Yes or no?
If not, why not?
Why don't all the extra children born into poverty provide an economic boon to the nations with absurdly high birth rates?
How do you reconcile your out of the mainstream view with this reality?
Global warming was a mainstream view until data demolished it.
Where is the data undercutting the widely reported and almost universally acknowledged EXPANDING human population?
Even you admit we may well climb to NINE BILLION PEOPLE!
That is both much more likely and a graver threat to human well being than your mythical decline in human population, based upon an innumerate assumption that the slightly declining birth rates of 7 billion people will lead to demographic collapse, instead of rapidly approaching 8 billion people and climbing.
MORE PEOPLE, GREATER WEALTH,
MORE RESOURCES, HEALTHIER ENVIRONMENT
Julian L. Simon
INTRODUCTION
This is the economic history of humanity in a nutshell:
From 2 million or 200,000 or 20,000 or 2,000 years ago until the
18th Century there was slow growth in population, almost no
increase in health or decrease in mortality, slow growth in the
availability of natural resources (but not increased scarcity),
increase in wealth for a few, and mixed effects on the
environment. Since then there has been rapid growth in
population due to spectacular decreases in the death rate, rapid
growth in resources, widespread increases in wealth, and an
unprecedently clean and beautiful living environment in many
parts of the world along with a degraded environment in the poor
and socialist parts of the world.
That is, more people and more wealth has correlated with
more (rather than less) resources and a cleaner environment -
just the opposite of what Malthusian theory leads one to believe.
The task before us is to make sense of these mind-boggling happy
trends.
The current gloom-and-doom about a "crisis" of our
environment is all wrong on the scientific facts. Even the U. S.
Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that U.S. air and
our water have been getting cleaner rather than dirtier in the
past few decades. Every agricultural economist knows that the
world's population has been eating ever-better since World War
II. Every resource economist knows that all natural resources
have been getting more available rather than more scarce, as
shown by their falling prices over the decades and centuries.
And every demographer knows that the death rate has been falling
all over the world - life expectancy almost tripling in the rich
countries in the past two centuries, and almost doubling in the
poor countries in just the past four decades.
The picture also is now clear that population growth does
not hinder economic development. In the 1980s there was a
complete reversal in the consensus of thinking of population
economists about the effects of more people. In 1986, the
National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences
completely overturned its "official" view away from the earlier
worried view expressed in 1971. It noted the absence of any
statistical evidence of a negative connection between population
increase and economic growth. And it said that "The scarcity of
exhaustible resources is at most a minor restraint on economic
growth".
This U-turn by the scientific consensus of experts on
the subject has gone unacknowledged by the press, the anti-
natalist environmental organizations, and the agencies that
foster population control abroad.
Here is my central assertion: Almost every economic and
social change or trend points in a positive direction, as
long as we view the matter over a reasonably long period of
time.
For proper understanding of the important aspects of an
economy we should look at the long-run trends. But the short-run
comparisons - between the sexes, age groups, races, political
groups, which are usually purely relative - make more news. To
repeat, just about every important long-run measure of human
welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries, in the
United States as well as in the rest of the world. And there is
no persuasive reason to believe that these trends will not
continue indefinitely.
Would I bet on it? For sure. I'll bet a week's or month's
pay - anything I win goes to pay for more research - that just
about any trend pertaining to material human welfare will improve
rather than get worse. You pick the comparison and the year.
THE FACTS
Let's quickly review a few data on how human life has been
doing, beginning with the all-important issue, life itself.
The Conquest of Too-early Death
The most important and amazing demographic fact -- the
greatest human achievement in history, in my view - - is the
decrease in the world's death rate. Figure 1 portrays the
history human life expectancy at birth. It took thousands of
years to increase life expectancy at birth from just over 20
years to the high '20's about 1750. Then about 1750 life
expectancy in the richest countries suddenly took off and tripled
in about two centuries. In just the past two centuries, the
length of life you could expect for your baby or yourself in the
advanced countries jumped from less than 30 years to perhaps 75
years. What greater event has humanity witnessed than this
conquest of premature death in the rich countries? It is this
decrease in the death rate that is the cause of there being a
larger world population nowadays than in former times.
Figure 1
Then starting well after World War II, the length of life
you could expect in the poor countries has leaped upwards by
perhaps fifteen or even twenty years since the l950s, caused by
advances in agriculture, sanitation, and medicine. (See Figure
2)
Figure 2
Let's put it differently. In the 19th century the planet
Earth could sustain only one billion people. Ten thousand years
ago, only 4 million could keep themselves alive. Now, 5 billion
people are living longer and more healthily than ever before, on
average. The increase in the world's population represents our
victory over death.
Here arises a crucial issue of interpretation: One would
expect lovers of humanity to jump with joy at this triumph of
human mind and organization over the raw killing forces of
nature. Instead, many lament that there are so many people alive
to enjoy the gift of life. Even regret death rate. And it is
this worry that leads them to approve the Indonesian, Chinese and
other inhumane programs of coercion and denial of personal
liberty in one of the most precious choices a family can make --
the number of children that it wishes to bear and raise.
The Decreasing Scarcity of Natural Resources
Throughout history, the supply of natural resources always
has worried people. Yet the data clearly show that natural
resource scarcity -- as measured by the economically-meaningful
indicator of cost or price -- has been decreasing rather than
increasing in the long run for all raw materials, with only
temporary exceptions from time to time. That is, availability
has been increasing. Consider copper, which is representative
of all the metals. In Figure 3 we see the price relative to
wages since 1801. The cost of a ton is only about a tenth now
of what it was two hundred years ago.
Figure 3
This trend of falling prices of copper has been going on for
a very long time. In the l8th century B.C.E. in Babylonia under
Hammurabi -- almost 4000 years ago -- the price of copper was
about a thousand times its price in the U.S. now relative to
wages. At the time of the Roman Empire the price was about a
hundred times the present price.
In Figure 4 we see the price of copper relative to the
consumer price index. Everything that we buy - pens, shirts,
tires - has been getting cheaper over the years because we know
how to make them cheaper, especially during the past 200 years.
Even so, the extraordinary fact is that natural resources have
been getting cheaper even faster than consumer goods.
Figure 4
So by any measure, natural resources have getting more
available rather than more scarce.
Regarding oil, the shocking price rises during the 1970s and
1980s were not caused by growing scarcity in the world supply.
And indeed, the price of petroleum in inflation-adjusted dollars
has returned to levels about where they were before the
politically-induced increases, and the price of of gasoline is
about at the historic low and still falling. Concerning energy
in general, there is no reason to believe that the supply of
energy is finite, or that the price of energy will not continue
its long-run decrease forever. I realize that it sounds weird to
say that the supply of energy is not finite or limited; for the
full argument, please see my 1981 book (revised edition
forthcoming) (Science is only valuable when it arrives at
knowledge different than common sense.)
Food is an especially important resource. The evidence is
particularly strong for food that we are on a benign trend
despite rising population. The long-run price of food relative
to wages is now only perhaps a tenth as much as it was in 1800 in
the U. S. Even relative to consumer products the price of grain
is down, due to increased productivity, just as with all other
primary products.
Famine deaths due to insufficient food supply have decreased
even in absolute terms, let alone relative to population, in the
past century, a matter which pertains particularly to the poor
countries. Per-person food consumption is up over the last 30
years. And there are no data showing that the bottom of the
income scale is faring worse, or even has failed to share in the
general improvement, as the average has improved.
Africa's food production per person is down, but by 1994
almost no one any longer claims that Africa's suffering
results from a shortage of land or water or sun. The cause of
hunger in Africa is a combination of civil wars and
collectivization of agriculture, which periodic droughts have
made more murderous.
Consider agricultural land as an example of all natural
resources. Though many people consider land to be a special kind
of resource, it is subject to the same processes of human crea-
tion as other natural resources. The most important fact about
agricultural land is that less and less of it is needed as the
decades pass. This idea is utterly counter-intuitive. It seems
entirely obvious that a growing world population would need
larger amounts of farmland. But the title of a remarkable pres-
cient article in 1951 by Theodore Schultz tells the story: "The
Declining Economic Importance of Land".
The increase in actual and potential productivity per unit
of land have grown much faster than population, and there is
sound reason to expect this trend to continue. Therefore, there
is less and less reason to worry about the supply of land.
Though the stock of usable land seems fixed at any moment, it is
constantly being increased - at a rapid rate in many cases - by
the clearing of new land or reclamation of wasteland. Land also
is constantly being enhanced by increasing the number of crops
grown per year on each unit of land and by increasing the yield
per crop with better farming methods and with chemical
fertilizer. Last but not least, land is created anew where there
was no land.
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. Yes,
there are more people on earth now than ever before. But if we
measure the scarcity of people the same way that we measure the
scarcity of other economic goods -- by how much we must pay to
obtain their services -- we see that wages and salaries have been
going up all over the world, in poor countries as well as in rich
countries. The amount that you must pay to obtain the services
of a barber or a cook has risen in India, just as the price of a
barber or cook -- or economist -- has risen in the United States
over the decades. This increase in the price of peoples'
services is a clear indication that people are becoming more
scarce even though there are more of us.
About pollution now: Surveys show that the public believes
that our air and water have been getting more polluted in recent
years. The evidence with respect to air indicates that
pollutants have been declining, especially the main pollutant,
particulates. (See Figure 5). With respect to water, the
proportion of monitoring sites in the U.S. with water of good
drinkability has increased since the data began in l96l. (Figure
6).
Figures 5 and 6
Every forecast of the doomsayers has turned out flat wrong.
Metals, foods, and other natural resources have become more
available rather than more scarce throughout the centuries. The
famous Famine 1975 forecast by the Paddock brothers -- that we
would see millions of famine deaths in the U.S. on television in
the 1970s -- was followed instead by gluts in agricultural
markets. Paul Ehrlich's primal scream about "What will we do
when the [gasoline] pumps run dry?" was followed by gasoline
cheaper than since the 1930's. The Great Lakes are not dead;
instead they offer better sport fishing than ever. The main
pollutants, especially the particulates which have killed people
for years, have lessened in our cities. (Socialist countries are
a different and tragic environmental story, however!)
The wrong forecasts of shortages of copper and other metals
have not been harmless, however. They have helped cause
economic disasters for mining companies and for the poor
countries which depend upon mining, by misleading them with
unsound expectations of increased prices. Airplane design, CAFE
standards. Misdirected valuable resources. But nothing has
reduced the doomsayers' credibility with the press or their
command over the funding resources of the federal government.
Let's dramatize these sets of changes with a single
anecdote. The trend toward a better life can be seen in most of
our own families if we look. For example, I have mild asthma.
Recently I slept in a home where there was a dog, and in the
middle of the night I woke with a bad cough and shortness of
breath. When I realized that it was caused by the dog dander, I
took out my twelve dollar pocket inhaler, good for 3000 puffs,
and took one puff. Within ten minutes my lungs were clear. A
small miracle. Forty years ago I would have been sleepless and
miserable all night, and I would have had to give up the squash-
playing that I love so much because exercise causes my worst
asthma in the absence of an inhaler....Or diabetes. If your
child had diabetes a hundred years ago, you had to watch
helplessly as the child went blind and died early. Now
injections, or even pills, can give the child almost as long and
healthy a life as other children....Or glasses. Centuries ago
you had to give up reading when your eyes got dim as you got to
be 40 or 50. Now you can buy magnifying glasses at the drugstore
for nine dollars. And you can even wear contact lenses for eye
problems and keep your vanity intact. Is there not some
condition in your family that in earlier times would have been a
lingering misery or a tragedy, that nowadays our increasing
knowledge has rendered easily bearable?
With respect to population growth: A dozen competent
statistical studies, starting in 1967 with an analysis by Nobel
prizewinner Simon Kuznets, agree that there is no negative
statistical relationship between economic growth and population
growth. There is strong reason to believe that more people have
a positive effect in the long run.
Population growth does not lower the standard of living -
all the evidence agrees. And the evidence supports the view
that population growth raises it in the long run.
Incidentally, it was those statistical studies that
converted me in about 1968 from working in favor of population
control to the point of view that I hold today. I certainly did
not come to my current view for any political or religious or
ideological reason.
The basic method is to gather data on each country's rate
of population growth and its rate of economic growth, and then
to examine whether -- looking at all the data in the sample
together -- the countries with high population growth rates have
economic growth rates lower than average, and countries with low
population growth rates have economic growth rates higher than
average. All the studies agree in concluding that this is not
so; there is no correlation between economic growth and
population growth in the intermediate run.
Of course one can adduce cases of countries that seemingly
are exceptions to the pattern. It is the genius of statistical
inference, however, to enable us to draw valid generalizations
from samples that contain such wide variations in behavior. The
exceptions can be useful in alerting us to possible avenues for
further analysis, but as long as they are only exceptions, they
do not prove that the generalization is not meaningful or useful.
The research-wise person may wonder whether population
density is a more meaningful variable than population growth.
And indeed, such studies have been done. And again, the
statistical evidence directly contradicts the common-sense
conventional wisdom. If you make a chart with population density
on the horizontal axis and either the income level or the rate of
change of income on the vertical axis, you will see that higher
density is associated with better rather than poorer economic
results.
Check for yourself: Fly over Hong Kong -- just a few
decades ago a place seemingly without prospects because of
insoluble resource problems -- and you will marvel at the
astounding collection of modern high-rise apartments and office
buildings. Take a ride on its excellent smooth-flowing highways
for an hour or two, and you will realize that a very dense
concentration of human beings does not prevent comfortable
existence and exciting economic expansion -- as long as the
economic system gives individuals the freedom to exercise their
talents and to take advantage of opportunities. And the
experience of Singapore demonstrates that Hong Kong is not
unique. Two such examples do not prove the case, of course. But
these dramatic illustrations are backed by the evidence from the
aggregate sample of countries, and hence do not mislead us.
(Hong Kong is a special thrill for me because I first saw it
in 1955 when I went ashore from a U. S. Navy destroyer. At the
time I felt great pity for the thousands who slept every night on
the sidewalks or on small boats. It then seemed clear to me, as
it must have to almost every observer, that it would be
impossible for Hong Kong to surmount its problems -- huge masses
of impoverished people without jobs, total lack of exploitable
natural resources, more refugees pouring across the border each
day. But upon returning in 1983, I saw bustling crowds of
healthy, vital people full of hope and energy. No cause for pity
now.
The most important benefit of population size and growth is
the increase it brings to the stock of useful knowledge. Minds
matter economically as much as, or more than, hands or mouths.
Progress is limited largely by the availability of trained
workers. The more people who enter our population by birth or
immigration, the faster will be the rate of progress of our
material and cultural civilization.
Here we need a qualification that tends to get overlooked:
I do not say that all is well everywhere, and I do not predict
that all will be rosy in the future. Children are hungry and
sick; people live out lives of physical or intellectual poverty,
and lack of opportunity; war or some new pollution may finish us
off. What I am saying is that for most relevant economic matters
I have checked, the aggregate trends are improving rather than
deteriorating.
Also, I don't say that a better future happens automatically
or without effort. It will happen because women and men will
struggle with problems with muscle and mind, and will probably
overcome, as people have overcome in the past -- if the social
and economic system gives them opportunity to do so.
THE EXPLANATION OF THESE AMAZING TRENDS
Now we need some theory to explain how it can be that
economic welfare grows along with population, rather than
humanity being reduced to misery and poverty as population
grows.
The Malthusian theory of increasing scarcity, based on
supposedly-fixed resources - the theory that the doomsayers rely
upon - runs exactly contrary to the data over the long sweep of
history. Therefore it makes sense to prefer another theory.
The theory that fits the facts very well is this: More
people, and increased income, cause problems in the short run.
Short-run scarcity raises prices. This presents opportunity, and
prompts the search for solutions. In a free society, solutions
are eventually found. And in the long run the new developments
leave us better off than if the problems had not arisen.
To put it differently, in the short-run, more consumers mean
less of the fixed available stock of goods to be divided among
more people. And more workers laboring with the same fixed
current stock of capital mean that there will be less output per
worker. The latter effect, known as "the law of diminishing
returns," is the essence of Malthus's theory as he first set it
out.
But if the resources with which people work are not fixed
over the period being analyzed, then the Malthusian logic of
diminishing returns does not apply. And the plain fact is that,
given some time to adjust to shortages, the resource base does
not remain fixed. People create more resources of all kinds.
When we take a long-run view, the picture is different, and
considerably more complex, than the simple short-run view of more
people implying lower average income. In the very long run, more
people almost surely imply more available resources and a higher
income for everyone.
I suggest you test this idea against your own knowledge: Do
you think that our standard of living would be as high as it is
now if the population had never grown from about four million
human beings perhaps ten thousand years ago? I don't think we'd
now have electric light or gas heat or autos or penicillin or
travel to the moon or our present life expectancy of over seventy
years at birth in rich countries, in comparison to the life
expectancy of 20 to 25 years at birth in earlier eras, if
population had not grown to its present numbers.
Consider this example of the process by which people wind
up with increasing availability rather than decreasing
availability of resources. England was full of alarm in the
l600's at an impending shortage of energy due to the defor-
estation of the country for firewood. People feared a scarcity
of fuel for both heating and for the iron industry. This
impending scarcity led to the development of coal.
Then in the mid-l800's the English came to worry about an
impending coal crisis. The great English economist, Jevons,
calculated that a shortage of coal would bring England's industry
to a standstill by l900; he carefully assessed that oil could
never make a decisive difference. Triggered by the impending
scarcity of coal (and of whale oil, whose story comes next)
ingenious profit-minded people developed oil into a more
desirable fuel than coal ever was. And in l990 we find England
exporting both coal and oil.
Another element in the story: Because of increased demand
due to population growth and increased income, the price of whale
oil for lamps jumped in the l840's, and the U.S. Civil War pushed
it even higher, leading to a whale oil "crisis." This provided
incentive for enterprising people to discover and produce
substitutes. First came oil from rapeseed, olives, linseed, and
camphene oil from pine trees. Then inventors learned how to get
coal oil from coal. Other ingenious persons produced kerosene
from the rock oil that seeped to the surface, a product so
desirable that its price then rose from $.75 a gallon to $2.00.
This high price stimulated enterprisers to focus on the supply of
oil, and finally Edwin L. Drake brought in his famous well in
Titusville, Pennsylvania. Learning how to refine the oil took a
while. But in a few years there were hundreds of small refiners
in the U.S., and soon the bottom fell out of the whale oil
market, the price falling from $2.50 or more at its peak around
l866 to well below a dollar. And in 1993 we see Great Britain
exporting both coal and oil.
Here we should note that it was not the English government
that developed coal or oil, because governments are not effective
developers of new technology. Rather, it was individual
entrepreneurs who sensed the need, saw opportunity, used all
kinds of available information and ideas, made lots of false
starts which were very costly to many of those individuals but
not to others, and eventually arrived at coal as a viable fuel --
because there were enough independent individuals investigating
the matter for at least some of them to arrive at sound ideas and
methods. And this happened in the context of a competitive
enterprise system that worked to produce what was needed by the
public. And the entire process of impending shortage and new
solution left us better off than if the shortage problem had
never arisen.
THE ROLE OF ECONOMIC FREEDOM
Here we must address another crucial element in the
economics of resources and population -- the extent to which the
political-social-economic system provides personal freedom from
government coercion. Skilled persons require an appropriate
social and economic framework that provides incentives for
working hard and taking risks, enabling their talents to flower
and come to fruition. The key elements of such a framework are
economic liberty, respect for property, and fair and sensible
rules of the market that are enforced equally for all.
The world's problem is not too many people, but lack of
political and economic freedom. Powerful evidence comes from an
extraordinary natural experiment that occurred starting in the
1940s with three pairs of countries that have the same culture
and history, and had much the same standard of living when they
split apart after World War II -- East and West Germany, North
and South Korea, Taiwan and China. In each case the centrally
planned communist country began with less population "pressure",
as measured by density per square kilometer, than did the market-
directed economy. And the communist and non-communist countries
also started with much the same birth rates.
The market-directed economies have performed much better
economically than the centrally-planned economies. The economic-
political system clearly was the dominant force in the results of
the three comparisons. This powerful explanation of economic
development cuts the ground from under population growth as a
likely explanation of the speed of nations' economic development.
THE ASTOUNDING SHIFT IN THE SCHOLARLY CONSENSUS
So far we've been discussing the factual evidence. But in
1994 there is an important new element not present twenty years
ago. The scientific community of scholars who study population
economics now agrees with almost all of what is written ahove.
The statements made above do not represent a single lone voice,
but rather the current scientific consensus.
The conclusions offered earlier about agriculture and
resources and demographic trends have always represented the
consensus of economists in those fields. And now the consensus
of population economists also is now not far from what is written
here.
In 1986, the U. S. National Research Council and the U. S.
National Academy of Sciences published a book on population
growth and economic development prepared by a prestigious
scholarly group. This "official" report reversed almost
completely the frightening conclusions of the previous 1971 NAS
report. "Population growth at most a minor factor..." "The
scarcity of exhaustible resources is at most a minor constraint
on economic growth", it now says. It found benefits of
additional people as well as costs .
A host of review articles by distinguished economic
demographers in the past decade have confirmed that this
"revisionist" view is indeed consistent with the scientific
evidence, though not all the writers would go as far as I do in
pointing out the positive long-run effects of population growth.
The consensus is more toward a "neutral" judgment. But this is a
huge change from the earlier judgment that population growth is
economically detrimental.
By 1994, anyone who confidently asserts that population
growth damages the economy must turn a blind eye to the scientif-
ic evidence.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
In the short run, all resources are limited. An example of
such a finite resource is the amount of space allotted to me.
The longer run, however, is a different story. The standard of
living has risen along with the size of the world's population
since the beginning of recorded time. There is no convincing
economic reason why these trends toward a better life should not
continue indefinitely.
The key theoretical idea is this: The growth of population
and of income create actual and expected shortages, and hence
lead to price run-ups. A price increase represents an
opportunity that attracts profit-minded entrepreneurs to seek new
ways to satisfy the shortages. Some fail, at cost to themselves.
A few succeed, and the final result is that we end up better off
than if the original shortage problems had never arisen. That
is, we need our problems though this does not imply that we
should purposely create additional problems for ourselves.
I hope that you will now agree that the long-run outlook is
for a more abundant material life rather than for increased
scarcity, in the United States and in the world as a whole. Of
course such progress does not come about automatically. And my
message certainly is not one of complacency. In this I agree with
the doomsayers - that our world needs the best efforts of all
humanity to improve our lot. I part company with them in that
they expect us to come to a bad end despite the efforts we make,
whereas I expect a continuation of humanity's history of
successful efforts. And I believe that their message is self-
fulfilling, because if you expect your efforts to fail because of
inexorable natural limits, then you are likely to feel resigned;
and therefore to literally resign. But if you recognize the
possibility - in fact the probability - of success, you can tap
large reservoirs of energy and enthusiasm.
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, and the brakes are a)
our lack of imagination, and b) 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
benefit, and so inevitably they will benefit not only themselves
but the rest of us as well.
page 1 /article3 popenvi2/February 28, 1994
REFERENCES
Schultz, Theodore W., "The Declining Economic Importance of
Land," Economic Journal, LXI, December, 1951, pp. 725-740.
National Research Council, Committee on Population, and Working
Group on Population Growth and Economic Development, Population
Growth and Economic Development: Policy Questions (Washington, D.C.:
National Academy Press, 1986)
page 2 /article3 popenvi2/February 28, 1994
Where is the data undercutting the widely reported and almost universally acknowledged EXPANDING human population?
Since you obviously are unwilling or unable to read the books and articles I've linked or posted on this thread, at least take a few minutes and watch the Demographic Winter documentary.
You can watch it for free on YouTube:
Demographic Winter - the decline of the human family (Full Movie)