For nearly sixty years, environmentalists have shrieked warnings about overpopulation and Peak Everything. What will happen if population falls significantly, however? Marian Tupy warns of an economic and political collapse in a new book, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.
Human innovation holds much greater potential than projected resource limitations and alleged scarcity. Marian and I discuss that in my latest Ed Morrissey Show podcast, as well as the book he co-authored with Gale Pooley. In a sense, we are already seeing economic and innovation declines in nations where birth rates have fallen, which is more concerning to Marian than the obvious fiscal issues this has on safety-net programs to which these nations remain committed.
The crises at hand and the crises to come can clearly be traced back to the neo-Malthusianism of the 1960s and 1970s, Marian posits in both his book and in our conversation. The basis for these dire predictions were entirely false, and so are claims of Peak Everything that persist to this day. Marian address those in a Townhall column a week ago:
The relative scarcity of resources is typically measured by looking at prices. If prices rise, resources are deemed to be getting scarcer, and, if they fall, more abundant. The media sometimes scare their readers by reporting “nominal” prices (hence all the headlines about food and fuel prices being at a record highs), rather than “real” prices, which take into account inflation. It was on the inflation-adjusted prices of five metals that the Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich and the University of Maryland economist Julian Simon bet $1,000 in 1980. If the real prices went down over the next decade, they agreed, Ehrlich would pay Simon. If they went up, Simon would pay Ehrlich. Ehrlich lost.
The problem with real prices is that they ignore changes in incomes. Typically, though not always, individual incomes increase faster than inflation. That’s because people tend to grow more productive over their lifetimes and across time. Contrast the productivity of workers equipped with shovels and those driving giant excavators. While real prices are measured in dollars and cents, time prices are measured in hours and minutes. To calculate a time price, all you need to do is to divide the nominal price of a good or service by the nominal hourly income. That tells you how long you must work to afford something.
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Consider U.S. manufacturing workers. Between 1900 and 2018, the time prices of pork, rice, cocoa, wheat, corn, coffee, lamb and beef fell by 98.4%, 97.6%, 97.1%, 96.7%, 96.1%, 93.8%, 78.6% and 75.5% respectively. That means that the same length of time that bought 1 pound of each commodity, now buys 62.6, 41.1, 34.8, 30.5, 25.6, 16.2, 4.7 and 4 pounds. While people cannot eat rubber, aluminum, potash or cotton, the prices of these commodities are valuable inputs in the production processes that impact the prices of goods and services, and hence the overall standard of living. Their time prices fell by 99.4%, 98.9%, 98.2% and 95.8% respectively. All the while, the population of the United States rose from 23 million to 328 million.
Rather than pursue the depopulation strategies that even China now regrets, Marian advises nations to incentivize fertility. The need to maintain and expand intellectual engagement for innovation will only grow in the years ahead, and the resources will emerge as that innovation takes place. A population collapse, especially on the scale the neo-Malthusians propose, will demolish the momentum for human innovation and may condemn a far greater percentage of the global population into subsistence-level standards of living.
Don’t miss our chat on today’s podcast! Also on today’s #TEMS:
- What does the new poll from the Washington Post and ABC tell us about the midterms — and about other polls?
- In Russia, their war effort has grown so desperate that Putin and his cronies are trying to sell martyrdom.
- Finally, don’t believe everything you read in the media about Georgia Meloni’s victory in the Italian elections.
The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!
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