Population Growth Is Our Greatest Triumph
Julian Simon
University of Maryland
The increase in the world’s population represents our victory over death. In the 19th Century the earth could sustain only one billion people. Ten thousand years ago, only 1 million could keep themselves alive. Now, 5 billion people are living longer and more healthily than ever before, on average.
The current gloom-and-doom about a “crisis” of our environment is all wrong on the scientific facts. Even the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that U.S. air and our water have been getting cleaner rather than dirtier in the past few decades. Every agricultural economist knows that the world’s population has been eating ever-better since World War II, defying simplistic Malthusian reasoning. . Every resource economist knows that all natural resources have been getting more available rather than more scarce, as shown by their falling prices over the decades and centuries. And every demographer knows that the death rate has been falling all over the world – life expectancy almost tripling in the rich countries in the past two centuries, and almost doubling in the poor countries in just the past four decades. This is the most important and amazing demographic fact — the greatest human achievement in history.
For proper understanding of the important aspects of an economy we should look at the long-run trends. Almost every long-run trend in material human welfare points in a positive direction, as long as we view the matter over a reasonably long period of time. And there is no persuasive reason to believe that these trends will not continue indefinitely. But the short- run comparisons – between the sexes, age groups, races, political groups, which are usually purely relative – make more news.
The world’s problem is not too many people, but lack of political and economic freedom. Blaming population for poor countries’ problems is a tragic intellectual error.