[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 11 (Thursday, February 12, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S786-S787]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              JULIAN SIMON

 Mr. ABRAHAM. Mr. President, I would like to bring to my 
colleagues attention an article by Ben Wattenberg on the recent passing 
of economist Julian Simon. Dr. Simon, who I had the pleasure of 
meeting, was a great lover of freedom and a strong advocate for free 
markets. He was a pioneer who presented important research showing the 
benefits of legal immigration. His research also demonstrated that the 
rationale for the type of population control practiced in many places 
in the world is misguided and harmful. In other words, human beings are 
not problems to be solved. Such positions never won him popularity 
contests among certain groups, but as The Washington Times wrote of 
Julian Simon: ``His forecasts about trends in resource availability, 
pollution and other effects of additional people have been completely 
borne out by events.'' A fitting epitaph. I ask that the articles by 
Ben Wattenberg and Julian Simon be printed in the Record.
  The articles follow:

             [From The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 11, 1998]

                           Malthus, Watch Out

                          (By Ben Wattenberg)

       Julian Simon, who waged intellectual war on 
     environmentalists and Malthusians, died suddenly on Sunday. 
     He would have been 66 tomorrow, the day of his funeral.
       Simon could sometimes glow like an exposed wire, crackling 
     with nervous intellectual intensity. Privately, he had a soul 
     of purest honey. But by force of will, fueled by his sizzling 
     energy, Simon helped push a generation of Americans to 
     rethink their views on population, resources and the 
     environment. By now it is clear that in this task he was 
     largely successful. As the years roll on he will be more 
     successful yet, his work studied, and picked at, by regiments 
     of graduate students.
       His keystone work was ``The Ultimate Resource,'' published 
     in 1981 and updated in 1996 as ``The Ultimate Resource 2'' 
     (Princeton University Press). Its central point is clear: 
     Supplies of natural resources are not finite in any serious 
     way; they are created by the intellect of man, an always 
     renewable resource. Coal, oil and uranium were not resources 
     at all until mixed well with human intellect.
       The notion drove some environmentalists crazy. If it were 
     true, poof!--there went so many of the crises that justified 
     their existence. From their air-conditioned offices in high-
     rise buildings, they brayed: Simon believes in a 
     technological fix! The attacks often got personal: Simon's 
     doctorate was in business economics, they sniffed; he had 
     merely been a professor of advertising and marketing, and--
     get this--he had actually started a mail order business and 
     written a book about how to do it. Never mind that he also 
     studied population economics for a quarter century.
       In fact, it was Simon's knowledge of real-world commerce 
     that gave him an edge in the intellectual wars. He knew 
     firsthand about some things that many environmentalists had 
     only touched gingerly, like prices. If the real resource was 
     the human intellect, Simon reasoned, and the amount of human 
     intellect was increasing, both quantitatively through 
     population growth and qualitatively through education, then 
     the supply of resources would grow, outrunning demand, 
     pushing prices down and giving people more access to what 
     they wanted, with more than enough left over to deal with 
     pollution and congestion. In short, mankind faced the very 
     opposite of a crisis.
       Simon rarely presented a sentence not supported by facts--
     facts arranged in serried ranks to confront the opposition; 
     facts about forests and food, pollution and poverty, nuclear 
     power and nonrenewable resources; facts used as foot soldiers 
     to strike blows for accuracy.
       In a famous bet, gloom-meister Paul Ehrlich took up Simon's 
     challenge and wagered that between 1980 and 1990 scarcity 
     would drive resource prices up. Simon bet that progress would 
     push prices down. Simon won the bet, easily. Mr. Ehrlich won 
     a MacArthur Foundation ``genius'' grant. But the wheel turns, 
     and we'll see who's a genius. Fortune magazine listed 
     Simon among ``the world's most stimulating thinkers.'' Mr. 
     Ehrlich didn't make the cut.
       Simon sensed the primacy of something else that many 
     environmentalists and crisis-mongers didn't catch on to for a 
     quite a time: Human intellect could best be transformed into 
     beneficial goods and services in an atmosphere of political 
     and economic liberty. At the United Nations' Mexico City 
     population conference in 1984 Simon winced, and 
     counterattacked, when population alarmists caricatured the 
     Reagan-appointed American delegation as promoting the idea 
     that ``capitalism is the best contraceptive.'' It was not a 
     good idea to ridicule capitalism, or free markets, or human 
     liberty, in Simon's presence.
       Of course, rising living standards do tend to depress 
     fertility. Living standards do rise faster under democratic 
     market systems. Smart folks now know that the fruits of 
     economic growth can be used to diminish pollution. You don't 
     hear much anymore about how we're running out of everything. 
     (Next task: Simonize the Global Warmists.)
       Finally, unlike many of his opponents, Julian was a 
     traditionalist. He did not work on the Sabbath, and the 
     Friday Sabbath dinner at the Simon house was always a gentle 
     and joyous celebration.
       At rest on the Sabbath, Julian was indefatigable the rest 
     of the week, chasing his precious facts. If Thomas Malthus is 
     in heaven, he's in for an argument, laced with facts, facts, 
     facts.
                                  ____


         [From the Wall Street Journal Tuesday, April 22, 1997]

                     Another Sure Bet on Earth Day

                          [By Julian L. Simon]

       The message of Earth Day is uplifting today just as it was 
     in 1970. But any reasonable person who looks at the 
     statistical evidence must agree that Earth Day's original 
     scientific premises are simply wrong.
       Panic reigned during the first Earth Week. The doomsaying 
     environmentalists--among whom the pre-eminent figure was Paul 
     Ehrlich--asserted that the oceans and the Great Lakes were 
     dying; great famines were impending; the death rate would 
     quickly increase, due to pollution; and increasingly-scarce 
     raw materials would reverse the past centuries' progress in 
     the standard of living.

[[Page S787]]

     Every ill was the result of exploding populations in the U.S. 
     and abroad. The doomsayers urged government-coerced birth 
     control, abroad and even at home.
       Of course none of those calamities have occurred. Indeed, 
     long before 1970, however, most agricultural economists--led 
     by Nobel Prize winner Theodore Schultz--had known that people 
     throughout the world have been living longer and eating 
     better since at least 1950 in the poor countries, and for two 
     centuries in the rich countries. Fewer people die of famine 
     than a century ago. The real prices of food are lower than in 
     earlier periods.
       All other raw materials, too: In the great 1963 book 
     ``Scarcity and Growth,'' Harold Barnett and Chandler Morse 
     had documented that prices had been declining throughout 
     history, signaling increased natural-resource availability 
     rather than growing scarcity.
       Data showing improved cleanliness of air and purity of 
     water in the rich countries had been published before 1970. 
     Since then the major air and water pollutions in the advanced 
     countries have continued to abate rather than worsen. And 
     statistical studies by Richard Easterlin and Nobel Prize 
     winner Simon Kuznets had in 1967 shown there to be no 
     statistical evidence that population growth hinders economic 
     progress. Yet the environmental organizations, the press, and 
     the Clinton administration still take as doctrine exactly the 
     same falsified ideas expressed by the doomsayers in 1970.
       Scientific opinion about population growth has now shifted 
     away from the doomsayers' apocalyptic views. In 1986 the 
     National Academy of Sciences published a report on population 
     growth and economic development prepared by a prestigious 
     scholarly committee chaired by economists D. Gale Johnson and 
     Ronald Lee. It reversed almost completely the frightening 
     conclusions of the previous NAS report in 1971. The expert 
     group found ``no statistical association between national 
     rates of population growth and growth rates of income per 
     capita,'' though they hedged their qualitative judgment a 
     bit. The report found benefits of additional population as 
     well as costs.
       I'm sufficiently certain about these trends that I'm 
     willing to put my money where my mouth is. In 1980, Mr. 
     Ehrlich and two associates bet me that increasing scarcity 
     would bring higher prices of raw materials. We agreed to 
     assess the trends in $1,000 worth of copper, chrome, nickel, 
     tin, and tungsten for ten years. I would win if resources 
     grew more abundant and thus cheaper, and they would win if 
     resources became more expensive. At settling time in 1990, 
     the Ehrlich team sent me a check for $576.07. The inflation-
     adjusted price of our basket of metals had declined more than 
     40% over the bet period.
       More environmental and resource data are available 
     nowadays. And a single bet proves little. Hence I make the 
     new broader bet offer to any prominent doomsayer that just 
     about any trend pertaining to material human welfare will 
     improve rather than get worse. The other person picks the 
     trend(s)--life expectancy, a price of a natural resource, 
     some measure of air or water pollution, the number of 
     telephones per person, or whatever--and chooses the area of 
     the world, and the future year a decade or more hence.
       Professor Ehrlich and global-warming climatologist Stephen 
     Schneider have responded to my offer with a strategy one 
     might call switch-and-bait. They first switch the subject 
     from material human welfare, and offer to bet on a set of 
     physical indicators such as sperm count, global temperature, 
     and levels of carbon dioxide and ozone. They call these 
     elusive measures ``indirect indicators.'' But they are not 
     relevant. The subject is economic welfare (including health) 
     and not atmospheric science.
       Furthermore, the economic goodness or badness of many 
     physical indicators is quite unknown. Carbon dioxide makes 
     the plants grow faster; more of it may be a good thing. And 
     only two decades ago Mr. Schneider wrote a book about the 
     imminent danger of global cooling, so perhaps a higher mean 
     temperature is not the demon he now warns us of.
       When I explain these ideas, Mr. Ehrlich baits me--on 
     National Public Radio and elsewhere--by saying that I 
     ``chickened out'' and ``ran.'' The fact that these folks have 
     to resort to such a switch-and-bait ploy reveals a lot about 
     the strength of their position.
       The continuing influence of the failed forecasters among 
     the media and policy makers is frustrating. But it's spring, 
     so let's look at the good news. There is every scientific 
     reason to be joyful about the trends in Earth's condition, 
     and to be hopeful for humanity's future. So we can safely 
     ignore the scare stories and have a Happy Earth Day.

                          ____________________