[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.

Human life requires changing nature on a massive scale. Any cause that holds minimal impact as an ideal is anti-human and an enemy of the human environment.

Today’s anti-industrial movement is not new in this respect. Throughout history, there have been major, anti-industrial groups or movements. The basic premise they have in common is that it is arrogant and wrong for man to transform nature as he sees fit. Man, they believe, should not tame nature but exist in some sort of mystical “harmony” with it (how he is supposed to cope with nature’s dangers and a life expectancy of 30 is rarely specified).

Perhaps the iconic anti-industrialist was the 18th Century’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who worshiped nature untouched by man and regarded the transformation of nature in his time (let alone the then-unimaginable transformation that is our modern world) as evil.

But the modern-day followers of Rousseau knew they cannot succeed by being directly anti-industrial. So they create a false association between themselves and environmental progress, and a false opposition between industrial progress and environmental progress.

Part of this false conceptualization has been achieved by using an old socialist trick to obscure the massive environmental improvement that industrial capitalism brought. The trick is to criticize something by comparison to a nonexistent and impossible utopia.

Socialists used this technique to criticize capitalism for causing poverty, even though capitalism inherited poverty–and cured it. Yet Marxists would attack capitalism’s incredible contribution to human life, including to the life of laborers, by comparing that contribution, not to its predecessors and not to any known alternatives, but to a fictional socialist utopia whose advertised results contradicted everything known (even then) about socialism’s destructive nature.

Environmentalists have done the equivalent to industrial progress. Instead of comparing the human environment pre-industrial and post-industrial, they compared the post-industrial environment to a non-existent pollution-free utopia achieved by man living in “harmony” with nature.

They have done this in spite of conclusive historical evidence living in “harmony” with nature means living very briefly. Historically, to the extent humans didn’t mine, didn’t burn fuels, didn’t develop, and were unwilling or unable to control or displace other species where necessary, they died early and often. The modern standard of living is an unprecedented, singular achievement that continues only so long as men are free to command nature on a large scale.

Early environmentalists cursed the coal fumes of newly industrial cities, evading the wood fumes, dung fumes, and starvation coal had replaced–and the work-hours it saved and years of life it added to human life. They cursed smog, evading that it replaced rampant airborne disease from horse-drawn society. And when increased production of coal and oil and natural gas produced the energy and technology to develop ways to radically reduce their pollution, environmentalists took credit–as if laws against pollution weren’t essential to capitalism, the system where protection of all forms of property is sacrosanct.

Development, industrial progress, and capitalism promote a human environment. The anti-industrial “green” movement opposes it. This is a truth that Americans desperately need to understand. At present, the philosophical confusion caused by anti-industrialists causes Americans who are genuinely concerned about their health and well-being to embrace the ideas and policies of those who want to sacrifice that health and well-being to the non-human. We are taught to denigrate fossil fuels, which have doubled the human life expectancy, and to strive for a mythical “green energy” economy, powered by fuel sources that have failed for decades.

We are not taught that industrialization has enabled man to be orders of magnitude less vulnerable to climate, but that a degree rise in temperature over 150 years portends catastrophe. With proposals on the table such as 80% cuts in CO2 emissions, “green” confusion could mean economic suicide.

Such is the power of moral idealism and philosophical corruption. The ideal—and the corruption—need to be replaced.

Industrial Progress: A New Cultural Ideal for America

The only solution to a false ideal put forward by philosophical corruption is a true ideal put forward with philosophical clarity.

We need to embrace, unambiguously, the never-ending project that is the industrial revolution: the transformation of nature on a massive scale, with the unlimited potential to produce more energy, create more wealth, create more productivity, increase leisure time, transport things more quickly, conduct more complex scientific experiments, build sturdier, more comfortable places to live. We can travel farther and faster. We can live longer and better.

For the same reasons, we need to embrace, unambiguously, the harmony of industrial progress and the human environment. Industrial progress should be celebrated in classrooms, on YouTube, on t-shirts. Americans should think of fracking with the same excitement they feel for iPhones.

It is a moral embarrassment that in today’s world, where billions die for lack of energy, where Americans still have so much untapped potential, that what passes for idealism is driving a battery-powered car or sorting through one’s trash to make sure everything is in its “proper” bin. What does it say about our cultural self-esteem when we believe it is wrong to do something as necessary as generate trash—which simply amounts to taking some matter from the earth, making profitable use of it, and putting its waste product in a safe place?

For too long, Americans have taken industrial progress for granted, and carelessly embraced “going green” as an ideal–expecting that the unprecedented standard of living we had would automatically continue, even though we permitted environmentalists to oppose new energy production and new development at every turn. Today, we are paying the price, with an economy whose productive fundamentals are less and less sound.

So long as the anti-industrialists have the moral high ground, they can inspire support for their suicidal “green economy,” and inspire guilt to gain power and thwart the opposition. Way too much of free-market criticism of environmentalism bends over backwards to declare itself “green” and mouth environmentalist terminology such as “protect the environment”—as if the kangaroo rat environment and the human environment are interchangeably valuable.

Thus, we must clearly identify and steadfastly reject any trace of the “green” ideal: to sacrifice the human environment to the non-human environment. And any trace of “green” must be removed from politics. The one and only industrial policy that is needed is the proper definition and protection of property rights for individuals and companies. Human ingenuity directed toward the improvement of human life, will do the rest.

In the past, Americans’ unprecedented industrial freedom and growth depended on a certain industrial philosophy. With industrial progress as our ideal, and with policies that fully respect property rights and fully allow free markets, the brilliantly talented individuals of this great country can lead us to the next industrial renaissance and an ever-improving environment.

Don’t “go green.” Go industrial.

[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.

Of the 2,000 persons in attendance, probably fewer than a dozen concluded that anything I said made sense.  A panelist denounced me as a religious nut, attributing to me weird beliefs such as that murder was the equivalent of celibacy.  My ten-minute talk so enraged people that it led to a physical brawl with another professor.

Every statement I made in 1970 about the trends in resource scarcity and environmental cleanliness turned out to be correct. Every prediction has been validated by events.  Yet the environmental organizations and the Clinton administration–especially Vice President Al Gore, the State Department, and the CIA –still take as doctrine exactly the same ideas expressed by the doomsayers in 1970, despite their being discredited by recent history.  And the press overwhelmingly endorses that viewpoint.

Here are the facts: On average, people throughout the world have been living longer and eating better than ever before.  Fewer people die of famine nowadays than in earlier centuries.  The real prices of food and of every other raw material are lower now than in earlier decades and centuries, indicating a trend of increased natural-resource availability rather than increased scarcity.  The major air and water pollutions in the advanced countries have been lessening rather than worsening.

In short, every single measure of material and environmental welfare in the United States has improved rather than deteriorated. This is also true of the world taken as a whole.  All the long-run trends point in exactly the opposite direction from the projections of the doomsayers.  There have been, and always will be, temporary and local exceptions to these broad trends.  But astonishing as it may seem, there are no data showing that conditions are deteriorating.

Rather, all indicators show that the quality of human life has been getting better.  As a result of this evidence of improvement rather than degradation, in the past few years there has been a major shift in scientific opinion away from the views the doomsayers espouse. There now are dozens of books in print and hundreds of articles in the technical and popular literature reporting these facts.

Responding to the accumulating literature that shows no negative correlation between population growth and economic development, in 1986 the National Academy of Sciences published a report on population growth and economic development prepared by a prestigious scholarly group. It reversed almost completely the frightening conclusions of the previous 1971 NAS report. The group found no quantitative statistical evidence of population growth hindering economic progress, though they hedged their qualitative judgment a bit. The report found benefits of additional people as well as costs. Even the World Bank, the greatest institutional worrier about population growth, reported in 1984 that the world’s natural resource situation provides no reason to limit population growth.

A bet between Paul Ehrlich and me epitomizes the matter.  In 1980, the year after the tenth Earth Day, Ehrlich and two associates wagered with me about future prices of raw materials.  We would assess the trend in $1000 worth of copper, chrome, nickel, tin, and tungsten for ten years.  I would win if resources grew more abundant, and they would win if resources became scarcer.  At settling time in 1990, the year after the twentieth Earth Week, they sent me a check for $576.07.

A single bet proves little, of course. Hence I have offered to repeat the wager, and I have broadened it as follows: I’ll bet a week’s or a month’s pay that just about any trend pertaining to material human welfare will improve rather than get worse.  You pick the trend–perhaps life expectancy, a price of a natural resource, some measure of air or water pollution, or the number of telephones per person– and you choose the area of the world and the future year the comparison is to be made.  If I win, my winnings go to non-profit research.

I have not been able to close another deal with a prominent academic doomsayer.  They all continue to warn of impending deterioration, but they refuse to follow Professor Ehrlich in putting their money where their mouths are.  Therefore, let’s try the chief “official” doomsayer, Vice President Al Gore.  He wrote a best-selling book, Earth in the Balance, that warns about the supposed environmental and resource “crisis.”  In my judgment, the book is as ignorant and wrongheaded a collection of cliches as anything ever published on the subject.

So how about it, Al?  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?

It is not pleasant to talk rudely like this.  But a challenge wager is the last refuge of the frustrated.  And it is very frustrating that after 25 years of the anti-pessimists being proven entirely right, and the doomsayers being proven entirely wrong, their credibility and influence waxes ever greater.

That’s the bad news.  The good news is that there is every scientific reason to be joyful about the trends in the condition of the Earth, and hopeful for humanity’s future, even if we are falsely told the outlook is grim.

So Happy Earth Day!

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.

HAH is an annual event meant to recognize that this is the greatest time to be alive and that we have come so far only because people have been free to use their minds and the resources in their environment to experiment, create, and innovate. Participants in HAH recognize the necessity to protect the individuals from government coercion in order to continue innovating and improving our lives and the world around us.

See how far we’ve come!

—————————————————–

MasterResource Posts in the Julian Simon Tradition

Here Comes Ingenuity! Offshore Drilling Will Be Better, Cleaner, Safer in the New Era (Julian Simon speaks to us today)

Julian Simon Changed His Mind–Can Others Come to View Humans as the Solution, not the Problem?

Remembering Julian Simon (1932–1998)

Julian Simon on the Ultimate Resource (Forget Peak Oil, Worry About Peak Government)

Climategate Did Not Begin With Climate (Remembering Julian Simon and the storied intolerance of neo-Malthusians)

“The Cheaper the Energy the Better” (Julian Simon in 1993 speaks to us today)

Energy as the Master Resource: Where Left, Right, and Center Agree

“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….

A Reformed Malthusian!

Simon fundamentally changed his worldview as an adult. Here is the story (sources at listed in the end):

In 1966, Julian Simon began studying issues of population, resources, and the environment. He began as a Malthusian, fearing more people in a world where the means of subsistence was fixed (Simon, 2002: 237–40).

Simon’s conversion to viewing human beings as the solution rather than the problem occurred in 1969; by 1972 or so, he had achieved full confidence in his new outlook (Simon, 2002: 240). He first went public with his contra world view in 1970 (Simon, 1996: 578; 2002: 243), the year in which he engaged in an Earth Day debate against Paul Silverman on his campus, the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign (Simon, 2002: 259–64). Simon’s shift was influenced by the statistical inferences he uncovered and by studying the research of others, particularly Harold Barnett and Chandler Morse’s 1963 classic, Scarcity and Growth (Simon, 2002: 242–43).

In 1969, Simon had an epiphany on the way to a meeting with U.S. officials to discuss ways to reduce fertility in less-developed countries. He thought, “Enabling a potential human being to come into life and to enjoy life is a good thing just as protecting a living person’s life from being ended is a good thing” (Simon, 1996: xxxii). He also thought: “What business do I have trying to help arrange it that fewer human beings will be born, each one of whom might be a Mozart or a Michelangelo or an Einstein—or simply a joy to his or her family and community, and a person who will enjoy life?” (xxxi).

Thus did Julian Simon, an open-minded scholar, change his mind on professional and personal grounds and become a determined advocate for his contra-Malthusian view to the day he died in 1998.

Bibliography

Barnett, Harold, and Chandler Morse. Scarcity and Growth: The Economics of Natural Resource Availability. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (for Resources for the Future), 1963.

Simon, Julian. The Ultimate Resource 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Simon, Julian. A Life Against the Grain. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002.

With a variety of intellectual, political, and public relations setbacks, climate alarmists are on a hot seat of their making.  They can dig in more (the new denialists) or at least more sympathetically study the ‘opposition’ to perhaps become global lukewarmers–and non catastrophists.

If so, they will follow the example of the late, great Julian Simon.

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:

Dear Professor Simon,

… I have now at last had time to read [The Ultimate Resource] with enthusiastic agreement. So far as practical effect is concerned it ought to be even more important than your theoretical work which I found so exciting because it so strongly supports all the conclusions of the work I have been doing for the last few years. I do not remember whether I explained in my earlier letter that one, perhaps the chief thesis of the book on The Fatal Conceit, the first draft of which I got on paper during the past summer, is that the basic morals of property and honesty, which created our civilization and the modern numbers of mankind, was the outcome of a process of selective evolution, in the course of which always those practices prevailed, which allowed the groups which adopted them to multiply more rapidly (mostly at their periphery among people who already profited from them without yet having fully adopted them.) That was the reason for my enthusiasm for your theoretical work.

Your new book I welcome chiefly for the practical effects I am hoping from it. Though you will be at first much abused, I believe the more intelligent will soon recognize the soundness of your case. And the malicious pleasure of being able to tell most of their fellows what fools they are, should get you the support of the more lively minds about the media. If your publishers want to quote me they are welcome to say that I described it as a first class book of great importance which ought to have great influence on policy….

Sincerely, F. A. Hayek

Two Tributes: Ben Wattenberg and Stepehn Moore

Two tributes to Simon upon his passing are worth rereading. One was published in the Wall Street Journal by close friend Ben Wattenberg; the other (longer) piece is by Simon’s pupil-made-good (and the 1st winner of the Julian Simon Memorial Award), Stephen Moore. I reproduce both below, as well as the New York Times obituary on Simon.

Malthus, Watch Out: Ben Wattenberg, Wall Street Journal, February 11, 1998

Julian Simon, who waged intellectual war on environmentalists and Malthusians, died suddenly on Sunday. He would have been 66 tomorrow, the day of his funeral.

Simon could sometimes glow like an exposed wire, crackling with nervous intellectual intensity. Privately, he had a soul of purest honey. But by force of will, fueled by his sizzling energy, Simon helped push a generation of Americans to rethink their views on population, resources and the environment. By now it is clear that in this task he was largely successful. As the years roll on he will be more successful yet, his work studied, and picked at, by regiments of graduate students.

His keystone work was “The Ultimate Resource,” published in 1981 and updated in 1996 as “The Ultimate Resource 2″ (Princeton University Press). Its central point is clear: Supplies of natural resources are not finite in any serious way; they are created by the intellect of man, an always renewable resource. Coal, oil and uranium were not resources at all until mixed well with human intellect.

The notion drove some environmentalists crazy. If it were true, poof!–there went so many of the crises that justified their existence. From their air-conditioned offices in high-rise buildings, they brayed: Simon believes in a technological fix! The attacks often got personal: Simon’s doctorate was in business economics, they sniffed; he had merely been a professor of advertising and marketing, and–get this–he had actually started a mail-order business and written a book about how to do it. Never mind that he also studied population economics for a quarter century.

In fact, it was Simon’s knowledge of real-world commerce that gave him an edge in the intellectual wars. He knew firsthand about some things that many environmentalists had only touched gingerly, like prices. If the real resource was the human intellect, Simon reasoned, and the amount of human intellect was increasing, both quantitatively through population growth and qualitatively through education, then the supply of resources would grow, outrunning demand, pushing prices down and giving people more access to what they wanted, with more than enough left over to deal with pollution and congestion. In short, mankind faced the very opposite of a crisis.

Simon rarely presented a sentence not supported by facts–facts arranged in serried ranks to confront the opposition; facts about forests and food, pollution and poverty, nuclear power and nonrenewable resources; facts used as foot soldiers to strike blows for accuracy.

In a famous bet, gloom-meister Paul Ehrlich took up Simon’s challenge and wagered that between 1980 and 1990 scarcity would drive resource prices up. Simon bet that progress would push prices down. Simon won the bet, easily. Mr. Ehrlich won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. But the wheel turns, and we’ll see who’s a genius. Fortune magazine listed Simon among “the world’s most stimulating thinkers.” Mr. Ehrlich didn’t make the cut.

Simon sensed the primacy of something else that many environmentalists and crisis-mongers didn’t catch on to for a quite a time: Human intellect could best be transformed into beneficial goods and services in an atmosphere of political and economic liberty. At the United Nations’ Mexico City population conference in 1984 Simon winced, and counterattacked, when population alarmists caricatured the Reagan-appointed American delegation as promoting the idea that “capitalism is the best contraceptive.” It was not a good idea to ridicule capitalism, or free markets, or human liberty, in Simon’s presence.

Of course, rising living standards do tend to depress fertility. Living standards do rise faster under democratic market systems. Smart folks now know that the fruits of economic growth can be used to diminish pollution. You don’t hear much anymore about how we’re running out of everything. (Next task: Simonize the Global Warmists.)

Finally, unlike many of his opponents, Julian was a traditionalist. He did not work on the Sabbath, and the Friday Sabbath dinner at the Simon house was always a gentle and joyous celebration.

At rest on the Sabbath, Julian was indefatigable the rest of the week, chasing his precious facts. If Thomas Malthus is in heaven, he’s in for an argument, laced with facts, facts, facts. 

Julian Simon Remembered: It’s A Wonderful Life

Julian L. Simon, professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and distinguished senior fellow at the Cato Institute, died February 8 at the age of 65. Stephen Moore, his former research assistant, is director of fiscal policy studies at the Cato Institute.

I first met “doom-slayer” Julian L. Simon at the University of Illinois in the spring of 1980—at just the time when the environmental doomsday industry had reached the height of its influence and everyone knew the earth was headed to hell in a hand basket. We could see the signs right before our very eyes. We had just lived through a decade of gasoline lines, Arab oil embargoes, severe food shortages in the Third World, nuclear accidents, and raging global inflation. Almost daily the media were reporting some new imminent eco-catastrophe: nuclear winter, ozone depletion, acid rain, species extinction, and the death of the forests and oceans.

The Club of Rome had just released its primal scream, Limits to Growth, which reported that the earth was rapidly running out of everything. The most famous declinist of the era, biologist Paul Ehrlich, had appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to fill Americans with fear of impending world famine and make gloomy prognostications, such as, “If I were a gambler, I would bet even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

The Carter administration published in 1980 its multiagency assessment of the earth’s future, titled Global 2000. Its famous doom-and-gloom forecast that “the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically. . . . and the world’s people will be poorer in many ways than they are today” received headlines across the nation. Malthusianism was now the official position of the U.S. government.

It was all so damned depressing. And, thanks to iconoclast Julian Simon, we now know that it was all so wrong.

It was back in the midst of that aura of gloom that by chance I enrolled in Simon’s undergraduate economics course at the University of Illinois. After the first week of the course, I was convinced that his multitude of critics were right. He must be a madman. How could anyone believe the outlandish claims he was making? That population growth was not a problem; that natural resources were becoming more abundant; that the condition of the environment was improving. That the incomes of the world’s population were rising. Simon made all of those bold proclamations and more in his masterpiece The Ultimate Resource, published in 1980. I read the book over and over—three times, in fact—and I came to the humbling realization that everything I had been taught since the first grade about population and environmental issues had been dead wrong.

The weight of the facts that Simon brought to bear against the doomsayers was simply so overpoweringly compelling that I, like so many others, became a Julian Simon fanatic. Julian was the person who brought me to Washington in 1982 to work as his research assistant as he finished his next great book (coedited with the late futurist Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute) titled The Resourceful Earth: A Response to Global 2000.

So for more than 15 years I was privileged to occupy a front-row seat from which I watched as Simon thoroughly and often single-handedly capsized the prevailing Malthusian orthodoxy. He routed nearly every prominent environmental scaremonger of our time: from the Club of Rome, to Paul Ehrlich, to Lester Brown, to Al Gore. (After reading Earth in the Balance, Julian was convinced that Gore was one of the most dangerous men and one of the shallowest thinkers in all of American politics.)

Simon’s dozens of books and his more than 200 academic articles always brought to bear a vast arsenal of compelling data on and analysis of how life on earth was getting better, not worse. Simon argued that we were not running out of food, water, oil, trees, clean air, or any other natural resource because throughout the course of human history the price of natural resources had been declining. Falling long-term prices are prima facie evidence of greater abundance, not increasing scarcity. He showed that, over time, the environment had been getting cleaner, not dirtier. He showed that the “population bomb” was a result of a massive global reduction in infant mortality rates and a stunning increase in life expectancy. “If we place value on human life,” Simon argued, “then those trends are to be celebrated, not lamented.”

Simon’s central premise was that people are the ultimate resource. “Human beings,” he wrote, “are not just more mouths to feed, but are productive and inventive minds that help find creative solutions to man’s problems, thus leaving us better off over the long run.” As Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute explained in his brilliant tribute to Simon in the Wall Street Journal, “Simon’s central point was that natural resources are not finite in any serious way; they are created by the intellect of man, an always renewable resource.” Julian often wondered why most governmental economic and social statistics treat people as if they are liabilities not assets. “Every time a calf is born,” he observed, “the per capita GDP of a nation rises. Every time a human baby is born, the per capita GDP falls.” Go figure!

The two trends that Simon believed best captured the long-term improvement in the human condition over the past 200 years were the increase in life expectancy and the decline in infant mortality (see figures). Those trends, Simon maintained, were the ultimate sign of man’s victory over death.

Today, many of Julian Simon’s views on population and natural resources are so triumphant that they are almost mainstream. No one can rationally look at the evidence today and still claim, for example, that we are running out of food or energy. But those who did not know Julian or of his writings in the 1970s and early 1980s cannot fully appreciate how viciously he was attacked—from both the left and the right. Paul Ehrlich once snarled that Simon’s writings proved that “the one thing the earth will never run out of is imbeciles.” A famous professor at the University of Wisconsin wrote, “Julian Simon could be dismissed as a simpleminded nut case, if his ideas weren’t so dangerous.”

To this day I remain convinced that the endless ad hominem attacks were a result of the fact that—try as they would—Simon’s critics never once succeeded in puncturing holes in his data or his theories. What ultimately vindicated his theories was that the doomsayers’ predictions of global famine, $100 a barrel oil, nuclear winter, catastrophic depletion of the ozone layer, falling living standards, and so on were all discredited by events. For example, the year 2000 is almost upon us, and we can now see that the direction in which virtually every trend of human welfare has moved has been precisely the opposite of that predicted by Global 2000. By now Simon and Kahn’s contrarian conclusions in The Resourceful Earth look amazingly prescient.

The ultimate embarrassment for the Malthusians was when Paul Ehrlich bet Simon $1,000 in 1980 that five resources (of Ehrlich’s choosing) would be more expensive in 10 years. Ehrlich lost: 10 years later every one of the resources had declined in price by an average of 40 percent.

Julian Simon loved good news. And the good news of his life is that, today, the great bogeyman of our time, Malthusianism, has, like communism, been relegated to the dustbin of history with the only remaining believers to be found on the faculties of American universities. The tragedy is that it is the Paul Ehrlichs of the world who still write the textbooks that mislead our children with wrongheaded ideas. And it was Paul Ehrlich, not Julian Simon, who won the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius award.”

Among the many prominent converts to the Julian Simon world view on population and environmental issues were Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. Despite howls of protest from the international population control lobby, in 1984 the Reagan administration adopted Simon’s position—that the world is not overpopulated and that people are resource creators, not resource destroyers—at the United Nations Population Conference in Mexico City. The Reaganites called it “supply-side demographics.” Meanwhile, in the late 1980s, Simon traveled by invitation to the Vatican to explain his theories on population growth. A year later Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter urged nations to treat their people “as productive assets.”

Simon’s theory about the benefits of people also led him to write extensively about immigration. In 1989 he published The Economic Consequences of Immigration, which argued that immigrants make “substantial net economic contributions to the United States.” His research in the 1980s showed that, over their lifetimes, immigrants on balance pay thousands of dollars more in taxes than they use in government services, making them a good investment for native-born Americans. It was arguably the most influential book on U.S. immigration policy in 25 years. Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.), chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee, has credited Simon’s work with helping “keep wide open America’s gates to immigrants.”

We at the Cato Institute published three of Julian Simon’s books and dozens of his articles and studies. We were always drawn to his celebration of the individual. Simon believed that human progress depended not only on creative and ingenious minds but also on free institutions. He often marveled that the only place on earth where life expectancy actually fell in the 20th century was in the Soviet Union and other East European nations during the tyranny of communism. Many of his most ardent critics were government activists who believe that the only conceivable solution to impending eco-catastrophe is ever more stringent governmental edicts: coercive population stabilization policies, gas rationing, wage and price controls, mandatory recycling, and so on.

Julian had an ebullient spirit, but from time to time he would complain to me that his writings never received the full recognition they deserved from academics. That was probably true, but I always reminded him that his work had had a more profound impact on the policy debate in Washington than that of any random selection of 100 of his academic peers combined.

Two weeks before Julian died, I was driving through central Iowa and was surprised and delighted to find gasoline selling for 89 cents a gallon. I hadn’t seen gas prices that low since before the OPEC embargo in the early 1970s. I instantly thought of Julian. It was one of those little real-world events that confirm that he was right all along.

New York Times Obituary “Julian Simon, 65, Optimistic Economist, Dies” by Kenneth Gilpin, February 12, 1998

Julian L. Simon, an economist and professor who spent much of his professional life taking on scientists, demographers and other academics who argued that mankind was stretching the resources of the earth to the breaking point, died at his home in Chevy Chase, Md., on Sunday.

The cause of death was a heart attack, his son, David, said. Mr. Simon was 65.

At the time of his death, Mr. Simon was a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington research organization. And his views, generally optimistic about the benefits humans bring to the planet and about man’s prospects for the future, were widely debated.

The essence of Mr. Simon’s view of man and the future is contained in two predictions for the next century and any century thereafter that are in ”The State of Humanity,” a book he edited for the Cato Institute.

”First,” he wrote, ”humanity’s condition will improve in just about every material way. Second, humans will continue to sit around complaining about everything getting worse.”

He argued that mankind would rise to any challenges and problems by devising new technologies to not only cope, but thrive. ”Whatever the rate of population growth is, historically it has been that the food supply increases at least as fast, if not faster,” he said in a profile published in Wired magazine last year.

Mr. Simon’s views were widely contested by a large coterie of the academic and scientific community, many of whose members believe that more people create more problems, straining the earth and its resources in the process.

”Most biologists and ecologists look at population growth in terms of the carrying capacity of natural systems,” said Lester R. Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington. ”Julian was not handicapped by being either. As an economist, he could see population growth in a much more optimistic light.”

In 1980, for example, Mr. Simon and Herman Kahn, the futurist, headed a panel organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation that took sharp issue with findings of the Global 2000 Report, a study issued by the Carter Administration.

Among other things, the report said that ”if present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now.”

At the time Mr. Simon was an economics professor at the University of Illinois. But he had been researching and writing about the positive effects of population growth since 1965, when he saw a headline in The New York Times warning of a population doomsday.

”Fortunately for this planet,” Mr. Simon said in response to the Global 2000 Report, ”these gloomy assertions about resources and environment are baseless.”

Mr. Simon’s sunny view of the future became the basis for a highly publicized bet in 1980 with Paul R. Ehrlich, the Stanford University ecologist whose 1968 book, ”The Population Bomb,” predicted that one-fifth of humanity would starve to death by 1985.

Mr. Ehrlich and two colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley were piqued by an article Mr. Simon wrote for Science magazine titled ”Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of False Bad News.” They responded to a challenge by Mr. Simon to Malthusians that the price of any natural resource would be lower by a mutually agreed-upon date, not higher.

Mr. Ehrlich and his colleagues took the bet on the belief that rising demand for raw materials by an exploding global populace would pare supplies of nonrenewable resources, driving up prices. Mr. Ehrlich said he had accepted Mr. Simon’s ”astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in.”

The Ehrlich group bet $1,000 on five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — in quantities that each cost $200 in October 1980, when the bet was made. Mr. Simon agreed that he would sell the agreed-upon quantities of the metals to the Ehrlich group 10 years later at 1980 prices. If the combined prices of acquiring the metals in 1990 turned out to be higher than $1,000, Mr. Simon would pay the difference in cash. If prices fell, the Ehrlich group would pay him.

During the decade, the world’s population grew by more than 800 million, the greatest increase in history, and the store of metals did not get any larger. Yet in the fall of 1990, with the prices of the metals down sharply, Mr. Ehrlich mailed Mr. Simon a check for $576.07.

Mr. Simon wrote back a thank you note, along with a challenge to raise the wager to as much as $20,000, tied to any other resources and to any other year in the future. Mr. Ehrlich declined to take him up on the new offer.

Born in Newark, Mr. Simon studied psychology as an undergraduate at Harvard University, then earned an M.B.A. and a doctorate in business economics at the University of Chicago. He joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1963.

Much of his early work was in mail order marketing — his book on the topic, ”How to Start and Operate a Mail Order Business,” sold more books than any he wrote subsequently. But his attention turned to population questions after he heard the grim predictions about an overpopulated planet.

Despite his optimism about the future of mankind, Mr. Simon was given to personal bouts of depression. As a form of therapy he wrote a book on the subject, ”Good Mood: The New Psychology for Overcoming Depression.”

An active lecturer, Mr. Simon’s view of the world and man’s possibilities never wavered.

”He believed that the world needs problems because they make us better,” said Robert L. Bradley Jr., president of the Institute for Energy Research in Houston. ”Problems make us better off than if they had never occurred.”

Mr. Simon is survived by his wife, Rita James Simon of Chevy Chase; three children, David M. Simon of Chicago, Judith Simon Garret of Vienna, Va., and Daniel H. Simon of Laurel, Md., and one grandchild.

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.

“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.

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).

Here is the full story from chapter 11 of my Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (pp. 272–73):

Science magazine in mid-1980 published an essay by Julian Simon that “raised the blood pressure of the scientific community a good twenty points,” one Malthusian environmentalist recalled. “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of False Bad News” presented official statistics to refute high-profile media scare stories. In so doing, Simon challenged the interrelated notions of a fixed supply of land, fixed and depleting resources, a growing inadequacy of food supply, an inverse relationship between population and progress, and a worsening environment.

Simon’s cherry-on-top was answering, Why do we hear phony bad news? Part of his explanation was “bad news sells books, newspapers, and magazines: good news is not half so interesting.” He asked, “Is it a wonder that there are lots of bad-news best-sellers warning about pollution, population growth, and natural-resource depletion but none telling us the facts about improvement?”

The provocative essay, published on the home turf of the neo-Malthusians, put Simon’s ideas in play. Princeton University Press rushed ahead to publish what became Simon’s signature book, The Ultimate Resource. The sustainability debate was finally joined.

A flood of dissent filled the offices of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in response to Simon’s cannon shot. Paul Ehrlich asked: “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off his shoes to count to 20?” Paul and Anne Ehrlich, John Holdren, and John Harte in a reply challenged Simon’s contention that oil was not becoming permanently scarcer. “The fact is that OPEC’s price hikes and the ‘improved market power’ of coal and uranium both reflected a new reality based on emerging scarcity of oil and natural gas.” Record oil prices gave at least superficial credence to their depletionism, but Simon, like M.A. Adelman, would soon have the upper hand.

Simon designed The Ultimate Resource (1981) to irresistibly engage his opponents. Using The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith as his model, Simon sought to write a popular book that would influence academia via the general public. Thus Simon turned over his trump cards in the introduction.

Hold your hat—our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense…. If the past is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less scarce, and less costly, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years. And population growth is likely to have a long-run beneficial impact on the natural-resource environment.

Energy. Grab your hat again—the long-run future of our energy supply is at least as bright as that of other natural resources, though political maneuvering can temporarily boost prices from time to time. Finiteness is no problem here either. And the long-run impact of additional people is likely to speed the development of a cheap energy supply that is almost inexhaustible.

Twenty-three chapters and thousands of data points later, his book ended: “The ultimate resource is people—skilled, spirited, and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so, inevitably, for the benefit of us all.” This was Erich Zimmermann resurrected—but backed by a much richer empirical record within a wider framework. It was Zimmermann who had written decades earlier, “Freedom and wisdom, the fruits of knowledge, are the fountainhead of resources.” A science of expansionism, and the integration of “depletable resources” in the corpus of general economics, was at hand.

The Ultimate Resource, condensing and building upon Simon’s 1977 book, The Economics of Population Growth, offered a new way to view the world. Science historian Thomas Kuhn, two decades before, had explained the whirlwind that Simon now found himself in. In Kuhnian terms, Simon’s time-series data revealed a gaping anomaly in an entrenched neo-Malthusian paradigm. The process of normal science had now to give way to extraordinary science, a scientific revolution whereby a new gestalt came forth. Not surprisingly, the establishment, viewing the world in a preformed and relatively inflexible box, was intolerant of the new theory.

Paradigm shifts, Kuhn explained, overturn the established order. Emotions run high. The process begins with scientists … behav[ing] differently and continues with pronounced professional insecurity where years and perhaps lifetimes of work and writing are put at risk. If the paradigm is powerful and useful, with open questions answered, it prevails until only a few elderly hold-outs remain.

Simon’s shift of vision was not verifiable as in the laboratory sciences, where experimentation under controlled conditions can objectively settle matters. While taking into account physical laws, social science issues such as the costs and benefits of population growth offered plenty of wiggle room for scientists to interpret the data differently or hold out for new data. Julian Simon would practically have to go it alone until economists—a few, more, then many—joined him against an entrenched core of largely environmental scientists wed to Malthusian notions.

Is there a paradigm crisis with exaggerated climate science? Is this why, in Kuhnian terms, so many–far too many–scientists are behaving strangely and badly?

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. This framework produces abundant energy by unleashing human ingenuity and problem-solving entrepreneurship, which Simon called the ultimate resource. The problem of scarcity, he explained, comes not from too many people or too few resources but from a “lack of political and economic freedom.”[4]

Doomsayers notwithstanding, our known resources of hydrocarbon energy are actually expanding. The historical record indicates that, despite ever-growing consumption, we have found new deposits of oil, gas, and coal as fast as or faster than we have consumed them. Thus, the total of the globe’s speculative resources, probable resources, and proved reserves has not depleting but just the opposite. According to current estimates, we have consumed only 1.5% of our physical hydrocarbon base.[5]In physical terms, then, the hydrocarbon era is still young. And this is good news indeed, because of the limited ability of dilute, intermittent energies such as wind and solar to power the industrial age.

Energy Statism

Unfortunately, free-market energy is not the only path, and its bright future not the only possible outcome. There is also the path of energy statism and the dark future it would bring.

Energy statism is both international and domestic. Internationally, as we know all too well, oil and gas resources and infrastructure are commonly government owned and operated, contributing to inefficiency and underutilization—as well as to political turmoil. This international statism is responsible for much of the price volatility experienced in energy markets. There is little America can do directly to neuter or end foreign energy politics except to lead by example with a domestic free market. Competition and capitalism are powerful forces.

But we can help ourselves by not making matters worse, as we did with the price and allocation controls that put Americans in the gasoline lines during the 1970s. Such regulation is thankfully absent today, yet do we have thousands of small edicts that make energy more expensive than it would be otherwise. Wealthy consumers can absorb such artificial scarcity, but poorer consumers must either cut back on their energy use or have less money to spend elsewhere. Thus energy taxes, whether explicitly enacted or created through regulation, are regressive.

Today, energy statism is driven largely by the overblown issue of climate change. In the name of a supposed need to “stabilize the climate,” energy planners at all government levels are restricting energy usage via mandates or tax policy. On the supply side, government promotes uneconomic “green” energy that is more expensive to both produce and transport and is less reliable than the energies that consumers would voluntarily choose. Meanwhile, federal laws lock up the large quantities of oil and gas on government land, off the east and west coasts, and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Energy politicization will reach disastrous proportions if the U.S. Senate follows the House in voting for H.R. 2454, better known as the Waxman-Markey climate bill. This 1,428-page bill is an energy road to serfdom for America, and that is why it has become a rallying cry for the free-market community. Americans must stop the growth of politicized energy and move in the opposite direction of free-market energy. Nothing less than our industrial way of life is at stake.

[2] Simon, Julian. Population Matters. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1990, p. xi.

[3] Simon, Julian. A Life against the Grain. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002, pp. 237–243.

[4] Simon, Julian. The Ultimate Resource 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 11.

[5] See Robert Bradley, “Are We Running Out of Oil? Functional Theory Says No,” PERC Reports (September 2004) at http://www.perc.org/articles/article452.php.