The Doomslayer

...Huh...

...The price of the five commodities declined by an average of 40 percent...

...Perhaps he should have tried...

...Outraged by what he read, he set out to disprove Simon's bizarre theories...

...That's also why more people are a good thing—it means greater potential for more Einsteins and Mozarts and Edisons...

...What he didn't say might well be his most enduring contribution: the idea that human beings don't just use resources while they inhabit this planet...

...I responded...

...Simon responded: "The only thing I'm going to win is a McDonald's...

...Is there a finite amount of oil...

...And with his scrupulous facts, Simon went on to show that as people get richer they have fewer children...

...Julian Simon lived in Technicolor...

...Every trend of human wellbeing—life expectancy, infant mortality, per capita incomes in India, the number of cars per person in China, the availability and quality of food and housing, the amount of leisure time we have available—is improving, not getting worse," he wrote shortly before his death in an updated edition of his most famous book, The Ultimate Resource...

...The 1970s were a historical aberration, occasioned by war in the Middle East...

...That happens throughout history: Galileo was branded a madman for proclaiming that the earth was round and revolved around the sun...

...Thanks in part to Julian Simon, the United States withdrew from funding coercive population-control programs around the globe, most notably China's genocidal one-couple, one-child policy...

...But those who did not know Julian or his writings in the 1970s and early 1980s cannot fully appreciate how viciously he was attacked, from the Left and the Right alike...

...Indeed, many of his most ardent critics were government activists, who insist the only conceivable solution to impending ecological doom is ever more stringent official edicts: coercive population-stabilization policies, gas rationing, wage and price controls, mandatory recycling, and so on...

...One of those rare pioneering thinkers that God places every so often in our midst, his ideas were far enough ahead of his time to win the iconoclast's ultimate accolade: being dismissed during much of his lifetime as dimwitted, even dangerous...

...I knew then what everyone knew: that the world was headed straight toward eco-catastrophe, potentially of biblical proportions...

...But the attacks he has suffered at the hands of the declinist establishment are nothing compared to what Simon absorbed two decades ago...

...they create them too...

...Malthusians liken human population growth to, as billionaire misanthrope Ted Turner likes to put it, "a plague of locusts...

...Lomborg's smart and best-selling book The Skeptical Environmentalist, a Simonesque compendium of hard data, earned the instant wrath of the Global Green movement, for challenging the cult of doom...

...In 1984, over howls of protest from the global population control lobby, the Reagan administration adopted Simon's line: that people are resource creators, not resource destroyers, and that "capitalism is the best contraceptive...

...Julian's had a professorial variation: "Show me the data...

...I am not an optimist...

...Lomborg has the luxury of standing on the shoulders of a giant—a debt of gratitude we all owe to Julian Simon...

...Though he published a dozen books and more than 200 scholarly articles, Simon is best known by far for his swashbuckling intellectual swordfight with Paul Ehrlich, the chronically wrong Stanford biologist...

...In his award-winning 1990 book The Economic Consequences of Immigration, Simon showed each of these beliefs is flatly contradicted by stubborn facts...

...That was Julian—conventional wisdom never met a worse enemy...

...Audiences would nod their heads in unison...

...Indeed the battle has continued over his grave...

...Doesn't this suggest that man is copulating uncontrollably, like John B. Calhoun's famous Norwegian rats that multiplied in their pen until they died from lack of sustenance...

...Yes," Julian glistened, "It's really fantastic isn't it...

...In person Julian could knock you over with his contagious optimism...

...When the experts claimed we were running out of oil and that prices would hit $100 a barrel by the end of the twentieth century, he calmly assured us: no, oil prices will fall...

...Two other prominent Simon converts were—surprise--Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II...

...And sure enough, once the political crisis ebbed, oil prices quickly resumed their historical downward trend...

...Twenty years ago, the doom-sayers were forecasting a standing-room-only earth...

...Simon said: hogwash...

...Into this came a bald-headed, ebullient, indefatigable economics professor in the Midwest telling us that every bit of it was wrong—in effect, that the earth isn't flat...

...With the twenty-first century now well upon us, virtually every arrow of human welfare—everything from infant mortality to Internet access—continues its upward ascent...

...Such is the fate of true prophets...

...Julian often bristled when he was described as an optimist...

...Not too many Jewish boys from New Jersey get to have an audience with the pope...

...The answer, as Simon patiently explained, is that people are forever inventing new, lower-cost energy sources, developing substitutes (anyone still using whale oil...

...he would ask...

...As it turned out, they didn't have a chance...

...First, that every significant measure of human well-being will continue to improve...

...Instead, to Lomborg's astonishment, the data was not just irondadif anything, it understated the case for an optimistic world...

...Incredible," he exalted, "for 100,000 years human beings have devoted almost all of their waking hours to consuming enough calories...

...An encyclical that followed from Pope John Paul II was laced with his influence, urging governments to treat people "as productive assets...

...Simon saw something very different...

...There were few Americans who struck more multiple blows for freedom and liberty than Julian Simon...

...Now mankind is trying to consume less...

...Today, it's harder—though hardly impossible, with Planned Parenthood, Green-peace, and most other environmental activist groups—to look rationally at the evidence and believe that we are running out of food or energy...

...Resources are created by the intellect of man," Simon preached, "and that is unlimited in its capacity...

...Which explains how Julian Simon discerned trends that the rest of us were too blind to see...

...Indeed, today the world's proven reserves of oil—let alone those of other energy sources we can't even imagine—are far larger than were in the 1980s (which incidentally goes a long way to explaining why oil prices have stayed low...

...The doomsday Club of Rome had just released its primal scream, The Limits to Growth, reporting that the earth was rapidly running out of just about everything needed to sustain life...

...Julian Simon believed that human progress depended on creative and ingenious minds, but also on free institutions...

...Somewhere up in heaven, Julian Simon is smiling...

...For decades polls have shown that most of us believe immigrants take jobs from Americans, depress wages, abuse welfare, and hurt our economy...

...Malthusianism was now the official position of the United States government...

...Human beings," he wrote, "are not just more mouths to feed, but are productive and inventive minds that help find creative solutions to man's problems, thus leaving us better off over the long run...

...Paul Ehrlich hadappeared on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show a dozen times—surely a first for a dour biologist—filling Americans' heads with predictions of impending world famine and gloomy prognostications (sample: "If I were a gambler, I would bet even money that England will not exist in the year 2000...

...In Jerry McGuire, Tom Cruise's mantra was: "Show me the money...

...When I first met Julian Simon, I asked him about a United Nations report forecasting a 10-billion-person earth...

...Try as they would, his critics have never dented his data, much less his theories...

...It was Julian Simon against a well-financed and highly respected network of hundreds of professional doomsayers, all insisting on the obvious—that we were going to hell in a handbasket...

...Economics 101 says that scarcity causes prices to rise, and there we were staring at Julian's graphs, showing 200 years of falling energy prices...

...Then he was invited to the Vatican to explain his theories...

...There's enough dreariness in the world," was his explanation...

...Economist, author, inventor, and contrarian, Simon—who died before his time in 1998—was as close as we are likely to get to an irreplaceable human resource...

...he gleefully told me...

...Shortly before his untimely death, Simon said he felt very confident about two predictions...

...Good question—or maybe we need to find a more sophisticated measure...

...Well then, he would respond, if oil supplies are finite and we are using them up at an ever-increasing pace, why are oil prices falling...

...It's great news that the world can sustain 10 billion people, who will be healthier and wealthier than we are today," he explained...

...Doom-sayers looked at the period from 19721980—when oil prices exploded from $3 to $30 a barrel—and announced: prices will rise forever...

...1k...

...Though far from proven, the theory suggests that what we know as "fossil" fuels could in fact be renewable and, for all practical purposes, limitless...

...And second, that people will continue to grouse about how things used to be better in the old days...

...Simon's greatest contribution may have been puncturing the "overpopulation" bogeyman...

...His methodology was disarmingly simple: the best—in fact, the only—reliable predictor of the future is the past...

...The bet was chronicled in a cover story of the New York Times Magazine, and for the first time in his life Simon was taken seriously...

...No prizes for guessing who won...

...One of Simon's secret weapons was his professional background as a master statistician...

...Another time shortly before his death, I showed him a report on growing obesity in the Third World...

...In the late 1990s, Bjorn Lomborg, a young Danish statistics professor and active Greenpeace supporter, came across Wired magazine's profile of "The Doomslayer"— complete with devilish red horns—while waiting for a flight at Los Angeles Airport...

...and discovering new reserves—the bottom of the North Sea, Wyoming shale, who knows what's next...

...All I had was superstition...

...No, answered Simon, because mankind does not propagate like field rats...

...But by the time of Simon's untimely death of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five, the scholars and the pundits could only look at the state of human affairs and grudgingly concede that it was the "doomslayer"—as Wired magazine dubbed him—who was right all along, and apocalyptics like Ehrlich who were the scam artists...

...Ehrlich foolishly accepted, specifying chrome, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten...

...When the close-the-borders crowd said that immigrants were stealing American jobs and abusing our welfare system, Simon responded with reams of evidence showing that immigrants were a key factor to making—and keeping—America great...

...At professional meetings and formal dinners, he was famous for fluorescent ties of bright orange, yellow, and red...

...But on no issue was Julian Simon a more prominent myth buster than on immigration...

...He delighted in bending the minds of his students by asking, "Why it is that every time a calf is born, the per capita GDP of a nation rises...

...If a .300 hitter had four hits in his last five at bats, his statistical likelihood of getting a hit the next time at bat would still be just three in ten...

...Meanwhile, the Carter administration's multi-agency assessment of the earth's future, Global 2000, was making headlines with its forecast that "by the year 2000 the world will be more crowded, more polluted, and less stable ecologically...

...I was never fully convinced, but as always, he had the data...

...The rest of the world was living in black and white...

...I'm a realist!' he would insist...

...Simon delighted in pointing out inherent contradictions between doom theory and real-world evidence...

...A follow-up $100,000 bet that any significant measure of life on earth would be better, not worse, over ten years—offered in his 1996 book The State of Humanity—never got a taker...

...One of his favorite slogans came from Winston Churchill: "The further back you look, the further ahead you can see...

...In Western Europe that is happening already...

...He examined years of baseball batting averages and came to the astonishing conclusion—to baseball people, anyway—that there is no such thing as a hitting streak...

...When Paul Ehrlich won a MacArthur "genius" award, John Tierney of the New York Times asked Julian if he thought he might win the award himself some day...

...Today, all serious demographers predict that global population growth will stabilize by the end of this century...

...Stunned silence...

...He went back and looked at energy prices over 200 years—and sure enough, with occasional spikes, they had declined steadily over the end period...

...Nuclear winter, ozone depletion, poisoned air, acid rain, species extinction, the death of the forest and oceans, global warming—the only question was which would do us in first...

...The implication: cheap and easily accessible energy for centuries and centuries of mankind to come...

...And, we can only hope, more Julian Simons...

...Ronald Reagan used to say the same thing, by the way...

...Julian Simon, in an age of supposed limits, taught us that the earth and its human cargo are essentially infinite...

...The attacks on Simon were a testament to the power of his ideas...

...Outraged doomsayers smugly denounced Simon as a crank...

...Immigrants don't just take jobs, they create jobs, through their purchases and through their propensity to start new businesses!' Spencer Abraham, now secretary of energy, then chairman of the Senate's immigration committee, credits Simon's work with helping "keep wide open America's gates to immigrants...

...Large populations are only a problem where they are held back by tyrannical governments," he wrote...

...Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich—whose best-selling 1976 book The Population Bomb may set the all-time record for wrongheaded prophecy—once quipped that Julian Simon proved that "the one thing the earth is not running out of is idiots...

...We alone as a species are endowed with reason...

...Think about what it might cost to light your house with whale oil...

...When I first met him during my school days at the University of Illinois in 1980, Simon's ideas were so astonishing as to border on lunacy...

...The mid-1970s energy "crisis" was a classic case of short-term analysis...

...Amid the economic and ecological turmoil of the late 1960s and 1970s—gasoline lines, Arab oil embargoes, teeming masses of starving people in Asia and Africa, nuclear accidents like Three-Mile Island, and raging global inflation—Julian Simon was a lone, levelheaded voice assuring us that life on earth was getting better, not worse...

...When the conventional wisdom said that we were losing our capacity to feed ourselves, Simon accurately forecast that burgeoning food supplies, fueled by the Green Revolution in farming, would outpace the increasing number of human mouths...

...The revered godfather of the neo-Malthusianism in the late-twentieth-century America, Ehrlich once snarled that trying to explain biological limits to Simon "would be like trying to explain odd-day, even-day gas distribution to a cranberry...

...He was often asked: Surely we should be worried by the tripling of global population during the twentieth century, from 2 billion to 6 billion people...

...Japan's native-born population has been declining since 1998...

...Today, factoring in inflation, oil costs a third of what it did in the 1970s...

...In 1980, Simon offered Ehrlich a $1,000 bet: that five commodities—of Ehrlich's choosing—would be more scarce, and thus more expensive, in ten years' time...

...And yet every time a human baby is born, the per capita GDP falls...

...What a lot of other curious and open-minded people soon discovered, listening to Simon and reading his prodigious works, was that the facts he marshaled were overpowering...

...His specialty was examining trends not over five or ten or twenty years, but over the very long run—indeed, as far back as usable information could be found...