife Fund) and is held on the last Saturday of March annually, asking households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights and other electrical appliances for one hour to raise awareness towards the need to take action on climate change. Earth Hour was conceived by WWF and The Sydney Morning Herald in 2007, when 2.2 million residents of Sydney participated by turning off all non-essential lights.^[1] Following Sydney’s lead, many other cities around the world adopted the event in 2008.^[2][3] Earth Hour 2011 will take place on March 26, 2011 from 8:30p.m. to 9:30 p.m., at participants’ respective local time.

Here is what CEI recently distributed:

HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT HOUR 2011
March 26th 8:30pm – 9:30pm

On Saturday March 26th 2011 from 8:30pm to 9:30pm individuals, business, and governments will shut off their lights for one hour as a symbolic vote against global climate change. Observers of Earth Hour want world leaders to “do something” about pollution and energy use.  What this means is that they want politicians to use sanctions and taxation to prevent individuals from freely using resources, hindering our ability to create the solutions and technologies of the future.

During this same hour The Competitive Enterprise Institute encourages you to leave your lights on for the third annual Human Achievement Hour (HAH), a celebration of individual freedom and appreciation of the achievements and innovations of humans throughout history. To celebrate Human Achievement Hour participants need only to spend the 8:30pm to 9:30pm hour on March 26th enjoying the benefits of capitalism and human innovation: gather with friends in the warmth of a heated home, watch television, take a hot shower, drink a beer, call a loved one on the phone, or listen to music. If you are in the DC-metro area, join CEI’s in-house party for drinks, food, good music, and conversation about human innovation. [Read more →]

“Material insufficiency and environmental problems have their benefits, over and beyond the improvement which they invoke. They focus the attention of individuals and communities, and constitute a set of challenges which can bring out the best in people” (emphasis added).

- Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996), p. 587.

“We need our problems, though this does not imply that we should purposely create additional problems for ourselves.”

- Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996), p. 588.

If he were alive, Julian Simon (1932–1998) would apply his view that our problems can make us better to the worst-case scenario that BP uniquely brought to life in the Gulf of Mexico this year.

Simon argued that there was a third driving force or condition for human improvement beyond the the institutional  framework for progress (private property, voluntary exchange, the rule of law) and the insightful reasons given for capitalistic progress (motivation, effective use of knowledge, trial and error feedback, etc.).

The third element is the very fact of problems and setbacks, which create challenges that human ingenuity would not need to confront and solve as much as in an incremental improvement process.

The recent Gulf oil spill was certainly not anticipated by anyone in government or in private industry. Yet it happened. And BOOM, the whole offshore industry had to lock heads to try to find the best way to contain the spill and to eventually stop the same. After 87 days, the runaway well was capped. After about 110 days, the cement held, and the well was entombed.

And now will come a new generation of offshore technology to ensure that such an accident does not happen again (see below). Whatever the combination of new regulation, insurance requirements, or just best practices for cost minimization, there must be sound, failsafe, redundant technology for safe, spillage-free deepwater exploration. The reprinted article before is one early recognition of this fact.

APPENDIX: OFFSHORE DRILLING: Disaster Will Lead to Leaps in Engineering Innovation, Greenwire, July 20, 2010.

Disaster begets innovation more often than success does. The modern feats of technology often stemmed from some inevitable mistakes, say historians of engineering.

“It’s a great source of knowledge — and humbling, too — sometimes that’s necessary,” said Henry Petroski, a historian of engineering at Duke University and author of the book, “Success Through Failure.” “Nobody wants failures. But you also don’t want to let a good crisis go to waste.”

The Deepwater Horizon incident, experts say, will provide rich fodder to spur innovation into developing safe and complex techniques to drill into ever-deeper waters. Among lessons learned from this incident are ones about the importance of blowout preventers — the switches on top of wells that cut off the oil supply and are often the last line of defense. The devices were not working in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Environmentalists learned a different lesson about the need to move away from offshore drilling and reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

But the history of engineering suggests that though devices may become unfavorable, whole ideas do not become obsolete. Following the Hindenburg disaster where a hydrogen-filled blimp exploded, engineers simply built airships with inert helium gas. Other disasters including the sinking of the Titanic, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown and the collapse of the World Trade Center all taught engineers to come to terms with flaws and evolve.

Engineers think that the present disaster will help wells become safer as designers search for solutions to reduce risk. The profession itself is inherently problem-solving and would not concern itself with the politics or ethics of reducing dependence on oil, say historians.

Forensic engineers say that analyzing the Deepwater Horizon disaster will take time, and investigations will be necessary to refine the art of drilling. One of the biggest lessons so far: to build blowout preventers with more than one blind shear ram. These blades slice right through the pipe to cut off flow, and two of these plates would be better than one.

“It’s like our personal lives,” said David Fowler, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who teaches a course on forensic engineering. “Failure can force us to make hard decisions” (William Broad, New York Times, July 20). –GV

“The quality of [truth-seeking] depends on a willingness to respectfully engage in open, honest, and objective debate, to challenge … our own beliefs…. As the philosopher, economist, and Anglican bishop Richard Whately observed: ‘It is one thing to wish to have truth on our side, and another thing to wish sincerely to be on the side of truth’.”

- Charles Koch, The Science of Success (John Wiley & Sons, 2007), p. 115. [Book review here]

A week ago I posted a tribute to Julian Simon (1932–1998) on the anniversary of his death. The post was picked up elsewhere in the blogosphere, and I received a number of emails from academics who remarked about how much they appreciated Simon’s personal kindness and scholarly qualities. Steve Horwitz wrote at Coordination Problem:

[Simon] was a model of what a scholar can and should be:  well-read, totally on top of the relevant data, fearless about taking on sacred cows, unafraid to be in your face but always with a smile on his face.  Plus, his boundless optimism for humanity’s future makes for a wonderful contrast to not just the doom-and-gloom of the environmentalists, but even the doom-and-gloom of some libertarians, for whom disaster (though political not environmental) lurks just around the corner.

Plus, Simon’s bet with Ehrlich is the best example of challenging “cheap talk” ever.

Above all of that, he was a charming man who even had time for three over-eager assistant professors on a boat ride in the middle of the Mediterranean in the fall of 1994.  I know that Pete, Dave, and I would all tell you that the 45 minutes we spent chatting with Julian at the rear of that boat on a gorgeous sunny day was one of the fonder memories we have of time spent with Big Thinkers.  He was funny, charming, and gracious.  And he is missed.

Yes, Simon was a true scholar who worked in a ‘challenge culture’ inside his mind.  I remember how at his Houston Forum talk, “More People, Greater Wealth, Expanded Resources, Cleaner Environment,” he was asked perhaps the hardest question of all: what do you think is the major weakness of your view. (What would your answer be to this question?) I remember the pained expression on Simon’s face as he grabbled with that question. I just knew how hard he was trying…. [Read more →]

Editor note: Julian Simon is a primary inspiration for this free-market energy blog, the name of which comes from his characterization of energy as the master resource.

Twelve years ago today came the shocking news: Julian Simon, age 65, had died of heart failure after his regular morning workout in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He had undiagnosed heart disease.

Just two months before, I had visited extensively with Simon when he came Houston to give what would be his last major address, titled: “More People, Greater Wealth, Expanded Resources, Cleaner Environment.” A full house of 200 heard Simon that day, and one in attendance, free-market entrepreneur Gordon Cain, was so impressed that he mailed Simon an unsolicited $25,000 check for research.

Simon invited me to coauthor an energy paper with him for a conference he was planning. This excited me, as did his warm inscription to my first edition copy of The Ultimate Resource. After all, he was the latest major influence on me in a line of thinkers that began with Ayn Rand and had continued with Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. Not unlike other libertarians, I had gone from individualism-is-cool (Rand’s The Fountainhead) to free-markets-work (Mises’s Human Action) to the-perils-of-government-planning (Hayek, various).

I am not the only one to list Simon alongside other top classical liberal/libertarian scholars. Don Boudreaux, chair of the department of economics at George Mason University, wrote:

The three scholars who have had the the greatest impact on my own thinking are F. A. Hayek, James Buchanan, and Julian Simon….  [Simon's] vital idea of “the ultimate resource”  … is one of the most profound—and least understood—in all of the social sciences.

 Dear Professor Simon,

I have never before written a fan letter to a professional colleague, but to discover that you have in your Economics of Population Growth provided the empirical evidence for what with me is the result of a life-time of theoretical speculation, is too exciting an experience not to share it with you. The upshot of my theoretical work has been the conclusion that those traditional rules of conduct (esp. of several property) which led to the greatest increases of the numbers of the groups practicing them leads to their displacing the others — not on “Darwinian” principles but because based on the transmission of learned rules — a concept of evolution which is much older than Darwin.

I doubt whether welfare economics has really much helped you to the right conclusions. I claim as little as you do that population growth as such is good — only that it is the cause of the selection of the morals which guide our individual action. It follows, of course, that our fear of a population explosion is unjustified so long as the local increases are the result of groups being able to feed larger numbers, but may become a severe embarrassment if we start subsidizing the growth of groups unable to feed themselves.

Sincerely, F. A.Hayek

Hayek wrote a second letter upon reading The Ultimate Resource: [Read more →]

Best of MasterResource 2009: This post originally appeared on September 5th.

Julian Simon (1932–98) is an inspiration to those of us here at MasterResource and, indeed, the whole capitalist movement. Indeed, it was he who characterized energy as the master resource and human ingenuity as the ultimate resource.

In honor of Simon, I have reproduced some quotations from his works and invite readers to add their favorite in the comment section.

“The world’s problem is not too many people, but a lack of political and economic freedom.”

- Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton, N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 11.

“There is only one important resource which has shown a trend of increasing scarcity rather than increasing abundance. That resource is the most important of all—human beings. . . . [An] increase in the price of peoples’ services is a clear indication that people are becoming more scarce even though there are more of us.”

- Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton, N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 581.

“Human beings create more than they destroy.”

- Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton, N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 580.

“Progress toward a more abundant material life does not come like manna from heaven. . . . My message certainly is not one of complacency. In this I agree with the doomsayers: our world needs the best efforts of all humanity to improve our lot.”

- Julian Simon, “Introduction,” in Simon, ed., The State of Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), p. 27. [Read more →]

A powerful argument against climate alarmism is the failed worldview of modern neo-Malthusianism, which has promoted fear after fear with an intolerant, smartest-guys-in-the-room mentality. Remember the “population bomb” where many millions would die in food riots? Well, obesity turned out to be the real problem.

Remember the Club of Rome’s resource scare? In 1972, 57 predictions of exhaustion were made regarding 19 different minerals. All either have been falsified or will be.

Remember the global-cooling scare promoted by, among others, the Obama administration’s science czar, John Holdren? (Yes, global cooling was a big deal, although it was not a “consensus.”)

And all of the above doom merchants were uber-confident and still are loath to admit they were ever wrong. Holdren, for example, is sticking to his prediction that as many as one billion people could die by 2020 from (man-made) climate change. That’s about ten years, folks.

Climategate/Climate McCarthyism

Now to today. Error and intolerance rule in the global warming scare. Read the flaming emails from the principals of Climategate. Read about Joseph “Climate McCarthyism” Romm by his critics on the Left.  Read the latest from (non-Climategater) Michael Schlesinger, who lost his cool against New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin.

And of course there is John Holdren, now science advisor to President Obama, who said this to me when I asked him to critically review my essay evaluating his 2003 criticism of Bjorn Lomborg, “The Heated Energy Debate.”  Holdren responded:

What exactly entitles you to the evidently self-applied label of ‘energy expert’?  …. You are of course entitled to (verbally) attack me in any legal way you like, but please don’t then pretend in personal notes to me that we are colleagues, each doing our best to get at the truth…. [Y]ou appear to be … lacking both discernible qualifications in the real world and the ability to tell a good argument from a bad one. I want nothing further to do with you.

A strange intellectual dude.

Remember Julian Simon

Today’s Climategate is predictable with some of the same players at work–and many new ones as well. Remember how Paul R. Ehrlich treated his intellectual rival Julian Simon? The Stanford University biologist refused to debate Simon or even meet him in person. He insulted Simon repeatedly in print. Ehrlich even scolded Science magazine for publishing Simon’s 1980 breakthrough essay “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of Bad News,” with the words: “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off this shoes to count to 20?” (quoted in Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource II, 1996, p. 612). [Read more →]

Julian Simon (1932–98) is an inspiration to those of us here at MasterResource and, indeed, the whole capitalist movement. Indeed, it was he who characterized energy as the master resource and human ingenuity as the ultimate resource.

In honor of Simon, I have reproduced some quotations from his works and invite readers to add their favorite in the comment section.

“The world’s problem is not too many people, but a lack of political and economic freedom.”

- Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton, N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 11.

“There is only one important resource which has shown a trend of increasing scarcity rather than increasing abundance. That resource is the most important of all—human beings. . . . [An] increase in the price of peoples’ services is a clear indication that people are becoming more scarce even though there are more of us.”

- Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton, N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 581.

“Human beings create more than they destroy.”

- Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton, N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 580.

 “Progress toward a more abundant material life does not come like manna from heaven. . . . My message certainly is not one of complacency. In this I agree with the doomsayers: our world needs the best efforts of all humanity to improve our lot.”

- Julian Simon, “Introduction,” in Simon, ed., The State of Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), p. 27.

“Adding more people causes problems. But people are also the means to solve these problems. The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge; the brakes are our lack of imagination and unsound social regulations of these activities. The ultimate resource is people—especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty—who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefits, and so inevitably they will benefit the rest of us as well.”

- Julian Simon, “Introduction,” in Simon, ed., The State of Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), p. 27.

And here is one Simon-like quotation from outside of the Simon tradition to think about!

“The worst of all forms of pollution is wasted lives.”

 - Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York: Plume/Penguin, 1992, 1993), p. 162.

[Editor Note: This piece was orginally published by the Institute for Energy Research and is reprinted with permission]

There are two futures for energy, depending on which socioeconomic system we adopt. The free-market promises a bright energy future, while the opposite path of political energy is dark. In that sense energy differs little from other goods and services (such as health care): its supply will depend on whether economic laws are allowed to work or are hampered by political intervention.

Free-Market Energy

As the late Julian Simon explained, the future for free-market energy is positive. “It’s reasonable to expect the supply of energy to continue becoming more available and less scarce, forever.”[1] So Simon said in his most influential book, The Ultimate Resource. This prediction riled his Malthusian critics, who labeled Simon a naïve romantic. He responded: “I am not an optimist, I am a realist.”[2] In fact, Simon himself had once been a Malthusian and concerned about overpopulation and scarce resources, until the data reversed his thinking.[3]

But abundant free-market energy requires free-market institutions: private property rights, voluntary exchange, and the rule of law. [Read more →]