Category — Simon, Julian

“We appear to be on the Road to Serfdom, paved with green bricks rather than red bricks…. It is actually likely that the United States is now approaching State ownership of about 50 percent of all its land—a level of socialist land ownership unequalled in the world.”

It is a fabulous honor to receive the Julian Simon Memorial Award. Julian was one of the seminal thinkers of the 20th century—and one of the first to challenge the radical Greens’ attack on freedom and progress.

Simon demolished the limits to growth and the belief that human progress was bound in a Malthusian straitjacket, and limited by the known or presumably known physical supplies of natural resources. He argued that the ultimate resource was the limitless nature of man’s mind—his intelligence, innovation, discovery, and invention, constantly discovering and creating new resources where none had existed before. For instance, the looming scarcity of copper vanished with its replacement by abundant beach sand, by silica.

In the past decade, the doomsayers returned again, gleefully predicting the end of growth and the need to reduce population and living standards because of their long hoped-for exhaustion of fossil fuels and the arrival of peal oil and peak gas. But then to their dismay, they witnessed the ultimate resource, man’s intransigent mind, turn the Earth’s abundance of shale deposits into a potential cornucopia of oil and natural gas, requiring nothing more than a drill and water pressure—hydraulic fracing—to once more shatter the supposed limits to growth. [Read more →]

“I might add a prediction—that the hydrocarbon energy age could still be young, even quite young. The much-hyped emergence of a new renewable energy era by mid-century is less our energy future than our energy past…”

I am honored to receive the [2002] Julian Simon award tonight. My thanks go to the Simon family and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for having this annual award to recognize and encourage new contributions in the “sustainable development” field that Simon pioneered.

My appreciation also goes out to a number of groups within the classical liberal “structure of production” that have supported my intellectual development over the last quarter century, and in particular the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, the Cato Institute, and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.

Julian Simon was very interested in energy and energy-environmental issues. I have identified six of his themes in this area:

• Energy is “the master resource” because energy is pervasive in industrial activity, and energy allows us to transform resources into more valuable goods and services (such as turning salt water into drinking water, a very energy-intensive process)
• Natural resources originate from the mind, not the ground, and therefore are not depletable. Thus energy can be best understood as a pyramid of increasing substitutability and thus supply and not a “bell curve” with any particular hydrocarbon energy.
• The average person in market settings creates (transforms) more inanimate energy than he or she consumes.
• The average person in market settings improves the natural environment more than he or she despoils it. [Read more →]

“Have you noticed something about fossil fuels–we are the only creatures that use them. What this means is that when you use oil, coal or gas, you are not competing with other species. When you use timber, or crops or tide, or hydro or even wind, you are [competing]. There is absolutely no doubt that the world’s policy of encouraging the use of bio-energy, whether in the form of timber or ethanol, is bad for wildlife – it competes with wildlife for land, or wood or food.”

“The eco-pessimist view ignores history, misunderstands finiteness, thinks statically, has a vested interest in doom, and is complacent about innovation.”

It is now 32 years, nearly a third of a century, since Julian Simon nailed his theses to the door of the eco-pessimist church by publishing his famous article in Science magazine: “Resources, population, environment: an oversupply of bad news”. It is also 40 years since The Limits to Growth and 50 years since Silent Spring, plenty long enough to reflect on whether the world has conformed to Malthusian pessimism or Simonian optimism.

Loutish Critics

Before I go on, I want to remind you just how viciously Simon was attacked for saying that he thought the bad news was being exaggerated and the good news downplayed. Verbally at least Simon’s treatment was every bit as rough as Martin Luther’s. Simon was called an imbecile, a moron, silly, ignorant, a flat-earther, a member of the far right, a Marxist. “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off his shoes to count to 20?” said Paul Ehrlich. [Read more →]

“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.

“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.

Julian Simon (1932-1998) was born February 12th, eighty-one years ago today. MasterResource, which is named in his honor, applies Simon’s ultimate resource insight to the master resource of energy and to related environmental issues (see Appendix A).

This week, MasterResource will publish the remarks of three former Julian L. Simon Memorial Award winners: Matt Ridley, Robert Bradley, and Robert J. Smith. (The 12 recipients of the award to date are listed in Appendix B.)

There have been many tributes to and recognitions of Simon, both before and after his untimely death. Don Boudreaux, for example, former chairman 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.

F. A. Hayek wrote to Simon upon reading Economics of Population Growth (1977): [Read more →]

[Editor note: Julian Simon titled this silver-anniversary essay, "Earth Day: Spiritually Uplifting, Intellectually Debased." Posts about the ideas of Simon (1932–1997), an inspiration to this blog, can be found here.]

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. [Read more →]

“[Julian] Simon found that humanity progressed not only by solving immediate problems within the existing institutional framework but also by creatively improving the framework over time. . . . In the short run, members of society adopt localized technical and contractual fixes. In the medium range, they may explore government regulatory policies. In the longer term, they expand the scope and scale of the liberal institutions. These institutions of economic freedom—private property, binding contracts, and the rule of law—improve incentive structures that foster both economic well-being and environmental stewardship.”

- Fred Smith, “Introduction,” in Robert Bradley, Julian Simon and the Triumph of Energy Sustainability (Washington, D.C.: ALEC, 2000), p. 12.

Julian Simon (1932–98) would have been eighty years old today. MasterResource is inspired by his contributions to energy (what he labeled “the master resource”), as well as his open-ended view of human ingenuity (what he called “the ultimate resource”).

Who can forget Simon’s statement: “It’s reasonable to expect the supply of energy to continue becoming more available and less scarce, forever.” [1] That one got the neo-Malthusians (fixity-depletionists) mad!

Or this: “Discoveries, like resources, may well be infinite: the more we discover, the more we are able to discover.” [2] The cascading effect of human discovery, indeed, the open-endedness of entrepreneurship (and in the mineral world, resourceship), is a very powerful explanatory concept.

And his public policy conclusion: “The world’s problem is not too many people, but a lack of political and economic freedom.” [3] Simon elaborated:

[Read more →]

[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