POPULATION GROWTH IS OUR GREATEST TRIUMPH This is the economic history of humanity in a nutshell: From 2 million or 200,000 or 20,000 or 2,000 years ago until the 18th Century there was slow growth in population, almost no increase in health or decrease in mortality, slow growth in the availability of natural resources (but not increased scarcity), increase in wealth for a few, and mixed effects on the environment. Since then there has been rapid growth in population due to spectacular decreases in the death rate, rapid growth in resources, widespread increases in wealth, and an unprecedently clean and beautiful living environment in the richer capitalistic countries along with a degraded environment in the poor and socialist countries. . The increase in the world's population represents our victory over death. In the 19th Century the earth could sustain only one billion people. Ten thousand years ago, only 1 million could keep themselves alive. Now, 5 billion people are living longer and more healthily than ever before, on average. You'd expect lovers of humanity to jump with joy at this triumph of human mind and organization over the raw forces of nature. Instead, they lament that there are so many to enjoy the gift of life. The current gloom-and-doom about a "crisis" of our environment is all wrong on the scientific facts. Even the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that U.S. air and our water have been getting cleaner rather than dirtier in the past few decades. Every agricultural economist knows that the world's population has been eating ever-better since World War II, defying simplistic Malthusian reasoning. . Every resource economist knows that all natural resources have been getting more available rather than more scarce, as shown by their falling prices over the decades and centuries. And every demographer knows that the death rate has been falling all over the world - life expectancy almost tripling in the rich countries in the past two centuries, and almost doubling in the poor countries in just the past four decades. This is the most important and amazing demographic fact -- the greatest human achievement in history. It took thousands of years to increase life expectancy at birth from just over 20 years to the high '20's about 1750. Then about 1750 life expectancy in the richest countries suddenly rose so that the length of life you could expect for your baby or yourself in the advanced countries jumped from less than 30 years to perhaps 75 years. Then starting well after World War II, the length of life you could expect in the poor countries has leaped upwards by perhaps fifteen or even twenty years since the l950s, caused by advances in agriculture, sanitation, and medicine. It is this decrease in the death rate that is the cause of there being a larger world population nowadays than in former times. One would expect lovers of humanity to jump with joy at this triumph of human mind and organization over the raw killing forces of nature. Instead, many lament that there are so many people alive to enjoy the gift of life, and even regret the decline in the death rate. And it is this worry that leads them to approve the Indonesian, Chinese and other inhumane programs of coercion and denial of personal liberty in one of the most precious choices a family can make -- the number of children that it wishes to bear and raise. The picture also is now clear that population growth does not hinder economic development. All the statistical studies show that faster population growth does not cause slower economic growthIn the 1980s there was a complete reversal in the consensus of thinking of population economists about the effects of more people. In 1986, the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences completely overturned its "official" view away from the earlier worried view expressed in 1971. It noted the absence of any statistical evidence of a negative connection between population increase and economic growth. And it said that "The scarcity of exhaustible resources is at most a minor restraint on economic growth". This U-turn by the scientific consensus of experts on the subject has gone unacknowledged by the press, the anti- natalist environmental organizations, and the agencies that foster population control abroad. For proper understanding of the important aspects of an economy we should look at the long-run trends. Almost every long-run trend in material human welfare points in a positive direction, as long as we view the matter over a reasonably long period of time. And there is no persuasive reason to believe that these trends will not continue indefinitely. But the short- run comparisons - between the sexes, age groups, races, political groups, which are usually purely relative - make more news. Would I bet on it? For sure. I'll bet a week's or month's pay - anything I win goes to pay for more research - that just about any trend pertaining to material human welfare will improve rather than get worse. You pick the comparison and the year. The world's problem is not too many people, but lack of political and economic freedom. Blaming population for poor countries' problems is a tragic intellectual error. page 1 /article4 popunenv/December 24, 1995 Julian L. Simon teaches business administration at the University of Maryland, and is the author of The Ultimate Resource (2nd edition forthcoming in early 1996) and other works on population economics. page 2 /article4 popunenv/December 24, 1995