Julian Simon blows holes though conventional thinking around "limited" resources like basic materials, energy and food. His work should be mainstream but isn't. Internalizing this work will give you an edge over many of the so-called-expert s we hear from in every major media outlet.

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Product Description

Arguing that the ultimate resource is the human imagination coupled to the human spirit, Julian Simon led a vigorous challenge to conventional beliefs about scarcity of energy and natural resources, pollution of the environment, the effects of immigration, and the "perils of overpopulation." The comprehensive data, careful quantitative research, and economic logic contained in the first edition of The Ultimate Resource questioned widely held professional judgments about the threat of overpopulation, and Simon's celebrated bet with Paul Ehrlich about resource prices in the 1980s enhanced the public attention--both pro and con--that greeted this controversial book.

Now Princeton University Press presents a revised and expanded edition of The Ultimate Resource. The new volume is thoroughly updated and provides a concise theory for the observed trends: Population growth and increased income put pressure on supplies of resources. This increases prices, which provides opportunity and incentive for innovation. Eventually the innovative responses are so successful that prices end up below what they were before the shortages occurred. The book also tackles timely issues such as the supposed rate of species extinction, the "vanishing farmland crisis," and the wastefulness of coercive recycling.

In Simon's view, the key factor in natural and world economic growth is our capacity for the creation of new ideas and contributions to knowledge. The more people alive who can be trained to help solve the problems that confront us, the faster we can remove obstacles, and the greater the economic inheritance we shall bequeath to our descendants. In conjunction with the size of the educated population, the key constraint on human progress is the nature of the economic-political system: talented people need economic freedom and security to bring their talents to fruition.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #312724 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 778 pages

Amazon.com Review
Julian L. Simon is the world's greatest contrarian. The Ultimate Resource 2--an update, not a sequel, despite the title--skewers the sacred cows of environmentalism, population control, and Paul Ehrlich. In the contest between resource scarcity and human ingenuity, Simon bets the farm on the ability of intelligent people to overcome their problems. Thankfully, he is not a theorist. This book lays out convincing empirical evidence for Simon's prediction of a prosperous future. The key to progress is not state-run conservation programs, he says, but economic and political freedom. Only then can talented minds properly apply themselves to our earthly dilemmas.

From The Washington Post
"Julian Simon's 1981 book The Ultimate Resource excoriated prominent environmentalists for resorting to scare tactics and data-bending.... As Simon notes, the past sixteen years have been kind to many of his ideas.... Much as Simon had predicted, global per capita food production edged upward steadily while population rose and air quality improved in many places and ways."

Review
Julian Simon, an economics professor, systematically, shockingly, irresponsibly explodes each and every foundation of the whole environmental movement. And he does so with so many facts, graphs and examples that it would be a strange person who could walk away from reading this book without his or her faith in the assumptions of the environmental movement being just a little bit shaken up. . . . This is a magnificent book with the power to change minds. -- Review

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Customer Reviews

The doomslayer falls
On Sunday, February 8th, psychologist and economist Julian L. Simon succumbed to a heart attack in Maryland. It is difficult to overstate the damage his death will cause the world debate on overpopulation, natural resources, and the environment. Dr. Simon's prolific and energetic mind gave rise to fourteen books and countless papers and lectures, dedicated to overthrowing the dogma that underlies so much of today's environmental discourse.

Simon, still considered a maverick after thirty years of relentless data-gathering, impeccable empirical work, and well-thought out conclusions, questioned the unquestionable. He maintained that the earth is in good shape by every conceivable measure, and that the environmental situation continues to improve each year. Every index of human happiness - food prices, net income, infant mortality, life expectancy, disease rates - has steadily improved. He documented those claims with reams of data, culminating in his 1996 tour de force The State of Humanity. It is absolutely comprehensive, and contains enough obscure data to make the most jaded Trivial Pursuit fan squirm (if you ever want to read about the average lower-class Brazilian's annual starch intake, look no further).

Constantly vilified by his critics, Simon always had a small and devoted following. He was dubbed 'the Doomslayer' by Wired magazine for his repeated skewering of environmental fanatics and 'Birkenstock Puritans.' Perhaps the most memorable episode happened in 1980. Simon wrote exasperatedly in an article that he was sick and tired of environmentalists' insistence that large-scale natural starvation was right around the corner. He invited them to put their money where their mouths were. Paul Ehrlich, the influential author of The Population Bomb and predictor of worldwide famine and resource scarcity for the 1980s, stepped up to the plate. Simon invited Ehrlich and any of his colleagues to choose any five non-government-controlled resources, purchase $1000 worth in any combination, and specify a later date. If the resource bundle went up in price (implicating that they had become more scarce), then Simon would have to pay the difference. If they went down in price, signifying greater abundance, then Simon would receive the difference. Ehrlich and company jumped at this proposition, writing that they were looking forward to cashing in 'before other greedy people see this opportunity.' They chose five heavy metals used as inputs for industry, and specified ten years as the time to wait. And thus it occurred that Ehrlich and his colleagues wrote a check to Julian Simon for $576.80 in 1990. When Ehrlich claimed that it was a fluke, Simon offered to repeat the bet on the same terms, with a new bundle and a new time period. Ehrlich refused, and no one ever stepped up to take his place.

In 1996 Simon updated his classic The Ultimate Resource, in which he claimed that the human mind and human creativity are our best bet to overcome the world's problems. Thus, it's not possible to have too many people. Doomsayers, Simon argues, think of people as merely mouths to feed, rather than individuals with lives, dreams, and ideas. They lament population growth, never once thinking that one of those children might grow up to invent a more advanced farming technique, a cure for AIDS, or a way to construct cheap, safe housing. For the same reasons, Simon argues passionately against immigration restrictions. The only way immigrants can harm their new home countries is by imposing a new drain on the welfare state, and the data show that natives almost always take greater advantage of social programs than immigrants do.

Today, the Unabomber's atrocities find an excuse in his radical environmentalism. Children learn in school that the world would have been better off without them, and that ecological Armageddon is right around the corner. Al Gore writes of a grim future and the need for a 'wrenching' social re-organization to cope with the coming age of scarcity. Julian Simon, conversely, spent his life providing an accessible and empirically sound body of work that challenges the environmentalist agenda. Environmentalists should read his work, to see numerous examples of good science as well as to think long and hard about some of their most cherished and reliable beliefs. Teachers should read it, since they handle and assist the ultimate resource in its earliest stages. But all of us should, at the very least, recognize that the environmental debate has two sides, and that Julian Simon spent his life fighting long, hard, and nobly for his.

Magnificent--a tribute to humanity; a rubuke to Malthusians
Now in a second edition, and what a treat that is, because now the unquenchable optimism and sound forcasting of the first volume is backed up by decades of confirmatory data. Resources of all kinds--foods, metals, energy--are more abundant and cheaper, life expectancy is up, and so is the worldwide standard of living. Why is this so, in spite of the dire warnings (The Population Bomb, Famine: 1975!) of the latest crop of doomsayers? Read the book and find out. Find out also, why these trends show no signs of turning around--why the world will be even richer and more prosperous in the next century.

A reader, in an earlier review, suggests that Simon's ideas are "ridiculous" (in spite of the fact that he has been proven right, time and time again, and the doomsayers have to come out with new books every few years, adjusting forward their predictions of a doomsday that never comes), and goes on to say some very stupid things about "limits to the food supply." Go read them, then consider--that review, like most doomsayers, admits startling progress in increasing food yields, then assumes that such progress is over, or nearly so (six millennia of agricultural advance to the contrary). Why? In the first hundred pages of this book, Simon details cutting-edge technologies being employed commercially _today_ that could raise worldwide food production by orders of magnitude. But the eco-tastrophe crowd keeps talking about "closed systems," in spite of the fact that every new technological innovation keeps making the "system" effectively larger and larger.

An accessible, brilliant magnum opus on population economics
Simon's premise is simple: direct measures of material, human well-being correlate positively with population growth and there is no theoretical upper limit. Simply put, things are getting better and better, not in spite of population growth, but because of it! The reason is simple as well: the "ultimate resource" is human imagination and we will not only never run out of it, but we will get more of it as population increases.

This sounds crazy (and I thought Simon was a kook the first time I heard of him), but Simon lays out his theory in detail and shows the overwhelming empirical evidence in favor of it. Simon is not a lone nut, either. The scholarly work in the field of population economics solidly supports his view, even if he may overstate his case sometimes.

This is an update of the original book, so Simon has a chance to answer the critics of the first edition. The poor quality of the critics' arguments, along with their ad hominem attacks, reveals why environmentalist doomsaying is a sad, pathetic, quasi-religion that bitterly opposes examining the facts.