Notes On Julian L Simon And H Essay
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Executive Summary
The Resourceful Earth is a response to Global 2000 Report to the President, which is dead wrong in its frightening environmental and social predictions.
They summarize the findings of Global 2000 using two paragraphs from its own summary:
If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the world's people will be poorer in many ways than they are today.
For hundreds of millions of the desperately poor, the outlook for food and other necessities of life will be no better. For many it will be worse. Barring revolutionary advances in technology, life for most people on earth will be more precarious in 2000 than it is now - unless the nations of the world act decisively to alter current trends (Global 2000, p1; in The Resourceful Earth, 1).
To highlight our differences as vividly as possible, we restate the above summary with our substitutions in italics:
If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be less crowded (though more populated), less polluted, more stable ecologically, and less vulnerable to resource-supply disruption than the world we live in now. Stresses involving population, resources, and environment will be less in the future than now... The world's people will be richer in most ways than they are today... The outlook for food and other necessities of life will be better. . . life for most people on earth will be less precarious economically than it is now (1-2).
This is followed by a list of their major findings.
The basic message: continued techno-economic progress is assured provided that misguided ideas based on an irrational fear of science and its products do not interfere politically:
We are confident that the nature of the physical world permits continued improvement in humankind's economic lot in the long run, indefinitely. Of course there are always newly arising local problems, shortages and pollutions, due to climate or to increased population and income. Sometimes temporary large-scale problems arise. But the nature of the world's physical conditions and the resilience in a well-functioning economic and social system enable us to overcome such problems, and the solutions usually leave us better off than if the problem had never arisen; that is the great lesson to be learned from human history.
We are less optimistic, however, about the constraints currently imposed upon material progress by political and institutional forces, in conjunction with popularly-held beliefs and attitudes about natural resources and the environment, including belief that conditions are deteriorating, that physical limits will increasingly act as a brake upon progress, and that nuclear energy is more dangerous than energy from other sources (3-4).
The Specific Conclusions
Population growth and the quality of life: Simon and Kahn argue, first, that the population growth rate has declined significantly from 1964-65 (2.2%) to 1983 (1.75%). Thus estimates of the population in 2000 are too high. But besides, larger populations size has [historically] been a clear-cut sign of economic success and has accompanied improvement in the human lot. . . . And the increase in life expectancy, which is the main cause of the increase in population size . . . is the fundamental human good (26).
a growing population does not imply that human living on the globe will be more crowded in any meaningful fashion. World incomes are rising, allowing people to purchase better housing and mobility (7). US housing data are used to show improvements in floor space, plumbing, and person/room ratios.
The world s people are getting better roads and more vehicles; therefore they can move around more freely, and have the benefits of a wider span of area (7). The US now has three million miles of roads.
Land devoted to national parks has increased in the US (though the chart suggests that much of this was due to a single act of Congress in 1975 (Alaska??)).
Pollution: The likelihood of increasing pollution is conceded, but dismissed as a transitory effect of industrial modernization in less developed countries: In the early stages of industrialization, countries and people are not yet ready to pay for clean-up operations. But further increases in income almost as surely will bring about pollution abatement. Besides, pollution increases are more than offset by improvements in disease control: biological disease pollution has been declining, even in the poor countries, at a rate far outweighing any hazardous effect of man-made pollution, as seen in increased life-expectancy (9).
They assert that air and water pollution have been declining in the richer countries (9). In the case of water quality the two articles which consider it seem neither to support nor refute them. They make much of the example of improvements in the Great Lakes. The problem with this, as with the overall assertion, is that it is based on only a few pollutant and/or quality factors and ignores the possibility that new pollutants are increasing as older ones are decreasing.
Ecological (in)stability and vulnerability to disruption: These concepts are so diffuse that we have no idea how one would measure them directly (11). In general, with increased human capacity to disrupt the ecosystem humanity s ability to restore imbalances in the ecosystem also increases (12). And the trend data on pollution, food . . ., and life expectancy suggest that the life-supporting capacities have been increasing faster than the malign disturbances (12). Note that while the entire work is anthropocentric, the anthropocentrism of this passage makes its inconsistent. After all, increased human life expectancy does not speak to the question of ecosystem health, certainly not as directly as they seem to imply.
In light of the ecological destruction wrought by the Gulf War, it is interesting to note that the only exception they can see to their rosy expectations for the future is war.
Resources: Simon and Kahn reject the idea of physical limits to economic growth. They point to trends showing that the cost trends of almost every natural resource have been downward over the course of recorded history (14) ( Recorded history seems to mean the duration of the industrial revolution). Not only do raw materials tend to require less and less work time to acquire, their prices have even been falling relative to consumer goods and the Consumer Price Index. . . . This is a very strong demonstration of progressively decreasing scarcity and increasing availability of raw materials (14). In the meantime, We have learned to use less of given raw materials for given purposes, as well as to substitute cheaper materials to get the same services (14).
Poverty: average income for the world s population has been rising and income in the poorer countries has been rising at a percentage rate as great or greater than in the richer countries since World War II (Morawetz, 1978) (16). In addition, the relative stability of their [poorer countries ] internal income-distribution shares suggests that the poorer classes of representative countries have been participating in this income rise along with the richer classes (16).
Food: Consumption of food per person in the world is up over the last...
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