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Simon-Ehrlich wager

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Main article: Simon-Ehrlich wager

Julian Lincoln Simon, a Cornucopian economist has argued that overpopulation is not a problem in itself, and that humanity will adapt to changing conditions. Simon argued that in the long run, human creativity would constantly improve living standards, and that the Earth's resources were, in effect, infinite.[27] Ehrlich called Simon the leader of a "space-age cargo cult" of economists convinced that new resources would miraculously appear and re-asserted the idea that population growth was outstripping the earth's supplies of food, fresh water and minerals.[6] This exchange led to the Simon-Ehrlich wager, a bet about the trend of prices for certain metals that he made in 1980 with, and lost to, Julian Simon.[6] Economists later showed that Ehrlich would have won in the majority of 10-year-periods over the last century.[28][29]

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MUCH TALK 6 26

I took out the quote from Peter Thiel discussing the years after the wager. It wasn't even presented as a quote, but stated in this article as a fact. I do not believe Peter Thiel by himself can be considered a reliable source for claims about economics in the 1990s. It isn't even his specific field of formal education, and I don't think he was even investing in the 90s. Regardless, I don't see how one could consider him saying something about the economy in the 90s as sufficient to state it as a fact in this article. BenjaminMan (talk) 03:43, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

I think Paul Ehrlich was also a member of the 'Club of Rome', which wrote "Limits to Growth", also a famously wrong set of predictions.

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This article is now blatantly POV in favor of Simon and against Ehrlich. It needs to be rewritten for objectivity and balance. Just the facts--stop being cheerleaders for your "cause" and start being Wiki-scholars! 173.16.125.178 (talk) 23:21, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Two useful papers on the subject :

The problem is that Ehrlich was utterly wrong about nearly everything. In the 70s it was still, barely, possible to believe that we were near the limits. Now, when we can look at the Green Revolution in the light of hindsight and can begin to understand the potential of biotech for crops, there is no reason whatsoever to think so beyond mistaking the limits of our current economy (essentially dependent on century-old fossil-fuel technology) for some kind of theoretical limit. 128.194.250.117 (talk) 00:06, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

BUT MINOR DISRPUTION STRAIT HORMUZ ALREADY CAUSING HUNGER?! 6 26

I agree that the article seems heavily biased in favor of Simon. I've begun revising some of the more flagrant examples of this. It strikes me that the section title "Analysis of why Ehrlich lost" places undue emphasis on Ehrlich's status as "loser." Couldn't it be changed to just "Analysis"? --74.96.103.19 (talk) 07:47, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

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Prof. Julian Lincoln Simon (February 12, 1932–February 8, 1998) was professor of business administration at the University of Maryland, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, an antienvironmentalist Policy Advisor at the Chemical Industry's American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). He was also a member of the Advisory Board of the American Immigration Institute (a program of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution - AdTI). Together with Ather Akbari, he wrote one report for the 'American Immigration Institute':

A 26 page document that can/could be ordered at AdTI. [2]

Documents & Timline

1953: B.A., Harvard, experimental psychology, 1953 Approximately four graduate courses in experimental psychology, Harvard, 1953

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1959: M.B.A., University of Chicago, 1959

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1961: Ph.D., University of Chicago, business economics, 1961

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1985 Oct-Nov: He was a keynote speaker at Elizabeth Whelan's American Council of Science and Health seminar "Environmental Risks: Priorities for the Eighties" (The ACSH was an American Chemical Council lobby). Simon was then the Professor of Business and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland, he said:

"Listening to environmentalists, you'd think our air is unbreathable, our water is undrinkable and that this country faces a crisis of major proportion. It's simply not so."[3]

Two seminars were held in Washington DC (Oct 16) and New York (Nov 13) both funded by the John M Olin Foundation.

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Criticism

Related Links

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desmog:

INDUR GOKLANY:  Ph. D., Electrical Engineering, Michigan State University.  Senior advisor at the U.S. Interior Department’s Office of Policy Analysis. Worked with federal and state governments, think tanks, and the private sector for over 35 years. WasJulian Simon Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in 2000, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (2002-2003), and the winner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Julian Simon Prize and Award (2007).

==

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager

The Simon–Ehrlich wager was a 1980 scientific wager between business professor Julian L. Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich, betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. The widely-followed contest originated in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000" Simon offered to take that bet, or, more realistically, "to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run."

Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. The bet was formalized on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990, as the payoff date. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period.[1]

Background

In 1968, Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which argued that mankind was facing a demographic catastrophe with the rate of population growth quickly outstripping growth in the supply of food and resources. Simon was highly skeptical of such claims, so proposed a wager, telling Ehrlich to select any raw material he wanted and select "any date more than a year away," and Simon would bet that the commodity's price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.

Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price increases: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference. If the prices fell, Ehrlich et al. would pay Simon.

Between 1980 and 1990, the world's population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by September 1990, the price of each of Ehrlich's selected metals had fallen. Chromium, which had sold for $3.90 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.70 in 1990. Tin, which was $8.72 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.88 a decade later.[2]

As a result, in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07 to settle the wager in Simon's favor.

Analysis

Julian Simon won because the price of three of the five metals went down in nominal terms and all five of the metals fell in price in inflation-adjusted terms, with both tin and tungsten falling by more than half.[3][4] In his book Betrayal of Science and Reason, Ehrlich wrote that Simon "[asserted] that humanity would never run out of anything". Ehrlich added that he and fellow scientists viewed renewable resources as more important indicators of the state of planet Earth, but that he decided to go along with the bet anyway.[3] Afterward, Simon offered to raise the wager to $20,000 and to use any resources at any time that Ehrlich preferred. Ehrlich countered with a challenge to bet that temperatures would increase in the future.[3] The two were unable to reach an agreement on the terms of a second wager before Simon died.

Ehrlich could have won if the bet had been for a different ten-year period.[5][6][7] Ehrlich wrote that the five metals in question had increased in price between the years 1950 and 1975.[3] Asset manager Jeremy Grantham wrote that if the Simon–Ehrlich wager had been for a longer period (from 1980 to 2011), then Simon would have lost on four of the five metals. He also noted that if the wager had been expanded to "all of the most important commodities," instead of just five metals, over that longer period of 1980 to 2011, then Simon would have lost "by a lot." ^[7]

Economist Mark J. Perry noted that for an even longer period of time, from 1934 to 2013, the inflation-adjusted price of the Dow Jones-AIG Commodities Index showed "an overall significant downward trend" and concluded that Simon was "more right than lucky".[8] Economist Tim Worstall wrote that "The end result of all of this is that yes, it is true that Ehrlich could have, would have, won the bet depending upon the starting date. ... But the long term trend for metals at least is downwards."[6]

The proposed second wager

Understanding that Simon wanted to bet again, Ehrlich and climatologist Stephen Schneider counter-offered, challenging Simon to bet on 15 current trends, betting $1000 that each will get worse (as in the previous wager) over a ten-year future period.[3]

The bets that has mostly no economic effect on people would continue to worsen were:

Simon declined Ehrlich and Schneider's offer to bet, and used the following analogy to explain why he did so:[9]

Let me characterize their offer as follows. I predict, and this is for real, that the average performances in the next Olympics will be better than those in the last Olympics. On average, the performances have gotten better, Olympics to Olympics, for a variety of reasons. What Ehrlich and others says [sic] is that they don't want to bet on athletic performances, they want to bet on the conditions of the track, or the weather, or the officials, or any other such indirect measure.

In his 1981 book The Ultimate Resource, Simon noted that not all decreases in resources or increases in unwanted effects correspond to overall decreases in human wellbeing.[10] Hence there can be an "optimal level of pollution" which accepts some increases in certain kinds of pollution in a way that increases overall wellbeing, while acknowledging that any increase in pollution is nevertheless a cost which must be considered in any such calculation (p. 143). Some of the trends listed above are actually predicted by Simon's theory of resource development, and do not in themselves even count as costs (as pollution does). E.g., he pointed out that due to increased efficiency, the amount of cropland required and actually used to grow food for each person has decreased over time and is likely to continue to do so (p. 5). The same might potentially be true of decreased reliance on firewood in developing countries, and per capita use of specific food sources like rice, wheat, and fish, if economic development makes a diverse range of alternative foods available. Some have also proven false, e.g., the amount of ozone in the lower atmosphere has decreased from 1994 to 2004.[11]

Other wagers

In 1996, Simon bet $1000 with David South, professor of the Auburn University School of Forestry, that the inflation-adjusted price of timber would decrease in the following five years. Simon paid out early on the bet in 1997 (before his death in 1998) based on his expectation that prices would remain above 1996 levels (which they did).[12]

In 1999, when The Economist headlined an article entitled, "$5 a barrel oil soon?" and with oil trading in the $12/barrel range, David South offered $1000 to any economist who would bet with him that the price of oil would be greater than $12/barrel in 2010. No economist took him up on the offer. However, in October 2000, Zagros Madjd-Sadjadi, an economist with The University of the West Indies, bet $1000 with David South that the inflation-adjusted price of oil would decrease to an inflation-adjusted price of $25 by 2010 (down from what was then $30/barrel). Madjd-Sadjadi paid South an inflation-adjusted $1,242 in January 2010. The price of oil at the time was $81/barrel.[13]

See also

References

  1. ^ Gorelick, Steven M. (2009). *Oil Panic and the Global Crisis: Predictions and Myths*. Wiley-Blackwell. p. 104. ISBN 978-1405195485.
  2. ^ Regis, Ed (February 1997). "The Doomslayer". Wired.com (Issue 5.02). Archived from the original on 2008-05-16. Retrieved 2008-05-18.
  3. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager#cite_ref-ehrlich-1998_3-1) c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager#cite_ref-ehrlich-1998_3-2) d(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager#cite_ref-ehrlich-1998_3-3) e(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager#cite_ref-ehrlich-1998_3-4) Ehrlich, Paul; Ehrlich, Anne (1998). Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future. pp. 100–104. ISBN 978-1610912501.
  4. ^ [1] Archived July 3, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ Sabin, Paul (September 7, 2013). "Betting on the Apocalypse". Retrieved 24 October 2013.
  6. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager#cite_ref-worstall-2013_6-1) Worstall, Tim (2013-01-13). "But Why Did Julian Simon Win The Paul Ehrlich Bet?". Forbes. Retrieved 24 October 2013.
  7. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager#cite_ref-Grantham_7-1) Grantham, Jeremy (July 2011), "Resource Limitations 2: Separating the Dangerous from the Merely Serious" (PDF), GMO Quarterly Letter, GMO LLC, p. 12, retrieved 2013-06-05
  8. ^ Perry, Mark J. (January 12, 2013). "Julian Simon: Still more right than lucky in 2013". American Enterprise Institute. Retrieved April 28, 2017.
  9. ^ http://jasoncollins.org/2011/05/20/the-simon-ehrlich-bet/
  10. ^ Simon, Julian (August 1981). *The Ultimate Resource* (Hardcover ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 069109389X.
  11. ^ url=https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/ozone-trends
  12. ^ "The Simon South Bet On Pine Sawtimber". Forestry.auburn.edu. 1998-02-08. Archived from the original on 2008-05-10. Retrieved 2009-09-07.
  13. ^ "The Madjd-Sadjadi South Bet On Oil". Forestry.auburn.edu. 2010-01-31. Archived from the original on 2012-06-08. Retrieved 2012-01-29.

Further reading

External links

Categories: 

Julian Lincoln Simon (February 12, 1932 – February 8, 1998)[1] was an American professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute at the time of his death, after previously serving as a longtime economics and business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[2]

Simon wrote many books and articles, mostly on economic subjects. He is best known for his work on population, natural resources, and immigration. His work covers cornucopian views on lasting economic benefits from natural resources and continuous population growth, even despite limited or finite physical resources, empowered by human ingenuity, substitutes, and technological progress.

He is also known for the famous Simon–Ehrlich wager, a bet he made with ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich. Ehrlich bet that the prices for five metals would increase over a decade, while Simon took the opposite stance. Simon won the bet, as the prices for the metals sharply declined during that decade.

Theory

Simon's 1981 book The Ultimate Resource is a criticism of what was then the conventional wisdom on resource scarcity, published within the context of the cultural background created by the best-selling and highly influential book The Population Bomb in 1968 by Paul R. Ehrlich and The Limits to Growth analysis published in 1972. The Ultimate Resource challenged the conventional wisdom on population growth, raw-material scarcity and resource consumption. Simon argues that our notions of increasing resource-scarcity ignore the long-term declines in wage-adjusted raw material prices.

Viewed economically, he argues, increasing wealth and technology make more resources available; although supplies may be limited physically they may be regarded as economically indefinite as old resources are recycled and new alternatives are assumed to be developed by the market. Simon challenged the notion of an impending Malthusian catastrophe—that an increase in population has negative economic consequences; that population is a drain on natural resources; and that we stand at risk of running out of resources through over-consumption.

Simon argues that population is the solution to resource scarcities and environmental problems, since people and markets innovate. His ideas were praised by Nobel Laureate economists Friedrich Hayek[3] and Milton Friedman, the latter in a 1998 foreword to The Ultimate Resource II, but they have also attracted critics such as Paul R. Ehrlich, Albert Allen Bartlett and Herman Daly.

Simon examined different raw materials, especially metals and their prices in historical times. He assumed that besides temporary shortfalls, in the long run prices for raw materials remain at similar levels or even decrease. E.g. aluminium was never as expensive as before 1886 and steel used for medieval armor carried a much higher price tag in current dollars than any modern parallel. A recent discussion of commodity index long-term trends supported his positions.[4]

His 1984 book The Resourceful Earth (co-edited by Herman Kahn), is a similar criticism of the conventional wisdom on population growth and resource consumption and a direct response to the Global 2000 report. For example, it predicted that "There is no compelling reason to believe that world oil prices will rise in the coming decades. In fact, prices may well fall below current levels". Indeed, oil prices trended downward for nearly the next 2 decades, before rising above 1984 levels in about 2003 or 2004. Oil prices have subsequently risen and fallen, and risen again. In 2008, the price of crude oil reached $100 per barrel, a level last attained in the 1860s (inflation adjusted). Later in 2008, the price again sharply fell, to a low of about $40, before rising again to a high around $125. Since mid-2011, prices were slowly trending downward until the middle of 2014, but falling dramatically until the end of 2015 to ca. $30. Since then prices were relatively stable (below $50).[5]

Simon was skeptical, in 1994, of claims that human activity caused global environmental damage, notably in relation to CFCs, ozone depletion and climate change, the latter primarily because of the perceived rapid switch from fears of global cooling and a new ice age (in the mid-1970s) to the later fears of global warming.[6]

Simon also listed numerous claims about alleged environmental damage and health dangers from pollution as "definitely disproved". These included claims about lead pollution & IQ, DDT, PCBs, malathion, Agent Orange, asbestos, and the chemical contamination at Love Canal.[7]He dismissed such concerns as a mere "value judgement."

But also, to a startling degree, the decision about whether the overall effect of a child or migrant is positive or negative depends on the values of whoever is making the judgment – your preference to spend a dollar now rather than to wait for a dollar-plus-something in twenty or thirty years, your preferences for having more or fewer wild animals alive as opposed to more or fewer human beings alive, and so on.[8]

Influence

Simon was one of the founders of free-market environmentalism. An article entitled "The Doomslayer"[9] profiling Julian Simon in Wired magazine inspired Danish Bjørn Lomborg to write the book The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Simon was also the first to suggest that airlines should provide incentives for travelers to give up their seats on overbooked flights, rather than arbitrarily taking random passengers off the plane (a practice known as "bumping").[3] Although the airline industry initially rejected it, his plan was later implemented with resounding success, as recounted by Milton Friedman in the foreword to The Ultimate Resource II. Economist James Heins said in 2009 that the practice had added $100 billion to the United States economy in the last 30 years.[10] Simon gave away his idea to federal de-regulators and never received any personal profit from his solution.[10]

Although not all of Simon's arguments were universally accepted, they contributed to a shift in opinion in the literature on demographic economics from a strongly Malthusian negative view of population growth to a more neutral view.[not ^specific ^enough ^to verify][citation needed] More recent theoretical developments, based on the ideas of the demographic dividend and demographic window, have contributed to another shift,[how?] this time away from the debate viewing population growth as either good or bad.[citation needed]

Simon wrote a memoir, A Life Against the Grain, which was published by his wife after his death.

Wagers with rivals

Paul R. Ehrlich – first wager

FLAG VERIF]

Simon challenged Paul R. Ehrlich to a wager[11] in 1980 over the price of metals a decade later; Simon had been challenging environmental scientists to the bet for some time. Ehrlich, John Harte, and John Holdren selected a basket of five metals that they thought would rise in price with increasing scarcity and depletion. Simon won the bet, with all five metals dropping in price.[11][12]

Supporters of Ehrlich's position suggest that much of this price drop came because of an oil spike driving prices up in 1980 and a recession driving prices down in 1990, pointing out that the price of the basket of metals actually rose from 1950 to 1975. They also suggest that Ehrlich did not consider the prices of these metals to be critical indicators, and that Ehrlich took the bet with great reluctance. On the other hand, Ehrlich selected the metals to be used himself, and at the time of the bet called it an "astonishing offer" that he was accepting "before other greedy people jump in."

The total supply in three of these metals (chromium, copper and nickel) increased during this time. Prices also declined for reasons specific to each of the five:

In all of these cases, better technology allowed for either more efficient use of existing resources, or substitution with a more abundant and less expensive resource, as Simon predicted.

Paul R. Ehrlich – proposed second wager

In 1995, Simon issued a challenge for a second bet. Ehrlich declined, and proposed instead that they bet on a metric for human welfare. Ehrlich offered Simon a set of 15 metrics over 10 years, victor to be determined by scientists chosen by the president of the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. There was no meeting of minds, because Simon felt that too many of the metric's measured attributes of the world were not directly related to human welfare, e.g. the amount of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere.[13] For such indirect, supposedly bad indicators to be considered "bad", they would ultimately have to have some measurable detrimental effect on actual human welfare. Ehrlich refused to leave out measures considered by Simon to be immaterial.

Simon summarized the bet with the following analogy:

Let me characterize their [Ehrlich and Schneider's] offer as follows. I predict, and this is for real, that the average performances in the next Olympics will be better than those in the last Olympics. On average, the performances have gotten better, Olympics to Olympics, for a variety of reasons. What Ehrlich and others say is that they don't want to bet on athletic performances, they want to bet on the conditions of the track, or the weather, or the officials, or any other such indirect measure.[14]

David South

The same year as his second challenge to Ehrlich, Simon also began a wager with David South, professor of the Auburn University School of Forestry. The Simon / South wager[15] concerned timber prices. Consistent with his cornucopian analysis of this issue in The Ultimate Resource, Simon wagered that at the end of a five-year term the consumer price of pine timber would have decreased; South wagered that it would increase. Before five years had elapsed, Simon saw that market and extra-market forces were driving up the price of timber, and he paid Professor South $1,000.[citation needed] Simon died before the agreed-upon date of the end of the bet, by which time timber prices had risen further.

Simon's reasoning for his early exit out of the bet was due to "the far-reaching quantity and price effects of logging restrictions in the Pacific-northwest."[16] He believed this counted as interference from the U.S. government, which rendered the bet worthless according to his economic principles. Simon's bet only considered the possibility of prices being driven up by Alabama's government; he did not believe anything worthwhile was shown when U.S. logging restrictions drove the prices up.

Main statements and criticism

Jared Diamond in his book *Collapse*, Albert Bartlett and Garrett Hardin describe Simon as being too optimistic and some of his assumptions being not in line with natural limitations.

We now have in our hands—really, in our libraries—the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years. (Simon along The State of Humanity: Steadily Improving 1995[17])

Diamond claims that a continued stable growth rate of earth's population would result in extreme over-population long before the suggested time limit. Regarding the attributed population predictions Simon did not specify that he was assuming a fixed growth rate as Diamond, Bartlett and Hardin have done. Simon argued that people do not become poorer as the population expands; increasing numbers produce what they needed to support themselves, and have and will prosper while food prices sink.

There is no reason to believe that at any given moment in the future the available quantity of any natural resource or service at present prices will be much smaller than it is now, or non-existent.

— Simon in The Ultimate Resource, 1981

Diamond believes, and finds absurd, Simon implies it would be possible to produce metals, e.g. copper, from other elements.[18] For Simon, human resource needs are comparably small compared to the wealth of nature. He therefore argued physical limitations play a minor role and shortages of raw materials tend to be local and temporary. The main scarcity pointed out by Simon is the amount of human brain power (i.e. "The Ultimate Resource") which allows for the perpetuation of human activities for practically unlimited time. For example, before copper ore became scarce and prices soared due to global increasing demand for copper wires and cablings, the global data and telecommunication networks have switched to glass fiber backbone networks.

This is my long-run forecast in brief, ... The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.[9]

This and other quotations in Wired are supposed to be the reason for Bjørn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg has stated that he began his research as an attempt to counter what he saw as Simons' anti-ecological arguments but changed his mind after starting to analyze the data.

Legacy

The Institute for the Study of Labor established the annual Julian L. Simon Lecture to honor Simon's work in population economics.[19] The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign held a symposium discussing Simon's work on April 24, 2002.[2] The university also established the Julian Simon Memorial Faculty Scholar Endowment to fund an associate faculty member in the business school.[2] India's Liberty Institute also holds a Julian Simon Memorial Lecture.[20] The Competitive Enterprise Institute gives the Julian Simon Memorial Award annually to an economist in the vein of Simon; the first recipient was Stephen Moore, who had served as a research fellow under Simon in the 1980s.[11]

Personal life

Simon was married to Rita James Simon, who was also a longtime member of the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later became a public affairs professor at American University.[2] Simon suffered for a long time from depression, which allowed him to work only a few productive hours in a day. He also studied psychology of depression and wrote a book[21] on overcoming it. Simon was Jewish.[22] He died of a heart attack at his home in Chevy Chase in 1998 at age 65.[1]

Education

Honors

Works

References

  1. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon#cite_ref-nyt19980212_1-1) Gilpin, Kenneth N. (12 February 2019). "Julian Simon, 65, Optimistic Economist, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 October 2019.
  2. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon#cite_ref-simon_symposium_2-1) c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon#cite_ref-simon_symposium_2-2) d(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon#cite_ref-simon_symposium_2-3) "Brief Notes". Inside Illinois. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Archived from the original on 2010-08-10. Retrieved 2009-09-04.
  3. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon#cite_ref-business.uiuc_3-1) Neal, Larry. "Julian Simon As Economist" (PDF). Competitive Enterprise Institute. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2004-02-15. Retrieved 2009-09-04.
  4. ^ Perry, Mark J. "Julian Simon: Still more right than lucky in 2013". American Enterprise Institute. Retrieved 24 January 2013.
  5. ^ "Brent Crude Oil Spot Price". Retrieved 2016-07-17.
  6. ^ Simon, Julian L. "Scarcity or Abundance? A Debate on the Environment – Chapter 5 – Atmospheric Issues". juliansimon.com. Archived from the original on 2008-05-12. Retrieved 2008-05-18.
  7. ^ The Ultimate Resource 2, pp. 260–65
  8. ^ Simon, Julian L. "Ultimate Resource: Introduction". juliansimon.com.
  9. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon#cite_ref-doomslayer_9-1) Regis, Ed (February 1997). "The Doomslayer". Wired (Issue 5.02). Archived from the original on 2008-05-16. Retrieved 2008-05-18.
  10. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon#cite_ref-overbooking_10-1) Dennis, Jan. "Airline overbooking policy well known and so, too, should be its creator". On Our Watch. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Retrieved 2009-09-04.
  11. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon#cite_ref-simon_award_11-1) c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon#cite_ref-simon_award_11-2) "CEI To Honor Free Market Economist Julian Simon". Competitive Enterprise Institute. Archived from the original on 2002-09-20. Retrieved 2009-09-04.
  12. ^ Dan Gardner (2010). Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail – and Why We Believe Them Anyway. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. p. 232.
  13. ^ "The Population Explosion by Paul and Anne Ehrlich". DIE OFF. Archived from the original on 2008-05-15. Retrieved 2008-05-18.
  14. ^ "Julian Simon's Bet With Paul Ehrlich". Overpopulation.com. Archived from the original on 2007-07-01. Retrieved 2008-05-13. Which cites: Miele, Frank. "Living without limits: an interview with Julian Simon." Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 1, 1997, p. 57.
  15. ^ "The Simon-South Bet on Pine Sawtimber". School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences. Auburn University. Archived from the original on 2008-05-10. Retrieved 2008-05-18.
  16. ^ "A letter" (PDF). School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences. Auburn University. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-05-29. Retrieved 2008-05-18.
  17. ^ Simon, Julian L. (September–October 1995). "The State of Humanity: Steadily Improving". Cato Policy Report. Cato Institute. Archived from the original on 2008-05-18. Retrieved 2008-05-18.
  18. ^ Diamond bases his criticism upon the fact that the transmutation of elements on a large scale is not currently possible. In theory, transmutation could allow humans to one day produce copper from other elements, but this would require significant breakthroughs in knowledge and technology in order to overcome the enormous barriers currently preventing this (i.e. the extremely large amounts of energy required to generate extremely small quantities)
  19. ^ "Migration". Institute for the Study of Labor. Archived from the original on 2011-06-16. Retrieved 2009-09-04.
  20. ^ "Julian L. Simon Memorial Lecture 2000". Liberty Institute. Archived from the original on 2006-12-10. Retrieved 2009-09-04.
  21. ^ "Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression". Juliansimon.com. 1999-06-13. Retrieved 2012-05-20.
  22. ^ "Julian Simon". The Economist. The Economist. Retrieved 12 March 2018.

Further reading

External links

Chicago school of economics

Categories: 

==

WIRED WAYBACK ffsimon_pr

The Doomslayer

By Ed Regis

Golden Rice: The Imperiled Birth of a GMO Superfood. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2019. ISBN 978-1-4214-3303-5.

The environment is going to hell, and human life is doomed to only get worse, right? Wrong. Conventional wisdom, meet Julian Simon, the Doomslayer.

This is the litany*: Our resources are running out. The air is bad, the water worse. The planet's species are dying off - more exactly, we're killing them -at the staggering rate of 100,000 peryear, a figure that works out to almost 2,000 species per week, 300 per day, 10 perhour, another dead species every six minutes.We're trashing the planet, washing away the topsoil, paving over our farmlands, systematically deforesting our wildernesses, decimating the biota, and ultimately killing ourselves.

The world is getting progressively poorer, and it's all because of population, or more precisely, overpopulation. There's a finite store of resources on our pale blue dot, spaceship Earth, our small and fragile tiny planet, and we're fast approaching its ultimate carrying capacity. The limits to growth are finally upon us, and we're living on borrowed time. The laws of population growth are inexorable. Unless we act decisively, the final result is written in stone: mass poverty, famine, starvation, and death.

Time is short, and we have to act now.

That's the standard and canonical litany. It's been drilled into our heads so far and so forcefully that to hear it yet once more is ... well, it's almost reassuring. It's comforting, oddly consoling - at least we're face to face with the enemies: consumption, population, mindless growth. And we know the solution: cut back, contract, make do with less. "Live simply so that others may simply live."

There's just one problem with The Litany, just one slight little wee imperfection: every item in that dim and dreary recitation, each and every last claim, is false. Incorrect. At variance with the truth.

Not the way it is, folks.

Thus saith The Doomslayer, one Julian L. Simon, a neither shy nor retiring nor particularly mild-mannered professor of business administration at a middling eastern-seaboard state university. Simon paints a somewhat different picture of the human condition circa 1997.

"Our species is better off in just about every measurable material way," he says. "Just about every important long-run measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials - all of them - have become less scarce rather than more. The air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe. Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy, with every prospect that this trend will continue.

"Fear is rampant about rapid rates of species extinction," he continues, "but the fear has little or no basis. The highest rate of observed extinction, though certainly more have gone extinct unobserved, is one species per year ..."

*(One species per year!)

"... in contrast to the 40,000 per year that some ecologists have been forecasting for the year 2000.

"The scare that farmlands are blowing and washing away is a fraud upon the public. The aggregate data on the condition of farmland and the rate of erosion do not support the concern about soil erosion. The data suggest that the condition of cropland has been improving rather than worsening."

As for global deforestation, "the world is notbeing deforested; it is being reforested in general."

Still, there isone resource that the world does not have enough of, that's actually getting rarer, according to Julian Simon. That resource: people.

"People are becoming more scarce," he says, "even though there are more of us."

Hello?

Simon started off as a card-carrying antigrowth, antipopulation zealot. He'd been won over by the conventional reasoning; he regarded the central argument as absolutely persuasive. And indeed, if we rehearse it now, it sounds like a faultless proof, clear and compelling, even watertight.

The classical case against population growth was expressed in 1798 by Thomas Malthus, the British economist and country parson who wrote in An Essay on the Principle of Population: "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second."

As a point of abstract mathematics, there is no way around the conclusion that a geometric progression, if carried on far enough, will eventually overtake an arithmetic progression, no matter what. If population increases geometrically while "subsistence," or food, increases arithmetically, then sooner or later the population will run out of food. End of story.

Or so it would appear, except for the following embarrassing fact: "Population has never increased geometrically," says Simon. "It increases at all kinds of different rates historically, but however fast it increases, food increases at least as fast, if not faster. In other words, whatever the rate of population growth is, the food supply increases at an even faster rate."

These, he says, are the actual and empirical facts of the matter, information available to any inquirer. Simon first got a taste of those facts while studying the data amassed by the economic demographer Simon Kuznets (winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in economics) and by economist Richard Easterlin, in the mid-1960s. Kuznets had followed population growth trends that went back 100 years and compared them against standard of living, while Easterlin analyzed the same data for selected countries since World War II. The studies showed that while population growth rates varied from country to country and from year to year, there was no general negative correlation with living standards. People did not become poorer as the population expanded; rather, as their numbers multiplied, they produced what they needed to support themselves, and they prospered.

The trends were the same for food supply. Rising population did notmean less food, just the opposite: instead of skyrocketing as predicted by the Malthusian theory, food prices, relative to wages, had declinedhistorically. In the United States, for example, between 1800 and 1980, the price of wheat plummeted while the population grew from 5 million to 226 million. Accord-ing to Malthus, all those people should have been long dead, the country reduced to a handful of fur trappers on the brink of starvation. In fact, there was a booming and flourishing populace, one that was better-fed, taller, healthier, more disease-free, with far less infant mortality and longer life expectancy than ever before in human history. Obesity, not starvation, was the major American food problem in 1980. Those were the facts.

Nor should they have come as any great surprise, once you gave the matter some thought. Plants and animals used for food constitute "populations" just as human beings do, and so they, too, ought to increase not arithmetically, as Malthus claimed, but geometrically. The food supply, in other words, ought to keep pace with human population growth, thereby leaving all of us well-fed, happy, and snug in our beds.

Which, Simon discovered, is exactly what has happened throughout history. So if you look at the facts - as opposed to spinning out theories - you find precisely the reverse of the situation described by Malthus. Just the opposite!

Simon acquired his habit of looking up the facts in early childhood, at the dinner table of the family home in Newark, New Jersey. He'd be in some argument with his father over the benefits of exercise, the price of butter, or the health value of air conditioning, and whether from ignorance, pigheadedness, or general perversity, his father would always take some outlandish, off-the-wall viewpoint, such as: "The price of butter is 8 cents a pound."

Julian: "No, it's not, it's 80 cents a pound. It's in the newspaper, take a look."

Father: "I don't have to look. I knowit's 8 cents a pound."

Julian: "Do you want to bet? I'll betyou it's not 8 cents a pound."

His father would never take the bet, but Julian would go to the library anyway, look things up in books, and come back with a ream of facts and data. His father, however, couldn't care less.

"I clearly didn't like my father," says Simon.

It's an attitude that drives him crazy to this day - people who know in advance what the truth is, who don't need to avail themselves of any "facts." But Simon loves facts and figures, he loves tables, charts, graphs, information arranged in rows and columns. Tabulations, the slopes of curves, diagrams, pie charts, histograms - he's a regular Mr. Data.

Of course, since people don't particularly like to have their cherished beliefs contradicted by heaps of facts served up on a platter, Simon has never been Mr. Popularity. He got fired from jobs in the navy because he hated the customary ass-kissing, sucking-up, and yessir requirements. Nor has he ever been much for schmoozing, glad-handing, or the latter-day manners of get-along, go-along.

"Socially I was always a bit marginal," he admits. "Also, there always lurked inside me some irreverence for authority and orthodoxy."

None of this held him back academically. He got a bachelor's in experimental psychology from Harvard, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and, two years later, in 1961, a PhD in business economics from the same school.

He was not one of those MBAs whose closest contact with the gritty business world was going down to the corner newsstand to purchase a copy of The Wall Street Journal. The year he got his doctorate he started and operated his own business, a mail-order firm that sold quality teas, coffees, and a book on how to make beer at home. The enterprise was successful enough, but not so much as the book he later wrote about it, How to Start and Operate a Mail-Order Business (McGraw-Hill, 1965), still in print and currently in its fifth edition.

He got married and had three kids and wound up, successively, as professor of advertising, of marketing, and of business administration and economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Then in 1966 or so, he had his big idea about how to solve the airline overbooking problem. Anticipating no-shows, airlines routinely oversold their flights. But when more people showed up at the gate than the plane had seats, pandemonium ensued. Well, why not pay people to get off the plane? he wondered. Offer them enough to make it attractive. It would be a voluntary system, and everyone would win.

So in his practical, down-to-earth, this-is-only-reasonable fashion, he submitted his suggestion to the airlines. The idea was laughed at, mocked, and ridiculed as unrealistic and unworkable. An official at Pan American replied: "Of course, we instituted the procedure immediately, after having the instructions translated into 18 languages." Ha ha ha, thank you, and goodbye.

Eleven years later, in 1977, Simon hadn't given up on the scheme. He published it in The Wall Street Journal, in an op-ed piece titled "Wherein the Author Offers a Modest Proposal." And lo and behold, a year after that, when economist Alfred Kahn headed up the Civil Aeronautics Board, Simon's proposal was put into practice. It was a raging success from the start, remains so to this day, and anyone who's ever voluntarily offloaded themselves from a plane for cash or free miles owes a nod of thanks to Julian Simon.

Still, that was a mere flash in the pan, and Simon's overall impact on the world at large was rather less massive than he desired. He was not making a name for himself, not setting the world on fire.

But there were those who were - Paul Ehrlich, for example.

Ehrlich, a Stanford University entomologist who as a youth had seen his best butterfly hunting grounds churned under the real estate developer's plow, wrote the runaway best-seller The Population Bomb. Published in 1968, the book was solidly Malthusian.

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over," it began. "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to 'stretch' the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production and providing for more equitable distribution of whatever food is available. But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control." And so on, The Complete and Authoritative Litany, for the next 200 pages.

This late-breaking Malthusian out-burst, strangely enough, did set the world on fire. The book sold 3 million copies, became the best-selling environmental tract of all time, and got the author on The Tonight Show.

At home in Illinois, Simon watched Ehrlich on the Johnny Carson show, and he went bananas. In fact, more bananas than he'd ever before gone in his life. Simon had by that time decided that the Malthusian stuff was the purest mythology, an invention out of whole cloth, a theory that was entirely controverted by every available empirical fact. And here was Paul Ehrlich on TV spreading his stardust all over the place and holding Johnny Carson in some kind of mystic thrall.

"It absolutely drove me out of my skull," he recalls. "Here was a guy reaching a vast audience, leading this juggernaut of environmentalist hysteria, and I felt utterly helpless. What could I do? Go talk to five people?"

As bad an experience as that was, matters immediately got worse. The next year, 1969, Ehrlich published an article called "Eco-Catastrophe!" in Ramparts. "Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born," it said. "By that time [1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions."

Then, in 1974, Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich, also a Stanford biologist, published a new book, The End of Affluence, in which they warned of a "nutritional disaster that seems likely to overtake humanity in the 1970s (or, at the latest, the 1980s). Due to a combination of ignorance, greed, and callousness, a situation has been created that could lead to a billion or more people starving to death.... Before 1985 mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity" in which "the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be nearing depletion."

Julian Simon read this stuff, which he viewed as unalloyed and total nonsense. He brooded and fumed and stewed in his juices. He experienced what might be called a personal lull.

And then, finally, in 1980 he emerged from the cocoon. He'd gone into it as a humble professor of marketing and a passive spectator of global death sentence forecasts. But now, suddenly, he broke out into the light of day, he sprang forth onto the world stage, he started swinging his diamond-tipped sword - thwick-thwack! - as ... The Doomslayer!

The rebirth occurred in the pages of Science, in an article titled "Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of False Bad News." It led with a summary that became a manifesto:False bad news about population growth, natural resources, and the environment is published widely in the face of contrary evidence. For example, the world supply of arable land has actually been increasing, the scarcity of natural resources including food and energy has been decreasing, and basic measures of U.S. environmental quality show positive trends. The aggregate data show no long-run negative effect of population growth upon standard of living. Models that embody forces omitted in the past, especially the influence of population size upon productivity increase, suggest a long-run positive effect of additional people.

Written in the form of Statement followed by Fact, every reigning doomsday dragon was neatly slashed in half, the severed beasts left flapping around on the ground like fish.

Statement: The food situation in less-developed countries is worsening.

*Fact: Per capita food production has been increasing at roughly 1 percent yearly - 25 percent during the last quarter century.

Statement: Urban sprawl is paving over the United States, including much "prime agricultural land" and recreational areas.*

Fact: All the land used for urban areas plus roadways totals less than 3 percent of the United States.... Each year 1.25 million acres are converted to efficient cropland by draining swamps and irrigating deserts.... A million acres yearly goes into additional wilderness recreation areas and wildlife refuges, and another 300,000 acres goes for reservoirs and flood control.

So on and so forth, fact piled upon fact, paragraph after paragraph, all of it buttressed by tables, charts, graphs, and diagrams, plus 42 footnotes, many of them containing additional data.

Letters to the editor poured into Sciencein an unseemly rush. A few of them expressed partial agreement, but the majority were heavily critical. Many of them repeated statutory items of The Litany - "human beings, like any other species, have the biological capacity to overrun the carrying capacity of their habitat" - and there were even some feeble attempts at humor: in extrapolating from past trends, said one writer, Simon is like "the person who leaped from a very tall building and on being asked how things were going as he passed the 20th floor replied, 'Fine, so far.'" (Simon's response: "I think the better story is about somebody who has a rope lifeline and falls off the 15th floor. Somewhere about 30 feet above the ground, she lets go of the rope. You ask her, 'Why did you let go of the rope?' And she answers, 'It was going to break anyway.' That's how many activists would like us to behave.")

Anne and Paul Ehrlich, along with two energy and natural resource experts, John Holdren and John Harte, wrote their own letter to the editor. After charging Simon with various "errors about the economics of scarcity," they went on to make some new doomsday predictions: "If deforestation for agriculture proceeds on a large enough scale, the resulting pulse of carbon dioxide may combine with that from increasing fossil-fuel combustion to alter global climate in a way that undermines food production to an unprecedented degree." They also corrected one of Simon's data points having to do with electricity, which Simon claimed had gotten cheaper. "The fact is," they said, "that real electricity prices bottomed in 1971 and were already up 18 percent from that low point in 1972." An 18 percent increase where Simon said there'd been a decline!

"I was taken aback," said Simon in his published reply. "Holdren and Harte are energy scholars. I checked Fig. 1 and other sources but could see no sign of their 18 percent." So he placed a phone call to the coauthor of the report cited by Holdren, Harte, and the Ehrlichs. "He, too, was puzzled. Upon investigation, the 1971 number (80.2) proved to be a typographical error and should have been 93.3. So much for Holdren et alia's 'fact.'"

The battle lines now drawn, it was not long before Ehrlich and Simon met for a duel in the sun. The face-off occurred in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000" - a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with - Simon countered with "a public offer to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run."

You could name your own terms: select any raw material you wanted - copper, tin, whatever - and select any date in the future, "any date more than a year away," and Simon would bet that the commodity's price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.

"How about it, doomsayers and catastrophists? First come, first served."

In California, Paul Ehrlich stepped right up - and why not? He'd been repeating the Malthusian argument for years; he was sure that things were running out, that resources were getting scarcer - "nearing depletion," as he'd said - and therefore would have to become more expensive. A public wager would be the chance to demonstrate the shrewdness of his forecasts, draw attention to the catastrophic state of the world situation, and, not least, force this Julian Simon character to eat his words. So he jumped at the chance: "I and my colleagues, John P. Holdren (University of California, Berkeley) and John Harte (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory), jointly accept Simon's astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in."

Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price rises: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference; if the prices fell, Ehrlich et alia would pay Simon.

Then they sat back and waited.

Between 1980 and 1990, the world's population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by September 1990, without a single exception, the price of each of Ehrlich's selected metals had fallen, and in some cases had dropped through the floor. Chrome, which had sold for $3.90 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.70 in 1990. Tin, which was $8.72 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.88 a decade later.

Which is how it came to pass that in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07.

A more perfect resolution of the Ehrlich-Simon debate could not be imagined. All of the former's grim predictions had been decisively overturned by events. Ehrlich was wrong about higher natural resource prices, about "famines of unbelievable proportions" occurring by 1975, about "hundreds of millions of people starving to death" in the 1970s and '80s, about the world "entering a genuine age of scarcity."

In 1990, for his having promoted "greater public understanding of environmental problems," Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award.

By the time he'd won the bet, Simon and his family had moved back to the East Coast, he to take up a position as professor of business administration at the University of Maryland, and his wife, Rita Simon, a sociologist, to become professor of criminal justice at the American University in Washington, DC. They moved into a red brick house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, an upper-middle-class community inside the Beltway.

The house had computers on every floor, two Xerox copiers, and an assortment of exercise machines on which Julian Simon read books or newspapers while trying to keep his spare and straight body in fighting trim. When it wasn't raining, snowing, or more than 100 degrees outside, he did his research and writing out on the deck, sometimes with a wet sponge covering his shaved bald head. He'd sit there in the shade of the mulberry tree, binoculars nearby to stare at birds - particularly hummingbirds that came to a feeder. And with battery-acid coffee from a thermos that looked as if it came over on the Mayflower, he'd tilt at new windmills.

He always found it somewhat peculiar that neither the Sciencepiece nor his public wager with Ehrlich nor anything else that he did, said, or wrote seemed to make much of a dent on the world at large. For some reason he could never comprehend, people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they'd been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days "experts" spoke awful falsehoods, and they werebelieved. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker.

There was Lester Brown, for example, founder and president of the Worldwatch Institute, who in 1981 wrote: "The period of global food security is over. As the demand for food continues to press against the supply, inevitably real food prices will rise. The question no longer seems to be whether they will rise but how much."

All during the 1980s, however, wheat and rice prices declined; in mid-century, in fact, they reached all-time lows. But this made no difference, and in 1986, for his work on the "global economy and the natural resources and the systems that support it," Lester Brown, too, received

a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award.

Julian Simon never received a MacArthur award.

"MacArthur!" he says. "I can't even get a McDonald's!"

This did not discourage him. Doomslaying was a thankless task, but it had to be done, like taking out the garbage: it had to be carted to the dump today even if there'd be another big pile of it tomorrow.

So Simon penned tract after tract pleading his case: The Ultimate Resource (Princeton University Press, 1981), arguing that the most valuable resource of all was people; Theory of Population and Economic Growth in 1986; Population and Development in Poor Countries in 1992, and so on. In all, he wrote or edited a rough dozen such books, all of them aimed at demolishing one or another tenet of The Litany. But the nearest he got to that MacArthur was a senior fellowship from the conservative Cato Institute.

Naturally, he received a fair amount of bad press for all this heresy, particularly for his pet claim that what the world needs most is lots of additional human beings. They're not just mouths to feed, he argued. Newborn babes grow up to be creative adults; they turn into individuals who contribute and achieve, who give back far more than they ever take.

But nobody could believe it.

"He's overly optimistic," said Peggy Rizo, then of the Washington, DC-based Population Crisis Committee, now called Population Action International. "He is an economist who is trying to transpose what he believes to be the American prairie experience into the experience of crowded areas like Africa, Central America, and Asia."

"What does it mean in terms of the quality of life of the people of the 21st century when cities are joined to cities and we have just several huge megalopolises?" asked Rupert Cutler, then executive director of the Environmental Fund, which became Population Environment Balance, headquartered in Washington, DC. "I think we can predict a pall of brown air over these cities. We can predict water shortages, joblessness ... and crime."

Well, it wasn't as if Julian Simon hadn't heard thatbefore.

Finally, in 1995 he came out with his crowning fact-feast and catalog of bounty, a book he edited called The State of Humanity. Almost 700 pages of dense text plus charts and figures, the quantity of factual information in it was nothing short of amazing. Simon had data you didn't even know people track, such as:

1974-1975.

Arcane as some of it was, Simon was extremely adept at using this material in formal debates. In July 1996, at a public event sponsored by the World Future Society, Simon debated Hazel Henderson, a private researcher and author of Building a Win-Win World (see "Win-Win World," page 152). Henderson, who was trying to make a case that government regulation was responsible for reduced air pollution, came armed with a graph showing a decline in pollution levels in London since the late 1950s. The slope of the line was clearly downward, illustrating, she said, the effect of London's Clean Air Act of 1956.

In his rebuttal period, Simon presented a graph of his own. Whenever he presents any data, his practice is to present the figures going all the way back to day one, to the start of record-keeping on the parameter in question. You have to focus on aggregate trends over the long term, he insists, not just pick and choose some little fleeting data chunks that seem to support your case. So his own chart of smoke levels in London stretched back into the 1800s, and the line from the 1920s on showed a constant and uniform downward slope. "If you look at allthe data," he said, "you can't tell that there was a clean-air act at any point."

Anyone who wonders about the accuracy of Simon's data or conjures up rafts of competing data on the other side of the issue will be met with Simon's claim that: "There are no other data." His statistics, he claims, come from the "official" sources, the standard reference works that everyone uses.

"Test for yourself the assertion that the physical conditions of humanity have gotten better. Pick up the US Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract of the United Statesand Historical Statistics of the United States at the nearest library. They're accessible to any schoolkid. Start at 1800. Those books have half the data you need for almost anything."

Well, if you've never opened a volume of Historical Statistics of the United States, you don't know what excitement is. Two fat square tomes chock-full of charts, tables, and black ink.

"Wonderful, wonderful books!"

For each of Simon's claims that I checked, the data in those volumes were identical to his. Black infant mortality rates are declining, he says in The State of Humanity. And on page 57 of volume one of Historical Statistics of the United States, in Table B 136-147, under "Fetal Death Ratio; neonatal, infant, and maternal mortality rates, by race: 1915 to 1970," the precise same decline in mortality rates is presented in tabular form: from 180 black infant deaths per 1,000 live births in 1915 to 31 per 1,000 in 1970. Similarly, his figures for life expectancy correspond to those in the original sources. Same for air pollution.

So go ahead and check his data! Enjoy!

Some of Simon's other claims, however, are so far from received opinion as to be hard to take seriously - his view on species loss, for example, regarding which he asserts that "the highest rate of observed extinctions is one species per year."

That was hard to accept. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, the guru of global species extinction, said in 1991: "Believe me, species become extinct. We're easily eliminating 100,000 a year." A year later, in his 1992 book The Diversity of Life, he had modified that figure somewhat, saying: "The number of species doomed each year is 27,000." Apparently, these numbers were a tiny bit slippery. Still, both of them were a far cry from Simon's "one species per year."

Simon, on the other hand, pointed out that the higher estimates did not come from observation, they came from theory, specifically from Wilson's own theory of "island biogeography" which correlates species extinction with tropical forest destruction. The theory's "species-area equation," supposedly, predicts that for each additional unit of forest destroyed, so many more species die out.

This was another mathematical argument, reminiscent of the one made long ago by Malthus, and it was exactly the type of Neat Mathematical Certainty that Julian Simon took so much joy in shooting big holes through, which is what he proceeded to do now. The problem with the theory, he wrote in a paper on species loss with Aaron Wildavsky, is that it is not borne out by the empirical facts.

"The only empirical observation we found is by Lugo for Puerto Rico, where 'human activity reduced the area of primary forests by 99 percent.... This massive forest conversion did not lead to a correspondingly massive species extinction.'" Simon quoted Lugo to the effect that "more land birds have been present on the Island in the 1980s (97 species) than were present in pre-Columbian times (60 species)."

Say again? The forest was 99 percent demolished, and the number of bird species actually rose?

Even for me, this was too much.

The International Institute of Tropical Forestry, part of the US Forest Service, is located in an overgrown gray stone building in San Juan's Botanical Gardens. Ariel E. Lugo, a slim, gray-bearded man in a silver-green forest service uniform, is director.

He's also a world-class expert on tropical forests and species extinction. A native of Puerto Rico, Lugo was educated in San Juan through his master's degree, came to the mainland, got a PhD in plant ecology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then taught botany for 10 years at the University of Florida. He spent two years at the Puerto Rico Department of Natural Resources and two more years on Jimmy Carter's Council on Environmental Quality in Washington, DC. Finally, he went back to San Juan as director of the Institute, a position he's held for the last 17 years.

"I see myself as in the middle of the road," he says. "On the right of me is Julian Simon, who sees nothing wrong. You know, 'We're doing just fine.' I don't want you to put me at that extreme."

Still, Lugo is not what could be called a major supporter of Wilson's theory of island biogeography, or of the species-area equation that forms its mathematical centerpiece. The equation is simple enough: *S = CA

zwhere *S is the number of species, A is the area, and C and *z* are constants for the type of species in question, its location, and other factors. The apparent certainty it embodies, however, is an illusion, according to Lugo.

"The first uncertainty is that we don't know how many species there are. The margin of error is enormous: depending on who you talk to there is anywhere between 5 million and 100 million species, but science has described only a million species. How can you predict how many species are lost if you don't know how many species you're dealing with?"

The second problem is that the equation was never intended to describe extinctionsto begin with. "It was a device for explaining the number of species on islands," he says. Generally, the bigger the island, the more species it has, other things being equal. But even if cutting down an island's forests causes species to leave the area, that's not the same thing as making those species extinct. "The presence or absence of a species in a particular area is one thing, whereas wiping out the genome of that species is another thing altogether - wiping out the seed, wiping out the mechanisms for hibernation, wiping out its dispersal, wiping out the management of the species. That's a completely different biology.

"And what is the relationship between deforestation and species loss to begin with?" he asks. "Do we understand that? Do we know that when you deforest an acre, you lose x proportion of species, to extinction? Well, I'm afraid that nobody knows that. There is not one study that can claim to have understood the relationship between deforestation and

species lost to extinction.

"And so if you're an objective scientist," he says, "you cannot put a number to the rate of species lost. But I believe we're exaggerating the numbers.

"What's unstated in all this is that when you deforest, you go to zero, that you go to pavement. That's how I put it, that 'you go to pavement.' This is why people get mad at me, because at this point in my talks I show a slide of pavement, but the pavement has weeds growing through it. I can take you to places of abandoned roads in the rain forest that have treesgrowing out of them."

Trees sprouting from the asphalt! Birds perching on the branches, insects crawling, worms boring, bees buzzing, lizards walking, moss growing on the tree trunk!

"Look at the example of Puerto Rico," Lugo says. "This island has a documented deforestation rate of 90 percent, and it has a documented loss of primary forest of 97 to 98 percent. So here's an island that has lost in the past, in the recentpast, up to the '50s - I was already born when the island was at the peak of deforestation - it's lost almost all of its forest.

"The first surprise is that there are more bird species here now than ever, in part due to the invasion of nonindigenous species. The second surprise is that much of the forest has grown back."

On Lugo's conference table is a book open to two photographs.

"Now, where I'm gonna send you today," he says, "is here."

He points to a road that winds through the western fringe of El Yunque, the Caribbean National Forest, the only tropical rain forest in the US national forest system. Picture One, an aerial photograph taken in 1951, shows the area on the west side of the road:clear-cut, mowed down, absolutely denuded of trees. It looks like stumps and dead grass. The east side of the road, by contrast, is deep, dark, and flush with vegetation, an untouched virgin rain forest.

Picture Two shows the same area 13 years later: from the aerial photograph, both sides of the road are identical.

"You can see that it recovered," says Lugo. "So, you take your car and you ride through these forests, and you tell me."

Puerto Rico Route 186 is not far away, about 30 minutes by traffic jam. The road is paved but unmarked, slightly more than a lane wide, just enough space for two cars to pass without the sound of impact. You drive toward the mountains, white clouds bunched above, isolated raindrops spattering the windshield, and in five or six minutes there's tropical forest on both sides. Tall ferns, flame trees, mahogany trees, humongous green leafy plants, plus massive clumps of bamboo - stalks that tower 20 or 30 feet overhead.

Julian Simon: The facts are fundamental.

Garrett Hardin: The facts are not fundamental. The theory is fundamental.- from a 1982 debate with the UC Santa Barbara biologist The doomslayer-doomsayer debate, Simon thinks, is an opposition between fact and bad theory, a case of empirical reality versus abstract principles that purport to define the way things work but don't.

"It's the difference," he says, "between a speculative analysis of what musthappen versus my empirical analysis of what hashappened over the long sweep of history."

The paradox is that those abstract principles and speculative analyses seem so very logical and believable, whereas the facts themselves, the story of what has happened, appear wholly illogical and impossible to explain. After all, people are fruitful and they multiply but the stores of raw materials in the earth's crust certainly don't, so how can it be possible that, as the world's population doubles, the price of raw materials is cut in half?

It makes no sense. Yet it has happened. So there must be an explanation.

And there is: resources, for the most part, don't grow on trees. People producethem, they createthem, whether it be food, factories, machines, new technologies, or stockpiles of mined, refined, and purified raw materials.

"Resources come out of people's minds more than out of the ground or air," says Simon. "Minds matter economically as much as or more than hands or mouths. Human beings create more than they use, on average. It had to be so, or we would be an extinct species."

The defect of the Malthusian models, superficially plausible but invariably wrong, is that they leave the human mind out of the equation. "These models simply do not comprehend key elements of people - the imaginative and creative."

As for the future, "This is my long-run forecast in brief," says Simon. "The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards.

"I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse."

But you don't have to be one of those people, one of those forever Glum and Gloomy Gusses. All you've got to do is keep your mind on the facts.

The world is not coming to an end.

Things are not running out.

Time is not short.

So, smile!

Shout!

Enjoy the afternoon!

==

==

 Julian Lincoln Simon (February 12, 1932–February 8, 1998) was professor of business administration at the University of Maryland, a Senior ...

American Immigration Institute - SourceWatch

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Sep 19, 2008 - Robert L. Hill, Fragoman, Del Ray & Bersen, P.C.. Prof. Rita Simon, American University Prof. Julian Simon, University of Maryland ...

Indur Goklany - SourceWatch

www.sourcewatch.org › index.php › Indur_Goklany

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1.

:{Jan 2, 2020 - Indur Goklany previously worked for the Office of Policy Analysis of the U.S. Department of the Interior and is currently a :{Julian Simon:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Fellow at ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Searle Freedom Trust - SourceWatch

www.sourcewatch.org › index.php › Searle_Freedom_...

:{:(style="border-color:#70757a;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-3px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

1.

:{Jun 26, 2020 - ... Environmental Economics); $85,000 (:{Julian Simon:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Fellows); Reason Foundation: $250,000 (Transportation Fellowship); $600,000 (Reason.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Robert L. Bradley Jr. - SourceWatch

www.sourcewatch.org › index.php › Robert_L._Bradle...

:{:(style="border-color:#70757a;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-3px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

1.

:{Dec 25, 2019 - He has authored five books, including ":{Julian Simon:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and the Triumph of Energy Sustainability" (2000), "Climate Alarmism Reconsidered" ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Natural Capitalism - SourceWatch

www.sourcewatch.org › index.php › Natural_Capitalism

:{:(style="border-color:#70757a;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-3px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

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:{Apr 9, 2013 - Joel Kovel, "The Justifiers: A critique of :{Julian Simon:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, Stephan Schmidheiny, and Paul Hawken on Capitalism and Nature", Capitalism Nature ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Liberty Institute - SourceWatch

www.sourcewatch.org › index.php › Liberty_Institute

:{:(style="border-color:#70757a;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-3px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

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:{Apr 18, 2009 - :{Julian:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: L. :{Simon:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Centre C-4/8, Sahyadri, Plot 5, Sector 12. Dwarka Phase-I, New Delhi 110 075. India Tel: 91-11-25079215/28031309:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Julian Simon - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Julian_Simon

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:{:{Julian:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Lincoln :{Simon:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: (February 12, 1932 – February 8, 1998) was an American professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a Senior ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

**Died**‎: ‎February 8, 1998 (aged 65); ‎Chevy Cha...

Born‎: ‎February 12, 1932; ‎Newark, New Jersey

Influences‎: ‎David Hume‎, ‎Adam Smith‎, ‎Friedrich ...

Field‎: ‎Environmental economics

Missing: sourcewatch ‎| Must include: sourcewatch

Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism

www.tandfonline.com › doi › pdf

However, Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource (1981) became a model ( ... at http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Leipzig_Declaration_on_Global_.

by PJ Jacques - ‎2008 - ‎Cited by 830 - ‎Related articles

Congressman Calls For Hearing Into Heartland Institute ...

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:{Feb 22, 2012 - Goklany was also the :{Julian Simon:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Fellow at the anti-environmental Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in 2000, a visiting ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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