If you think about it for a moment, it becomes clear that a growing population straining our finite planet means that resource prices will rise and people will become poorer on average. For example, Bill Maher, who most people, including myself, consider a smart guy, said in 2019: It's almost 8 o'clock now. It can't go on like this. The world is too crowded. ” He went on to suggest that we “be childless, die, and remain dead.”Maher is 21 years oldcent-Malthusian of the century. thomas robert malthusRemember, he wrote the famous 1798 Essay on population principleIn it, he argued that while food production increases arithmetically, population tends to increase geometrically. By the way, Malthus thought better than Maher. The fact that there were no major famines in Britain led Malthus to investigate ways to check people's tendency to multiply. But Malthus did not foresee what would actually happen, which would be a huge increase in the standard of living for a much larger number of people.
Fortunately, you can think about this problem for more than a minute. And our thinking can be influenced not only by intuition, but also by basic economic ideas about progress and a vast amount of economic history. You can also be informed by the knowledge of famous bets on resources. And the upshot of all of this thinking and economic history is that most of the resources, especially those sold in relatively free markets, have become more abundant relative to the population.
These are the opening paragraphs of my latest article against Hoover.How did Malthus go wrong?,” definition of ideaJanuary 11, 2024.
Another excerpt:
In their article, Blackman and Baumol present some surprising data on five minerals: tin, copper, iron ore, lead, and zinc. These show world reserves in 1950, world production from 1950 to 2000, and reserves in 2000. If we were to run out of resources, all reserves in 2000 would be smaller than in 1950. In fact, everything was big. This is most evident in the case of iron ore. In 1950 it was 19 billion tons. Between 1950 and 2000, 37.6 billion tons of iron ore were produced, more than the original tonnage. By 2000, global reserves had reached 140 billion tons, more than seven times the amount in 1950.
Near the end, I offer a bet with former co-blogger Arnold Kling, along the lines of Simon's bet with Ehrlich et al.
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