People - The Ultimate Resource

While the Olympics were being broadcast during the last two weeks of February I watched more television than I usually watch in a year. I am fascinated by this showcase of human ability, creativity, guts and determination. Watching gifted athletes take the human body to incredible heights, many of them quite literally, fills me with reverence and awe. Whether it is the soaring, twisting jumps of the snowboarders, the breathtaking speeds achieved by downhill skiers, or the grace and strength displayed by the figure skaters the Olympics are an inspiring display of what human beings can achieve through talent, hard work and perseverance.

The magnificence of human accomplishment is front and center during special events like the Olympics but it is actually before us all the time, so much so that we tend to take it for granted. Just the past ten years has generated revolutionary changes in the way we live our daily lives and a look back over the past century reveals an even more wondrous landscape of human innovation and advancement.

That's why one must sometimes wonder if we're talking about the same species when it turns to environmental and political matters. Here the messages seems to be 1) humanity is the scourge of the planet and 2) people can't do anything without the intervention of government. Both these notions are false and counterproductive to real human progress.

The late Julian Simon once accepted the conventional view that an exploding human population threatened both mankind and the earth. A professor of business administration at the University of Maryland, Simon's interest in population economics led to his deep involvement in projects designed to curb population growth.

A funny thing happened on the way to zero-population growth, however - the research and studies Simon was pursuing directly contradicted the accepted theory that a higher population leads to lower standards of living. In fact, Simon learned, the opposite was true and in 1977 he published The Economics of Population Growth, a technical manual that attempted to reconcile what seemed to be a contradiction. This was followed in 1981 with The Ultimate Resource and in 1996 an updated version, The Ultimate Resource 2, both of which further explained how population growth actually has positive economic effects in the long run.

Simon's book is over 600 pages long and filled with charts, facts and figures so his research cannot be fully analyzed here, but summaries of data from just a couple of categories prove he was on to something. Consider agriculture: food production per capita has been increasing steadily for the past 60+ years. Along with a decreasing occurrence of famine, Simon noted average height in developed countries has been increasing for centuries, a sign that people have better access to nutritious food. At the same time food production in developed countries has increased, agricultural land in use has actually decreased as people find more efficient ways to farm. Meanwhile, the amount of land used for forests, recreation and wildlife has been rapidly increasing.

Standard of living is another indicator of the positive direction in which the world is heading. Though in the short run children necessarily require additional expense, most of these costs are borne by their parents. Over the long term society is rejuvenated by additional people and Simon found found per capita income in both developed and non-developed countries to be higher where population was growing rather than stagnating.

Finally, let's examine Simon's findings about energy. In a nutshell, Simon is optimistic that energy supplies are not only more than ample, but also that the long-run impact of additional people is likely to speed the development of cheap and almost infinite energy supplies. In addition, energy use has grown cleaner and more efficient with each new innovation, a trend Simon see continuing as long as people are free to explore, research and create.

Problems such as poverty are not the result of too many people but too little economic and political freedom, according to Simon. A snapshot of the past half-century proves that similar people living under disparate economic and political circumstances -East and West Germany, North and South Korea, China and Taiwan - can achieve very different results. Societies which embrace the political values of economic and personal liberty, respect for property rights and a free market in which fair and sensible rules are observed are simply more likely to prosper than those subject to central economic planning and totalitarian government.

Simon's research may be dismissed by the doomsayers and power mongers who seek to control the world's population and resources but those of us with a more positive outlook on the future can have confidence people are not actually the problem - they are the solution.