Who: Julian Simon (1932-1998) was an American economist, a professor of business, and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. Simon is best known for his work on population growth, natural resources, immigration, and technological change. Founded on a belief in mankind’s ingenuity and supported by overwhelming empirical evidence, Simon’s research develops an optimistic vision of liberated humanity.
Why he matters: Simon spent his career making the factual case for political and economic freedom, resisting the mainstream impulse to “solve” crises with central planning. When popular opinion was convinced that the future would see mass starvation and a dramatic decline in the global standard of living caused by a “population bomb,” Simon jumped into the fray to disabuse the public of ill-informed pessimism. Rather than bow to the conventional Malthusian wisdom about the consequences of population growth, Simon heralded humanity as “the ultimate resource.” More people means more innovation, more genius, more beauty, and more wealth, said Simon. By Simon’s reasoning, natural resources are effectively infinite, because as a resource becomes more scarce, the rising price incentivizes innovation, eventually leading to the creation of substitutes and new technologies, then driving down prices. Resources are actually becoming less scarce over time, as Simon demonstrated in his famous bet with Paul Ehrlich.
This exceptional talent of Simon’s for debunking alarmist claims of catastrophe earned him the nickname, “The Doomslayer.” According to his research, the environment is getting cleaner, immigrants are making Americans wealthier, animal species aren’t endangered, and deforestation is less common than reforestation. Things are getting better all the time. And during his lifetime, Simon would gladly show the pages and pages of data to prove it.
When pressed to offer his own prediction of the future, Simon once said “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.”
If you only read one thing by Julian Simon: The Ultimate Resource [updated as Ultimate Resource 2] (1980), available for free online.
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