Naomi Beck on Hayek (6): Population Growth--Malthusian Doom or Simonian Abundance?

Naomi Beck argues that Hayek's evolutionary defense of capitalism fails, because he fails to show how capitalism can solve the many problems it creates--particularly the depletion of natural resources and degradation of the environment caused by unlimited economic and population growth.  She thinks that Thomas Malthus saw this problem clearly in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798): economic growth improves the conditions of life so that death rates decline, and population increases; but then inevitably the natural resources that sustain human life are depleted, and the human population must be reduced by famine, disease, infanticide, or war.  The neo-Malthusian Garrett Hardin saw the same problem: population growth in a world with limited resources must devastate the Earth, and therefore "freedom to breed will bring ruin to all" (122-23).

Beck criticizes Hayek for refusing to see the truth of Malthus's theory of population (119-21).  In Chapter 8 of The Fatal Conceit--"The Extended Order and Population Growth"--Hayek argued that Malthus's theory does not apply to a market economy with intensification of exchange and of the diversification and specialization of labor.  "The modern idea that population growth threatens worldwide pauperization is simply a mistake" (121).  "There is no danger whatever that, in any foreseeable future with which we can be concerned, the population of the world as a whole will outgrow its raw material resources, and every reason to assume that inherent forces will stop a process long before that could ever happen" (125).  After quoting passages like these, Beck objects: "It is not quite clear what Hayek thought would happen when we run out of resources.  He seemed totally impervious to mounting concerns regarding environmental issues and the risk of depletion or misuse of resources on the part of the scientists he quoted" (122).

In quoting the sentence above from page 125 of The Fatal Conceit about "no danger whatever," Beck (120) does not quote Hayek's references immediately following this sentence to the writings of Julian Simon, Esther Boserup, Douglas North, and Peter Bauer. She says nothing about Simon or about Simon's famous debate with Paul Ehrlich over population growth and resource availability. This is part of her rhetorical strategy of being silent about any possible objections to her position.

In 1968, Ehrlich (a biologist at Stanford) began his popular book The Population Bomb with this paragraph:

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over.  In the 1970's the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to 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.  But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control.  Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs, not just of individual families, but of society as a whole" (11).

Ehrlich's Malthusian prediction of catastrophe from unchecked population growth did not come true. Norman Borlaug's development of new high-yield varieties of food grains--the "green revolution"--allowed high-population countries like India to produce so much food in the 1970s that they actually became exporters of grain.  And while the world population in 1968 was three and one half billion, the world population today is about 7.7 billion, and yet the rate of global famine and poverty is much lower today than in 1968.

This confirms the prediction of Julian Simon--in contrast to Ehrlich--that population growth does not lead to a shortage of resources, because a growing population means not only more labor but also more ideas about how to solve our problems, and as long as there are the incentives of a free market economy, people will make resources more plentiful through more efficient uses of resources, increased supply, and the development of substitutes.  Consequently, Simon argued, a growing population creates not scarcity but abundance!  Hayek agreed with this.

In 1980, Simon challenged Ehrlich to make a bet with him.  Ehrlich could select a basket of raw materials that he expected would become less abundant and consequently more expensive over some designated time period.  At the end of that time period, the inflation adjusted price of those materials would be calculated.  If the price was higher, Ehrlich would win the wager.  If the price was lower, Simon would win.  Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten; and he chose 1980 to 1990 as the time period.  By 1990, the world population had increased by 873 million from 1980, but all five of the commodities that Ehrlich had selected had declined in price by an average of 57.6 per cent.  Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07.

Some of Ehrlich's supporters have tried to argue that Simon was just lucky, because if they had selected a different time period, Ehrlich could have won the bet.  But in 2016, some economists pointed out that in 2015 Ehrlich's five metals were 22.4 percent cheaper than they were in 1980.

Recently, Gale Pooley and Marian Tupy have developed a new way to measure the availability of resources, which confirms Simon's argument.  They have compiled the latest price data for 50 important commodities covering energy, food, materials, and metals.  They then have calculated the "time-price" of these commodities--in terms of the global average hourly income, the "time-price" is the amount of time that an average human has to work in order to earn enough money to buy a commodity.  By that standard, the real price of Ehrlich's minerals has declined in every year from 1980 to the present.  Pooley and Tupy also found that from 1980 to 2017, the real price of their basket of 50 commodities fell by 36.3 percent, and the time-price fell by 64.7 percent.

Their explanation for why Simon wins his bet with Ehrlich is based on Hayek's understanding of how the price system works to generate abundance:

"The relationship between prices and innovation is dynamic.  Relative scarcity leads to higher prices, higher prices create incentives for innovations, and innovations lead to abundance.  Scarcity gets converted to abundance through the price system.  The price system functions as long as the economy is based on property rights, rule of law, and free exchange" (11).

They conclude with this Hayekian insight:

"The world is a closed system in the way that a piano is a closed system.  The instrument has only 88 notes, but those notes can be played in a nearly infinite variety of ways.  The same applies to our planet.  The Earth's atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite.  What matters, then, is not the physical limits of our planet, but human freedom to experiment and reimagine the use of resources that we have" (15-16).

Oh, but what about climate change?  Hasn't capitalism caused the global warming that threatens to destroy civilization?  Doesn't slowing or reversing global warming require that we move away from unregulated capitalism towards a socialist society that restricts economic consumption and production, and thus perhaps reducing human population?  That's the argument of Naomi Klein in her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.  Although Beck does not mention Klein's book, she would seem to implicitly agree with Klein's argument.

Hayekian liberals like Matt Ridley accept the reality of global warming as caused by the modern economic growth that has depended on increased energy use from fossil fuels.  But Ridley and others have made the Hayekian argument that as long as global free market economic incentives endure, this will promote innovative ideas for solving or mitigating the problems from global warming.

We cannot predict what these new ideas will be.  But we can see some possibilities that are already at work.  For example, as Joshua Goldstein and Staffan Qvist have argued in their new book A Bright Future, one possible solution to global warming is a rapid expansion of nuclear power.  Sweden has already done this.  40 percent of Sweden's electricity comes from nuclear power, with another 40 percent coming from hydropower.  And the rest comes from wind and biofuels.

By contrast to Sweden, Germany has tried to eliminate nuclear power, while increasing renewable energy from wind and solar.  But 40 percent of Germany's energy still comes from coal, and six of Europe's 10 most polluting power plants are in Germany.

Sweden's innovative reliance on nuclear power as a cheap, clean, and reliable source of energy to fuel economic growth while reducing global warming is one illustration of Simon's insight into how capitalism generates abundance.

Beck is silent about all of this.

So what is Beck's proposal for avoiding what she sees as the disastrous consequences of population growth?  She never says.  But she does seem to agree with Hardin that "freedom to breed will bring ruin to all" (123).  And she says that the human experience with the artificial selection of animals shows that "successful breeding is not impossible" (66).  Is she implying that we need to coercively enforce eugenics?  If so, who will decide who has the "freedom to breed"?  She doesn't say.

In my six posts on Beck's book, my main criticism has been that she refuses to acknowledge, much less answer, the many possible objections to her position.  Her book is very short--a total of 184 pages--so she could easily have added a hundred pages or so explaining her replies to the objections I have raised.  This could have been a great book,  if only her editors had sent her manuscript out to some meticulously critical referees who could have forced her to take seriously some of the criticisms that I have brought up here.

Some of my points in this post are elaborated in other posts here, here, here, and here.


REFERENCES

Ehrlich, Paul. 1968. The Population Bomb. New York: Balantine Books.

Goldstein, Joshua S., and Staffan A. Qvist. 2019. A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow.  New York: PublicAffairs.

Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Pooley, Gale L., and Marian L. Tupy. 2018. "The Simon Abundance Index: A New Way to Measure Availability of Resources." Policy Analysis: Cato Institute, number 857, December 4.

Simon, Julian. 1996. The Ultimate Resource 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

To the Last Breath: Population Growth, Superabundance, and the Problem of Oxygen on the Earth and Beyond the Earth

While I am in my office this morning before dawn thinking about the mind's dependence on oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere, I hear my 94-year-old mother-in-law in her bedroom a few steps away from my office struggling against death as she labors to breathe. 

I am reading a new book by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley--Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.  Tupy and Pooley challenge the common belief of many people throughout history that there must be an inverse relationship between population growth and available natural resources, so that as population grows, resources become increasingly scarce.  In his 1798 book Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus presented the most influential statement of this idea:  while population grows geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, . . .), food production grows arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, . . .), and consequently growing population must eventually outstrip food production, and many people must then starve to death.  The modern ecological and environmentalist version of this argument is that the unprecedented growth of world population, which recently surpassed 8 billion people, has long ago exceeded the supply of natural resources necessary to support this huge human population: such a population growth is "unsustainable."  For example, the Global Footprint Network has developed the Ecological Footprint as a measurement of human demand for natural resources.  They estimate that the world currently needs the resources of 1.75 Earths to satisfy the human demand for natural resources, and by 2030, this could rise to 2 Earths.  Obviously, they insist, since we have only 1 Earth, this proves that Malthus was right, because we have now gone beyond the Malthusian limit to human population growth; and to avoid ecological collapse, we must either severely reduce the human population, or we must severely reduce our high modern standard of living that is depleting the Earth's natural resources.

Tupy and Pooley argue that this is not really true.  Over the 225 years since the publication of Malthus's book, there has been a stunning increase in the global human population--from about 900 million in 1800 to over 8 billion today--and yet the Malthusian prediction of apocalyptic catastrophe from unchecked population growth has not come true.  The mistaken thinking in the Malthusian argument became clear in the debate between Paul Ehrlich and Juian Simon.

I have written previously about this debate and how it confirms the evolution of human progress through the Liberal Enlightenment.

THE HUMAN MIND AS THE ULTIMATE RESOURCE

In 1968, Ehrlich (a biologist at Stanford) began his popular book The Population Bomb with this paragraph:

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over.  In the 1970's the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to 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.  But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control.  Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs, not just of individual families, but of society as a whole" (11).

Ehrlich's Malthusian prediction of catastrophe from unchecked population growth did not come true. Norman Borlaug's development of new high-yield varieties of food grains--the "green revolution"--allowed high-population countries like India to produce so much food in the 1970s that they actually became exporters of grain.  And while the world population in 1968 was three and one half billion, the world population today is over 8 billion, and yet the rate of global famine and poverty is much lower today than in 1968.

This confirms the prediction of Julian Simon--in contrast to Ehrlich--that population growth does not lead to a shortage of resources, because a growing population means not only more labor but also more people with more ideas about how to solve our problems, and as long as there are the incentives of a free market economy, people will make resources more plentiful through more efficient uses of resources, increased supply, and the development of substitutes.  Consequently, Simon argued, a growing population creates not scarcity but abundance!

In 1980, Simon challenged Ehrlich to make a bet with him.  Ehrlich could select a basket of raw materials that he expected would become less abundant and consequently more expensive over some designated time period.  At the end of that time period, the inflation adjusted price of those materials would be calculated.  If the price was higher, Ehrlich would win the wager.  If the price was lower, Simon would win.  Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten; and he chose 1980 to 1990 as the time period.  By 1990, the world population had increased by 873 million from 1980, but all five of the commodities that Ehrlich had selected had declined in price by an average of 57.6 per cent.  Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07.

Some of Ehrlich's supporters have tried to argue that Simon was just lucky, because if they had selected a different time period, Ehrlich could have won the bet.  But in 2016, some economists pointed out that in 2015 Ehrlich's five metals were 22.4 percent cheaper than they were in 1980.

Recently, Gale Pooley and Marian Tupy have developed a new way to measure the availability of resources, which confirms Simon's argument.  They have compiled the latest price data for 50 important commodities covering energy, food, materials, and metals.  They then have calculated the "time-price" of these commodities--in terms of the global average hourly income, the "time-price" is the amount of time that an average human has to work in order to earn enough money to buy a commodity.  By that standard, the real price of Ehrlich's minerals has declined in every year from 1980 to the present.  Pooley and Tupy also found that from 1980 to 2018, the real price of their basket of 50 commodities fell by 36.3 percent, and the time-price fell by 71.6 percent.  As compared with workers in 1980, workers in 2018 were able to buy some 252 percent more goods and services with their hours of work. Over that same period, population rose by 71.2 percent.  Thus, a huge increase in population brought not a scarcity of resources, as Malthus and Ehrlich would predict, but a huge increase in resources, which is what Pooley and Tupy call "superabundance" (1-2).

Their explanation for why Simon won his bet with Ehrlich is based on their Hayekian understanding of how the price system works to generate abundance:

"The relationship between prices and innovation is dynamic.  Relative scarcity leads to higher prices, higher prices create incentives for innovations, and innovations lead to abundance.  Scarcity gets converted to abundance through the price system.  The price system functions as long as the economy is based on property rights, rule of law, and free exchange" (5).

As long as the price system functions in a free society, the ultimate resource is not the material resources of the Earth but the intellectual resources of the human mind.  Increasing population means more minds with new ideas for solving problems, and the pricing system provides the incentives for people to try out their ideas, and the best ideas will prevail in the marketplace.

As I have argued in a previous post, this shows how classical liberals recognize that liberty promotes the growth of population.  Many thinkers of the Liberal Enlightenment in the 18th century saw this.

David Hume, for example, in his long essay on "Of the Populouness of Ancient Nations," criticized ancient nations for having a lower growth in population than modern nations, and he argued: "every wise, just, and mild government, by rendering the condition of its subjects easy and secure, will always abound most in people, as well as in commodities and riches. . . . if every thing else be equal, it seems natural to expect, that, wherever there are most happiness and virtue, and the wisest institutions, there will also be most people" (Essays, Liberty Fund, p. 382).  Hume believed that population was growing faster in modern nations than in ancient nations because there was more liberty in modern nations: "human nature, in general, really enjoys more liberty at present, in the most arbitrary government of Europe, than it ever did during the most flourishing period of ancient times" (383).  After all, the primary difference between the economic life of the ancients and that of the moderns was the practice of slavery among the ancients.  Like Hume, Etienne Damilaville, in his article on "Population" in the French Encyclopedia, edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, claimed that liberty fosters a growing population, because "it is under mild, limited governments, where the rights of humanity are respected, that men will become numerous" (Encyclopedic Liberty, Liberty Fund, p. 502).  It was this belief that growing population was a sign of human progress in a free society that was challenged by Malthus.

In his Foreword to Tupy and Pooley's book, George Gilder explains this Malthusian pessimism about population growth leading to a scarcity of resources as based on the "materialist superstition."

"The materialist superstition is this:  that wealth consists of things rather than thoughts, of accumulated capital rather than accumulated knowledge--that people are chiefly consumers rather than creators, mouths rather than minds."

". . . Thomas Sowell, expounding the argument that wealth is essentially knowledge, not material resources, wrote, 'The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.'"

What we need, Gilder observes, is an "economics of mind" that recognizes that wealth arises "not by accumulating matter but by replacing it with mind" (xvi-xvii).

This elevation of mind over matter as the source of wealth is only partially true, however, because it ignores the simple fact that minds depend on matter, and particularly matter as it exists in the biosphere of the Earth today.  It is not clear, therefore, that the "economics of mind" has any application to anywhere in the Universe beyond the ecological conditions of the Earth today.

THE ELEMENTS OF MATTER AND MIND

What I mean by "matter" is displayed in Charles Cockell's "Astrobiological Periodic Table of Elements":

To read this Table, you will need to enlarge it.

I should say here that I am speaking of "matter" in the ordinary sense, which ignores the Dark Matter hypothesized to exist by many scientists, which might be over 95% of the matter in the Universe.  This exotic form of matter has no direct relevance to life.

Mind depends on matter in the sense that mind can exist only through a particular combination and structure of these elements.  For example, the element oxygen with atomic number 8 is essential for the human mind.  If my mother-in-law is deprived of oxygen for more than a few minutes, she will die, and her mind will disappear, because her brain cannot function without a steady supply of oxygen.  For that reason, we have a tank of oxygen next to her bed, so that we can artificially increase her oxygen.  The elements sodium with atomic number 11 and potassium with atomic number 19 are also essential for the brain, because the sodium-potassium pump found in the membrane of all animal cells provides energy for the firing of nerve cells.  My mother-in-law's low levels of sodium and potassium have caused her to be mentally confused, and so we have been trying to increase her intake of those elements.

Studying the Astrobiological Periodic Table tells us a lot about the material basis of the human mind and life, and how the Earth's biosphere might be unique in the Universe as the one place adapted for supporting human intelligent life, if only for a few million years.

Except for the artificial elements that must be artificially created in laboratories, the other elements found in nature originate from the astrophysics of the Universe--from the Big Bang, low mass stars, high mass stars, supernovae, or cosmic rays.  Most of these elements can have some use in supporting some kind of life.  But six of them are essential in all known life--carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur (known by the acronym CHNOPS).  Carbon is the most versatile backbone of molecules, which is why we speak of "carbon-based" life.

That all of these elements supporting life are found throughout the Universe might suggest that life is pervasive in the Universe.  But actually life requires a structuring of these elements that seems unique to the Earth beginning about 3.5 billion years ago.  If there is any extraterrestrial life, it has yet to be found.  Even if it is found, it is likely to be limited to microbial life, because the conditions for multicellular plant and animal life are so difficult to achieve.

Even life on Earth is likely to endure for what will be only a brief moment in the history of the Universe.  From what we know about the evolution of stars, we can foresee that the Sun will turn into a Red Giant star several billion years from now, and the Earth will be a dead planet.  Even before then, the increasing luminosity of the Sun will extinguish all animals and then all plants.

As indicated in some previous posts, all animal life, including human life, depends on the energy derived from breathing the atmospheric oxygen generated by oxygenic photosynthetic organisms such as plants, algae, and cyanobacteria.    There was little oxygen in the atmosphere until about 2.4 billion years ago, when photosynthetic cyanobacteria began to raise the level of oxygen, and now oxygen is about twenty percent of the atmosphere. 

Electrons are the source of energy for all life.  Like other aerobic organisms, we eat organic carbon as the electron donor, and we breathe in atmospheric oxygen as the electron receptor.  The electron transport chain in the membranes of our cells forms ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which is the universal energy currency for life.  This all depends on photosynthesis creating organic carbon and atmospheric oxygen.

Only a few kinds of organisms can live independently of photosynthesis.  Methanogens (microorganisms that produce methane) live in the deep subsurface of the Earth.  They use hydrogen as an electron donor and carbon dioxide as both an electron acceptor and a source of carbon for making methane (one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms).  Methanogens might show us the evolution of the first metabolisms, and we might look for that on other planets.

If there were not enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, photosynthesis would shut down.  Right now, that doesn't seem to be a problem because human activity has been raising the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past two centuries.  But scientists project that over the longer term--somewhere between a hundred million and a billion years into the future--this carbon dioxide will disappear, photosynthesis will then stop, and all the life that depends on photosynthesis on the planet will die.

If we're lucky, we can hope to prolong the life of our species and other species for a few more centuries or millennia.  But we cannot hope to prolong life forever, because we live in an evolving universe that does not care about us or for us, and the evolutionary conditions sustaining human life and all living beings are enduring but not eternal.  Eventually, everything we love and everything that lives will die, and the Earth will become just another dead planet.  That's what Leo Strauss identified as "the most terrible truth" of Lucretian evolutionary atomism.

But surely, we might hope, long before the extinction of life on Earth, human beings will have colonized other planets, perhaps even beyond the Solar System.  And if they establish free societies with pricing systems that reward innovative ideas for promoting a flourishing life on those planets, then they can generate the superabundance that sustains growing populations, and human life will proliferate in the Universe beyond the Earth.

THE PROBLEM OF OXYGEN AND THE POSSIBILITY OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIBERTY

But as we have seen, astrobiologists like Charles Cockell warn that achieving such extraterrestrial liberty will require that we solve the "problem of oxygen."  Cockell worries that the extreme conditions in the universe beyond the Earth's biosphere--especially, the lack of oxygen in a breathable atmosphere--will tend to promote tyranny, because those who control the technology for supplying oxygen and the other basic commodities necessary for life (such as water and food) will have tyrannical power over those dependent on this technology of life support.  To counter this tendency to extraterrestrial tyranny, he lays out proposals for how the liberal institutions for promoting liberty on Earth could be applied to the design of human settlements in space, particularly on Mars, the one planet most like the Earth.  As is characteristic of classical liberalism, he looks for ways to limit, divide, and decentralize power to protect liberty and avoid tyranny.

Consider how one might solve the problem of oxygen on Mars in a way that could promote liberty rather than tyranny.  Compared with the Earth, the atmosphere of Mars is very thin, and most of it--95%--is carbon dioxide.  It has only trace levels of oxygen (0.174%).  The Malthusian would conclude that such a severe scarcity of a natural resource necessary for human life must make human habitation on Mars impossible.

It is possible, however, to build machines that can extract oxygen from atmospheric carbon dioxide--by splitting carbon dioxide molecules into oxygen and carbon monoxide, so that the oxygen atoms combine to form gaseous oxygen.  NASA built such a machine--the MOXIE (Mars OXygen In-situ resource utilization Experiment) for the NASA Mars Perseverance rover.  On April 20, 2021, this machine successfully produced oxygen on Mars.  This demonstrated in principle that we could build personal oxygen machines for Mars that could be individually owned and mass produced.  A free-market pricing system with private property rights could create incentives for developing the most efficient machines.  And as long as the production and distribution of these machines is decentralized, there should be no central control of these machines that could be used for tyrannical power.

While this illustrates how mind depends on matter (the mind's need for oxygen), it also illustrates how mind creates innovative ideas about how to better secure those material resources such as oxygen, and how this can be done best through a pricing system that secures human life and liberty, and the growth of human populations, even on Mars.

Darwinian Sustainability: Ehrlich versus Ridley

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over.  In the 1970's the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to 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.  But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control.  Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs, not just of individual families, but of society as a whole."

That is the first paragraph of Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb, first published in 1968.  I was reminded of that book when I noticed that Ehrlich is back in the news with an article in the latest issue of Nature (June 7, 2012), with new warnings about the approaching Malthusian Apocalypse.  There are many other articles in this same issue of the journal with similar warnings, which are to prepare us for the upcoming Rio Earth Summit.  The newspaper coverage of these articles suggests that we will see another wave of hysterical predictions about the gloomy future of the Earth, comparable to those initiated by Ehrlich and others in the 1960s and 1970s.  This is what Anthony Barnosky and his coauthors in another article in Nature call "biological forecasting." 

The most amazing feature of all of this writing is the silence about the failure of the "biological forecasting" of people like Paul Ehrlich.   When Ehrlich's Population Bomb was published in 1968, the world population was three and one half billion.  Today, the population has just passed seven billion.  This was not supposed to happen.  Ehrlich predicted that mass starvation in the 1970's would cause a collapse of world population to bring it down to the "carrying capacity" of the Earth. This is the logic of Thomas Malthus:  human population grows until there is not enough food to feed everyone, and then the population drops dramatically through famine, war, or disease until the balance with limited natural resources is restored.  While many people have starved in many parts of the world over the past 50 years, the average human life-span and per capita wealth have increased around the world. 

If scientific research is to be judged by falsifiable predictions, then the science of those like Ehrlich has been refuted by their record of falsified predictions.  In contrast to Ehrlich, Julian Simon argued that population growth was good as long as free markets and free trade allowed human entrepreneurial and inventive genius to find new ways to turn natural resources to productive uses.  To prove his point, Simon challenged Ehrlich to a bet.  In 1980, Ehrlich could pick a list of five commodity metals.  If Ehrlich was right, he would predict that by 1990 these metals would be so scarce that their prices would have risen.  If Simon was right, their prices would drop.  Ehrlich lost the bet.  The prices in 1990, adjusted for inflation, had dropped, just as Simon predicted. 

In 1989, I was on a year-long sabbatical at Stanford University doing research on "Darwinian natural right," and I audited some of the classes in the "Program in Human Biology" at Stanford.  Ehrlich is a Stanford biologist, and he lectured to some of the classes.  The students and faculty treated him with awe.  I was astonished that he was never challenged for his embarrassing failures.  In 1990, he lost his bet.  But he also received the "genius award" of the MacArthur Foundation!

Ehrlich is not a complete fool.  He has learned from his mistakes.  What he has learned is that he should never again make any predictions that are precise enough to be falsifiable.  So now he predicts an eminent "turning point" in the history of the Earth that will be catastrophic.  But he will not give us exact dates as he did in 1968.

So what's going on here?  It's the debate between Darwinian pessimism and Darwinian optimism.  It is well known that reading Thomas Malthus's book on population inspired Darwin in formulating his theory of evolution by natural selection in the "struggle for life."  It is possible, then, to infer that the natural evolution of life on earth is a history of population growth followed by mass starvation or conflict leading to a population decline falling back within the limits of scarce natural resources necessary for sustaining life.  Thus, "sustainability" is identified with limits to growth.

But, as I have indicated in some recent posts, it is also well known that reading Adam Smith inspired Darwin to see how human beings used social cooperation to achieve a dominance over the Earth.  Moreover, Darwin had some intimation of the importance of trade or exchange in allowing human beings to increase the productivity of their labor through specialization, just as Smith saw in The Wealth of Nations.  In The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley has developed this as the theme of all human history--the ever-increasing productivity of human life spurred by exchange and specialization--to explain human progress.  The critical turning point came with the Industrial Revolution--starting in England and Scotland during the lifetime of Smith--when human population and prosperity exploded to unprecedented levels.  The logic of Malthusian boom and bust was overturned, so that Darwinian pessimism could be replaced with Darwinian optimism.

Notice that in this new journalistic coverage for Ehrlich's Malthusian pessimism, there are no references to the arguments of people like Simon and Ridley.  Even in the articles in Nature, the scientists are careful not to mention the historical record supporting Darwinian optimism.

But don't we have good reasons to be pessimistic about the future?  If we continue using scarce resources (like fossil fuels) at the present rate, and if we continue to promote global warming at the present rate, can't we foresee catastrophe sometime in the near future?

For example, consider the following sentence in the article by Barnosky et al.: "A decrease in this extra energy budget, which is inevitable if alternatives do not compensate for depleted fossil fuels, is likely to impact human health and economics severely" (54).

But notice the conditional language--"inevitable if."  This points to what Ridley identifies as the fundamental fallacy of Malthusian pessimism--extrapolationism.  Extrapolate present trends into the indefinite future and catastrophe becomes inevitable.  Assume that the future will be a continuation of the present with no novel adaptations.  That was Ehrlich's mistake in 1968.

In The Population Bomb, he has a few pages on the possibility that new high-yield varieties of food grains might increase productivity to the point of feeding world population without any mass famines.  Ehrlich dismissed this as unlikely.  But that's exactly what happened.  Norman Borlaug's "green revolution" allowed countries like India to produce so much food in the 1970's that they actually become exporters of grain; and now India has become one of the more prosperous countries in the world.  India and China are the two most populous nations in the world, and they also have the greatest stockpiles of food grains.

Ridley draws the lesson from this:

The pessimists are right when they say that, if the world continues as it is, it will end in disaster for all humanity.  If all transport depends on oil, and oil runs out, then transport will cease.  If agriculture continues to depend on irrigation and aquifers are depleted, then starvation will ensue.  But notice the conditional: if.  The world will not continue as it is.  That is the whole point of human progress, the whole message of cultural evolution, the whole point of dynamic change--the whole thrust of this book.  The real danger comes from slowing down change.  It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine, and it solves problems by changing its ways.  It does so through invention driven often by the market: scarcity drives up price; that encourages the development of alternatives and of efficiencies.  It has happened often in history.  When whales grew scarce, petroleum was used instead as a source of oil.  (As Warren Meyer has put it, a poster of John D. Rockefeller should be on the wall of every Greenpeace office.)  The pessimists' mistake is extrapolationism: assuming that the future is just a bigger version of the past.  As Herb Stein once said, 'if something cannot go on forever, then it will not.'" (281)

But what about global warming?  Doesn't that bring the insurmountable limit to human population and economic growth?  Ridley's response is prudent.  He accepts the evidence for global warming as a product of human activities.  But then he asks us to consider the most reasonable response to this.  If we accept the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we can still be Darwinian optimists, Ridley argues, because the pessimistic assumptions about future global warming coming from the IPCC depend on optimistic assumptions about growing wealth, because it's the expansion of economic growth around the world that's likely to have the greatest effects on global climate.  Consequently, we should see that "the richer people get the less weather dependent their economies will be and the more affordable they will find adaptation to climate change" (333).  "In short, a warmer and richer world will be more likely to improve the well-being of both human beings and ecosystems than a cooler but poorer one" (341).  Those like Ehrlich argue just the opposite: a cooler but poorer world, with fewer human beings, would be better for us and for the Earth.

Darwinian optimists see a general trend in human history that is progressive--especially in the last 200 years--towards greater peace, prosperity, and population.  Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature surveys the evidence for declining violence in history leading to the "liberal peace" of the present.  Ridley's Rational Optimist surveys the evidence for growing prosperity and population.  Both support a Darwinian liberal progressivism based on the idea that classical liberal ideas--liberty, commerce, tolerance, limited government, bourgeois virtues--have promoted a course of cultural evolution that has cultivated the "better angels" of our evolved human nature.

It is not clear, however, that Darwinian thinking promotes a cosmic optimism.  After all, a Darwinian explanation of the place of human life in the cosmos would seem to indicate that the extinction of all life, including human life, is inevitable, and the most we can do is to slow the inevitable decline of Earthly life into entropy. 

That's a question for a future post.

REFERENCES

Anthony Barnosky, et al., "Approaching a State Shift in Earth's Biosphere," Nature, 486 (7 June 2012): 52-58.

Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).

Paul Ehrlich, Peter Kareiva, Gretchen Daily, "Securing Natural Capital, and Expanding Equity to Rescale Civilization," Nature, 486 (7 June 2012): 68-73.

Naomi Beck on Hayek (5): The Disregard for Darwin

Beck says that "Hayek's theory suffers from . . . disregard for the theories that inspired it" (5).  I agree with her about this--particularly in the case of Darwin.  Hayek was not a good interpreter of Charles Darwin.  Indeed, he does not even show any evidence that he had actually read Darwin!

Hayek criticized Darwin for seeing evolutionary selection as purely "genetic," and thus ignoring the importance of cultural evolution in explaining the history of human civilization.  He also criticized Darwin for ignoring group selection.  Beck rightly points out that this view of Darwin is incorrect (88-91).  Darwin accepted Lamarckian evolution through use and disuse.  He emphasized the importance of cultural evolution in explaining human social and moral history, particularly in The Descent of Man.  And he developed his own theory of group selection, which he called "community selection."  The proponents today of cultural group selection can see themselves as continuing in the tradition of Darwin.  So it is strange that Hayek did not see his own theory of cultural group selection as linked to Darwin's.

Hayek claimed that Darwin did not originate the idea of evolution, because he had inherited that idea from Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Smith, and others in the Scottish tradition of philosophy.  These were "Darwinians before Darwin."  Darwin's achievement was in applying this idea of evolution to the biological study  of the living world.  Beck criticizes Hayek for saying this: "This evaluation does not do justice to Darwin and demonstrates a rather regrettable incomprehension of his ideas, which in turn impoverished Hayek's analysis" (157).

I don't see her point here.  After all, Darwin himself acknowledged the history of the idea of evolution in the "Historical Sketch" that he added to the third edition of The Origin of Species.  Starting with Buffon, Darwin identified a long list of people who anticipated elements of evolutionary theory.  Beck says nothing about this.  It is true that he did not mention Hume and Smith in this "Historical Sketch," but he did cite them prominently in The Descent of Man.  And we know from Darwin's notebooks, that he began studying Scottish moral philosophy a few years after his return from his voyage on the Beagle as part of his effort to understand the evolution of human morality.

But if one is looking for some writer who exerted a crucial influence on Darwin's evolutionary thinking, Beck insists, one should look not at Mandeville, Hume, or Smith, but at Thomas Malthus.  After all, Darwin declared in his Autobiography that when he read Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population in October of 1838, "I had at last got a theory by which to work" (1959, 120).  Hayek, however, could not accept the Malthusian logic of evolution, Beck explains, because Hayek's ideological commitment to endless growth through capitalist expansion meant that he had to reject Malthus's warning that a growing human population must inevitably lead to a depletion of natural resources that will bring human misery.

But in assuming the truth of Malthus's reasoning, Beck ignores the anti-Malthusian arguments of Julian Simon and others that support Hayek's position.  This will be the subject of my next post.

Sex, War, and Malthusian Doom

In 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh after winning a 9-month war of independence from West Pakistan. Shortly after the end of the war, Malcolm Potts led an international team of doctors into Bangladesh to help the women who had been raped and made pregnant. They offered abortions to the women. In a conservative Muslim society, women who have been raped are shunned as unclean by their families and society generally. To have an abortion only adds to their humiliation. Over 100,000women were raped during the conflict, which made it perhaps the largest systematic rape of women in the history of the world.

The horror of this experience--and of similar experiences with warfare--led Potts to want to explain the cruelty of organized aggression in human history. The final product of his thinking is his book (co-authored with Thomas Hayden) entitled Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World (BenBella Books, 2008).

Reading this book in my course on "Biopolitics and Human Nature" has stirred a lively discussion among the students.

THREE THESES

Potts offers an evolutionary explanation for the causes of war and terrorism and for how such violence can be reduced. His argument turns on three claims.

His first claim is that young men have an evolved predisposition to "team aggression," which he identifies as the intentional coordination of young males in launching lethal attacks against members of their own species. He believes that there are only two species of social mammals showing this behavior--human beings and chimpanzees--and he explains this as showing an evolutionary history in which humans and chimps shared a common ancestral species in which young males practiced team aggression.

The primary insight for this claim came a few years after the war in Bangladesh, when Jane Goodall observed the chimps in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania waging a war between two chimp communities, in which young males organized themselves into raiding parties to attack individuals in the opposing community. Through a series of ferocious attacks, the Kasakela troop eventually conquered the territory of the rival Kahama troop.

Potts offers various kinds of arguments and evidence to support his claim that such team aggression among young males has shaped human evolution. There is fossil evidence that many hominid ancestors died from warfare. There is archaeological evidence that warfare is pervasive in human history. And there is anthropological evidence that foraging bands (like the Yanomamo, for example) have engaged in such team aggression. Moreover, there is also evidence for the "warfare hypothesis" in explaining human evolution as shaped by group-against-group violence that drove the evolution of human intelligence, religion, and state-formation.

Potts' second claim is that women do not have this evolved predisposition to team aggression. Of course, women are capable of aggressive violence. But they do not generally organize themselves into raiding parties for lethal violence against their enemies.

This leads to his third claim, which is that the best way to promote peace is to empower women so that their peacemaking tendencies can counter the warmaking tendencies of men. To achieve that, women need to have equal access to political power, and they need to have control over their lives.

Most importantly, women need to have freedom in controlling their reproduction through family planning, which requires access to contraception and abortion. If women are free to choose how many children they will have, Potts believes, they will generally choose to have small families. This will increase their social and political influence, because this will lessen the burdens of child care. This will also slow population growth, which will have the advantage of reducing the number of young males in proportion to older males, which reduces the likelihood of young male violence.

Potts is a life-long proponent of family planning. In 1968, he became the first doctor employed on the staff of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. This has led him to travel around the world promoting family planning.

He argues that family planning is the key to reducing population growth, which is the key to reducing war and terrorism. In over-populated societies, there are too many young males who lack economic resources and who cannot find sexual mates, which creates conditions favoring young male team aggression. Potts thinks this is evident in the societies that foster terrorism. Terrorists tend to be young, unmarried males with few opportunities for success in life, who become vengeful towards dominant outgroups, and who band together to attack their enemies.

I have identified courage in war as one of the 20 natural desires that shape human nature in all societies throughout history. That's the one desire on my list that has provoked the most criticism from people who don't like the idea that war is natural for human beings and a stage for the moral virtue of courage. While I have never written enough to support my evolutionary view of war, Potts' book provides a good survey of the reasoning and evidence for war as a natural desire--particularly, among young men--that manifests both the best and the worst in human beings.

But despite my general agreement with Potts, I do see at least eleven problems with Potts' position.

ELEVEN PROBLEMS

(1) THE NATURAL MALE INHIBITION AGAINST KILLING.
Most men will never kill anyone. In most men, there probably is a natural inhibition against killing. Even soldiers in war are often reluctant to kill the enemy, which is why special training is required to break down this inhibition. This point is elaborated in Dave Grossman's book--On Killing--which surveys the psychology of killing in war.

But if there is such a natural inhibition against killing, then how can Potts argue that young men are predisposed by their evolved nature to team aggression? Potts' answer is that evolution has given us an "empathy switch," so that "we seem to have an innate mental ability to treat our fellow humans with either great compassion or cold disregard, depending on whether we've assigned them to ingroup, or out" (70). The difference between men and women is that for young men, on average, it's easier to turn off the empathy switch when they think they're confronting an outgroup.

(2) VIOLENT WOMEN.
Potts notes the many historical examples of female violence in war. There are female suicide bombers and "warrior Amazons." Women have fought in military units. And in the American military, women are taking ever larger roles that take them into combat. Although this might seem to deny Potts' claim about sex differences in team aggression, he can answer by arguing that women engaging in team aggression are exceptional cases. We might see the behavioral profiles of men and women as two overlapping bell-shaped curves, so that despite the overlapping, we can still see the difference in their central tendencies.

(3) THE BONOBO PROBLEM.
Of the four extant great ape species--gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, and bonobos, chimps are the only species that shows male coalitional violence like that of human beings. The contrast is especially evident with bonobos, who have never been observed engaging in lethal violence, and who seem to show a "make-love-not-war" policy enforced by the females banding together to dominate over the males. That's why some feminists and pacifists suggest that if bonobos are closely related to humans, this should deny the claim that human violence is an evolved trait.

It's not clear to me that Potts has an adequate answer to this. He asserts that "team aggression died out in bonobos, while persisting in Pan troglodytes and Homo sapiens" (129). But this remains mere speculation. The problem here is that there is too little known about bonobos to reach clear conclusions on this issue.

(4) CULTURAL CIRCUMSTANCES.
The most common criticism of Potts is likely to be that his biological explanation of war and terrorism does not recognize the importance of cultural circumstances in shaping violent behavior. But, actually, Potts emphasizes that while the behavioral predisposition to team aggression is an evolved trait of men, the expression of that predisposition is determined by economic and social circumstances. So, for example, when there is a high proportion of young males in a society who lack resources and lack access to sexual partners and feel resentment towards a dominant outgroup, this is a social breeding ground for terrorism or street gangs. Consequently, we can control the predispositions to some degree by controlling the circumstances.

(5) THE NOVELTY OF MODERN WAR.
Modern military organizations don't look much like the raiding parties of chimps or human foragers. It was not until the emergence of the state as based on an agricultural economy about 5,000 years ago that mass armies were made possible, and this is too recent in human history to be a biological adaptation.

Potts' answer to this objection is that even modern armies are based on small units--squads (9-15 men) and platoons (45-70 men)--because the the psychology of team aggression still requires that young men see themselves as a "band of brothers" with a sense of camaraderie that can only arise in small units comparable in size to a chimp raiding party. This is true even though modern bureaucracy allows these small units to be organize hierarchically into massively large military organizations.

(6) SANGER AND EUGENICS.
As a proponent of family planning, Potts sees himself in the tradition of Margaret Sanger, who was the founder of the modern family planning movement. But in his praise of Sanger, he is silent about her dark side: she was a proponent of eugenics and sterilization for the "unfit." Although this might seem like a minor point, it's important as an indication of Potts' failure to be candid about the historical connections between family planning and eugenics.

(7) THE BREEDING OF FUNDAMENTALISTS.
Potts is disdainful of religious belief, and particularly, fundamentalist religious belief, because he see religious fundamentalism as opposed to modern science, which is, for him, the voice of reason in the world. But there's a problem here that he doesn't acknowledge. He likes to think that modern scientific rationalism will prevail in its battle with religious fundamentalism. And yet, he notes that religious believers tend to have much higher birth rates than secular people. If that's the case, doesn't that mean that eventually fundamentalist religious believers will prevail, just by virtue of their greater growth in population? Potts never confronts this problem for his argument.

(8) THE JULIAN SIMON PROBLEM.
Potts' argument for family planning to reduce population is based on the reasoning of Thomas Malthus that population growth must lead to a social collapse from the exhaustion of scarce resources. Malthusian doom pervades Potts' book, because he sees all of life as governed by competition over scarce resources. In taking this position, Potts never confronts the serious criticisms of the Malthusian view of the world. In particular, Potts never explicitly responds to the arguments of those like Julian Simon who insist that, on the whole, population growth is more a boon to humanity than a burden, because human beings add to resources through their productivity and their ingenuity. In his book The Ultimate Resource, Simon showed how the data of history refute the gloomy predictions of the Malthusians.

As far as I can see, there is only one paragraph on this point in Potts' book. He writes:

Free-market economists make up yet another important force from the right, arguing that population growth is good because growing markets create prosperity. They tend to believe that as young people reach working age they will contribute to the economy, even though the empirical evidence, as we have seen, is that in countries with rapid population growth young people merely join the lines of the unemployed. Many economists also claim that natural resource scarcities can be compensated for by technologies and price adjustments, and they too have been influential in reducing U.S. political interest in international family planning assistance. (327)

This is all he has to say. He is silent about the extensive evidence provided by Simon (and by others like Bjorn Lomborg and Matt Ridley) supporting the claim that when markets are free, population growth is generally beneficial.

Potts should at least say something about Simon's famous bet with Paul Ehrlich. In 1980, Simon bet Ehrlich $10,000 that the prices of a list of scarce metals would be lower by 1990, while Ehrlich predicted that the growing scarcity of these metals would produce much higher prices. Simon won the bet.

(9) STONE AGE EMOTIONS.
Potts shows how "Stone Age emotions" govern politics. For example, he argues, the "war on terror" as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks was an irrational expression of those "Stone Age emotions." The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not in the national security interests of the United States. But they were justified by President Bush who appealed to the natural emotional predisposition to team aggression in response to threats from a dangerous outgroup. Instead of yielding to such emotions, Potts claims, we should act by a "cool, objective analysis of risk" like a "dispassionate super computer" (174).

But how is this possible, if "an unemotional response is impossible" (113)? Although Potts often recommends that pure, dispassionate reason should suppress our "Stone Age emotions," he also says that we need to extend our evolved emotions of empathy from the ingroup to the outgroup (166-67, 238, 258). Moreover, in a few passages, he agrees that "the building blocks of human morality are emotional as well as cognitive" (361). Isn't it more realistic to appeal to the moral emotions of empathy, while extending them to ever wider groups, than to try to totally suppress the emotions under some dispassionate Kantian Reason? Isn't this extension of empathy (or "sympathy" as Hume, Smith, and Darwin called it) the psychological basis for "human rights" and humanitarian concern? This would seem to be more compatible with Darwin's view of the moral sense based on sympathy and with the moral psychology of the emotions developed by Darwinian psychologists today.

(10) THE JUSTICE OF MALE HONOR.
Potts gives some attention to the historical movements for abolishing slavery, for standards of just war, and for humanitarian conceptions of human rights, which have put some limits on the cruelty of war. But he does not comment on the fact that these movements have been led by men as well as women. Doesn't this show that the extension of empathy beyond narrow ingroups can be rooted in male moral psychology? Can't we see the traditional standards of just war as expressions of the manly love of honor and the desire to elevate warrior honor above brutish cruelty? If so, then this shows how the taming of manly aggression might come not just from womanly compassion but also from manly chivalry.

(11) THE MANLY HUMANITARIANISM OF SCIENCE.
Potts appeals to modern science as promoting a cosmopolitan community of rational understanding that can check the parochial predispositions of male team aggression. He writes: "Science, with its intrinsic honesty and its rejection of the supernatural as an answer to real world events, has proved the only medium in history capable of linking women and men of all cultures and all races in a common understanding of the real world" (360). But Potts doesn't ponder the fact that, for most of its history, modern science has been dominated by men. Doesn't this show another way in which the natural dispositions of some men--in this case, the Socratic desire for intellectual understanding--can be turned against male violence?

Some related posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Human Progress: (1) More Lives and Longer Lives

If evolutionary success is measured by high rates of survival and reproduction, leading to a growing population, then the human species has been amazingly successful over the last two hundred years.  (See Max Roser's article on "World Population Growth.")

Some historians have estimated that in 10,000 BCE, the world population was 2.4 million.  By 1,000 CE, it was 295 million.  By 1800, it was 900 million.  So, for thousands of years, the human population grew, but very slowly.  The annual growth rate was probably never more than .5%. 

But after 1800, the annual growth rate increased to .8% in 1900 and to 2.2% in 1962, which was the highest rate of growth in human history.  After 1962, population has grown, but at a declining rate.  Population has grown from 1.5 billion in 1900 to 6.1 billion in 2000, and then to 7.5 billion at the end of 2016.

Growth in population depends on the combination of two factors--the rate of fertility and the rate of mortality.  Prior to 1800, the rate of fertility was often high, but the rate of mortality was also high.  Women gave birth to many children with the expectation that only a few would survive to adulthood.  In the 19th century, beginning in northwestern Europe and North America, fertility remained high, but mortality declined, because improved standards of health and sanitation based on improved knowledge in medical science and public health lowered the rate of infant mortality and lengthened life expectancy.  Consequently, population began to grow faster than ever before in human history. No country in the world today has a lower life expectancy than the countries with the highest life expectancies in 1800.

Beginning in the first half of the 20th century, the most developed nations began to show a drop in the rate of fertility.  Social scientists have called this the "demographic transition."  In the more developed countries, women delay the age of their first pregnancy, and they choose to have fewer children.  As parents invest more in the education of their children, and as women have more opportunities for investing in their careers outside the home, parents choose to have fewer children.  By the 1960s, some countries saw fertility rates fall below replacement levels (less than 2.1 children per woman), which brought a decline in population along with an ageing of the population. (See my previous post on the demographic transition.)

In recent years, however, there has been some evidence that as societies move into the very highest levels of human development--as measured by long life expectancy, great wealth, and high levels of education--the declining trend in fertility is being reversed. By 2005, Sweden and some other highly developed societies were showing this, although the increase in fertility was still not yet up to replacement levels. (See Mikko Myrskyla et al., "Advances in Development Reverse Fertility Declines," Nature 460 [6 August 2009]: 741-43.)  For me, this shows that the natural human desire for children will always assert itself, although parents in the socioeconomic circumstances of modern liberal societies will often prefer to invest heavily in fewer children.

Even if the demographic transition has slowed the rate of growth in world population, the stupendous growth in population has continued.  Is this a sign of human progress or not?  Many thinkers of the Liberal Enlightenment have said yes.  David Hume, for example, in his long essay on "Of the Populouness of Ancient Nations," criticized ancient nations for having a lower growth in population than modern nations, and he argued: "every wise, just, and mild government, by rendering the condition of its subjects easy and secure, will always abound most in people, as well as in commodities and riches. . . . if every thing else be equal, it seems natural to expect, that, wherever there are most happiness and virtue, and the wisest institutions, there will also be most people" (Essays, Liberty Fund, p. 382).  Hume believed that population was growing faster in modern nations than in ancient nations because there was more liberty in modern nations: "human nature, in general, really enjoys more liberty at present, in the most arbitrary government of Europe, than it ever did during the most flourishing period of ancient times" (383).  After all, the primary difference between the economic life of the ancients and that of the moderns was the practice of slavery among the ancients.

Like Hume, Etienne Damilaville, in his article on "Population" in the French Encyclopedia, edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, claimed that liberty fosters a growing population, because "it is under mild, limited governments, where the rights of humanity are respected, that men will become numerous" (Encyclopedic Liberty, Liberty Fund, p. 502).

This belief that growing population was a sign of human progress in a free society was challenged by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), who warned that since population tends to increase faster than the production of food, restricting the number of births was the only way to avoid famine and starvation.

This Malthusian pessimism has been adopted by many modern environmentalists, who insist that the modern growth in human population is unsustainable and must soon lead to a catastrophic collapse of human civilization.  In 1968, Paul Ehrich began his best-selling book The Population Bomb by declaring:

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to 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. . . . We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. . . . The birth rate must be brought into balance with the death rate or mankind will breed itself into oblivion" (11).

Ehrlich wrote that he first knew "the feel of overpopulation" during "one stinking hot night in Delhi":

"My wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel in an ancient taxi.  The seats were hopping with fleas.  The only functional gear was third. As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area.  The temperature was well over f100, and the air was a haze of dusty and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowing through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect" (15).

For an environmentalist like Ehrlich, Hell is "people, people, people, people"--too many people!

Ehrlich's prediction of massive famines in the 1970s in overpopulated countries like India proved false because of people like Norman Borlaug.  Borlaug, an agronomist from Iowa, spent his life developing high-yield hybrid crops that would solve the problem of global hunger.  His success in doing this was called the Green Revolution.  After working for many years helping farmers in Mexico, Borlaug moved in 1963 to India and Pakistan, where he showed farmers that they could have better crops with bigger yields.  He also advised governments that farmers should be paid market prices for their crops instead of imposing price controls to subsidize food for urban people, because such price controls would reduce the supply of food. Today, India and Pakistan produce seven times more wheat than they did before Borlaug arrived.  In 1970, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work increasing the global food supply and thus averting the famines predicted by Ehrlich in 1968.

Major famines have largely disappeared from the world.  The great famines of the 20th century were mostly man-made in illiberal regimes like the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and North Korea.  In the 21st century, socialist regimes like that in Venezuela continue to produce food shortages.  Mao's "Great Leap Forward" famine in China (1958-1962) killed 30 million people, making it perhaps the greatest single catastrophe in human history.  Once the collectivized farms in China were abolished, and farming was privatized, food production increased, and now China produces a surplus of food for world markets. The freedom for people to choose their own work, and to reap the rewards, has made this most populous nation on Earth prosperous.

For Julian Simon, an economist at the University of Maryland, people like the Chinese farmers and Norman Borlaug illustrate the point that a growing human population is good, because people are so productive and inventive in solving problems that human beings are the "ultimate resource," and so having lots of them is good for us.  Simon's classical liberal approach to population made him Ehrlich's greatest adversary. 

Simon argued that there are no resources for human life without the human effort to discover and use them.  So, for example, petroleum is not inherently a resource. The Native Americans had no use for it.  It became useful only after human beings discovered how it could be used to satisfy human desires and then found efficient ways to extract it and sell it.

Of course, human beings are consumers of resources as well as producers, and people like Ehrlich assume that in general people consume more than they produce, so that population growth is bad. But Simon argued that growing human populations in free societies, where people are free to be inventively productive, will produce net increases in resources.