Please ask yourself: Is the trend of black infant mortality good or bad? Almost everyone's reaction is that black infant mortality is a bad situation. But look at a graph of black and white infant mortality in the United States since 1915. White infant mortality in 1915 was almost 100 deaths per 1000 births, and black infant mortality was fully 180 deaths per 1000 births. Both are horrifying. And the rates were even more horrifying in earlier years in some places -- up to 300 or 400 deaths per thousand births. Figure 1 Nowadays white infant mortality is about nine per thousand, and black infant mortality is about 18 per thousand. Of course it is bad that black mortality is higher than for whites. But should we not be impressed by the tremendous improvement for both races -- both falling to about ten percent of what they were -- with the black rate coming ever closer to the white rate? Is not this extraordinary improvement for the entire population the most important story -- and a most happy story? Yet the press gives us the impression that we should be mainly distressed about the state of black infant mortality. The gloom-and-doom about a "crisis" of our environment is all wrong on the scientific facts. Even the 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. 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. The picture also is now clear that population growth does not hinder economic development. In 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. Here is my central assertion: Almost every economic and social change or trend points in a positive direction, as long as we view the matter over a reasonably long period of time. For proper understanding of the important aspects of an economy we should look at the long-run trends. But the short-run comparisons - between the sexes, age groups, races, political groups, which are usually purely relative - make more news. To repeat, just about every important long-run measure of human welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries, in the United States as well as in the rest of the world. And there is no persuasive reason to believe that these trends will not continue indefinitely. 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. First come, first served. Material welfare, not emotional or spiritual or sexual or social. Not ozone but cancers. Not greenhouse but agriculture and standard of living. And I'll be happy to bet with Norman Myers about many of the trends that he thinks are going to be bad in the future. Take a look at Figure 1. What do you think it portrays? It is a graph of human life expectancy at birth, which slowly crept up from the low 20s thousands of years ago to the high 20s about 1750. Then about 1750 life expectancy in the richest countries suddenly took off and tripled in about two centuries. In just the past two centuries, 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. What greater event has humanity witnessed? Figure 1 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. (See Figure 2). Figure2 It is this decrease in the death rate that is the cause of there being a larger world population nowadays than in former times. The most important and amazing demographic fact -- the greatest human achievement in history, in my view - - is this decrease in the world's death rate. The point of showing you the figure this way is that this shape of figure is used to scare people about population growth simply from the shape alone, and the argument "This obviously can't continue." Indeed, it was a figure exactly like this one of population growth that got me to enlist in the great war against population growth. But as is obvious from fact that upward zoom of curve of life expectancy proves nothing, so same shape for other variables proves nothing. Let's put it differently. In the 19th century the planet Earth could sustain only one billion people. Ten thousand years ago, only 4 million could keep themselves alive. Now, 5 billion people are living longer and more healthily than ever before, on average. The increase in the world's population represents our victory over death. I 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. Some even express regret over the fall in the death rate. Throughout history, the supply of natural resources always has worried people. Yet the data clearly show that natural resource scarcity -- as measured by the economically- meaningful indicator of cost or price -- has been decreasing rather than increasing in the long run for all raw materials, with only temporary exceptions from time to time. That is, availability has been increasing. Consider copper, which is representative of all the metals. In Figure 3 we see the price relative to wages since 1801. The cost of a ton is only about a tenth now of what it was two hundred years ago. This trend of falling prices of copper has been going on for a very long time. In the l8th century B.C.E. in Babylonia under Hammurabi -- almost 4000 years ago -- the price of copper was about a thousand times its price in the U.S. now relative to wages. At the time of the Roman Empire the price was about a hundred times the present price. In Figure 4 we see the price of copper relative to the consumer price index. Everything that we buy - pens, shirts, tires - has been getting cheaper over the years because we know how to make them cheaper. Burt extraordinarily, natural resources have been getting cheaper even faster than consumer goods. So by any measure, natural resources have getting more available rather than more scarce. Regarding oil, the price rise since the 1970's does not stem from an increase in the cost of world supply. The production cost per barrel in the Persian Gulf still is perhaps 50 cents per barrel. Concerning energy in general, there is no reason to believe that the supply of energy is finite, or that the price of energy will not continue its long-run decrease forever. I realize that it sounds weird to say that the supply of energy is not finite or limited, but I'll be delighted to give you a whole routine on this in the question period if you ask. Food is an especially important resource. The evidence is particularly strong for food that we are on a benign trend despite rising population. The long-run price of food relative to wages is now only perhaps a tenth of what it was two centuries ago. Even relative to consumer products the price of grain is down, due to increased productivity. There is only one important resource which has shown a trend of increasing scarcity rather than increasing abundance. That resource is the most important of all -- human beings. Yes, there are more people on earth now than ever before. But if we measure the scarcity of people the same way that we measure the scarcity of other economic goods -- by how much we must pay to obtain their services -- we see that wages and salaries have been going up all over the world, in poor countries as well as in rich countries. The amount that you must pay to obtain the services of a barber or a cook has risen in India, just as the price of a barber or cook -- or economist -- has risen in the United States over the decades. This increase in the price of peoples' services is a clear indication that people are becoming more scarce even though there are more of us. About pollution now: The evidence with respect to air indicates that pollutants have been declining [SHOW], especially the main pollutant, particulates. With respect to water, the proportion of monitoring sites in the U.S. with water of good drinkability has increased since the data began in l96l. Species extinction is a key issue for the environmental movement. It is the subject of magazine stories with titles like "Playing Dice with Megadeath": whose sub-title is "The odds are good that we will exterminate half the world's species within the next century." The issue came to scientific prominence in 1979 with my debate opponent Norman Myers's book The Sinking Ark. It then was brought to an international public and onto the U. S. policy agenda by the 1980 Global 2000 Report to the President. "Hundreds of thousands of species -- perhaps as many as 20 percent of all species on earth -- will be irretrievably lost as their habitats vanish, especially in tropical forests," it said. The actual data on the observed rates of species extinction are wildly at variance with Myer's and following statements, and do not provide support for the various policies suggested to deal with the purported dangers. Here's what we know from his book (summarized in Figure 5): (l) The estimated extinction rate of known species is about one every four years between the years from l600 to l900. (2) The estimated rate is about one a year from l900 to the present. (3) Some scientists (in Myers's words) have "hazarded a guess" that the extinction rate "could now have reached" l00 species per year. That is, the estimate is simply conjecture; it is not even a point estimate but rather an upper bound. The source given for the "some scientists" statement is a staff- written news report. It should be noted, however, that the subject of this guess is different than the subject of the esti- mates in (l) and (2), because the former includes mainly or exclusively birds or mammals whereas the latter includes all species. While this difference implies that (l) and (2) may be too low a basis for estimating the present extinction rate of all species, it also implies that there is even less statistical basis for estimating the extinction rate for species other than birds and mammals than it might otherwise seem. (4) This guessed upper limit in (3) is then increased and used by Myers, and then by Lovejoy, as the basis for the "projections" quoted above. In Report to the President the language has become "are likely to lead" to the extinction of between l4% and 20% of all species before the year 2000. So an upper limit for the present that is pure guesswork has become the basis of a forecast for the future which has been published in newspapers to be read by tens or hundreds of millions of people and understood as a scientific statement. With respect to population growth: A dozen competent statistical studies, starting in 1967 with an analysis by Nobel prizewinner Simon Kuznets, agree that there is no negative statistical relationship between economic growth and population growth. There is strong reason to believe that more people have a positive effect in the long run. Population growth does not lower the standard of living - all the evidence agrees. And the evidence supports the view that population growth raises it in the long run. Now we need some theory to explain how it can be that economic welfare grows along with population, rather than humanity being reduced to misery and poverty as population grows. The Malthusian theory of increasing scarcity, based on supposedly-fixed resources, which is the theory that the doomsayers rely upon, runs exactly contrary to the data over the long sweep of history. And therefore it makes sense to prefer another theory. The theory that fits the facts very well is this: More people, and increased income, cause problems in the short run. Short-run scarcity raises prices. This presents opportunity, and prompts the search for solutions. In a free society, solutions are eventually found. And in the long run the new developments leave us better off than if the problems had not arisen. When we take a long-run view, the picture is different, and considerably more complex, than the simple short-run view of more people implying lower average income. In the very long run, more people almost surely imply more available resources and a higher income for everyone. I suggest you test this proposition as follows: Do you think that our standard of living would be as high as it is now if the population had never grown from about four million human beings perhaps ten thousand years ago? I don't think we'd now have electric light or gas heat or autos or penicillin or travel to the moon or our present life expectancy of over seventy years at birth in rich countries, in comparison to the life expectancy of 20 to 25 years at birth in earlier eras, if population had not grown to its present numbers. If population had never grown, instead of the pleasant lunch you had, you would have beenout chasing rabbits and digging roots instead. DISCUSSION I understand that many pop control and environment people are well-motivated. I began work on the economics of population believing that it, like war, was one of the two great threats to humanity. Frank Notestein incident in elevator. But data changed my mind. page 1 \whittle \norton09 January 20, 1993 *** USE FOR ULT RES People who call themselves "environmentalists" sometimes say to people like me: "You don't appreciate nature". I'll bet I spend more hours of the year outdoors than Norman Myers or any staff member of an environmental organization whose job is not specifically outdoors. I'm outside about nine hours a day perhaps 150 days a year - every day that it is not too cold for me to work. On average, only about one afternoon a year is it too hot for me to be outside (none in 1992); shirtless and in shorts, with a fan blowing and a sponge of water on top of my head, I am comfortable outside if the temperature is less than 95 or even 100 degrees. Does this not show some appreciation of the out-of-doors? Two pairs of binoculars are within reach to watch the birds. I love to check which of the tens of species of birds who come to sup from the mulberry tree behind our house will arrive this year, and I never tire of watching the hummingbirds at our feeder. I'll match my birdwatching time with just about any environmentalist, and I'll bet that I've seen more birds this spring than most of your environmental friends. And I can tell you that Jeremy Rifkin is spectacularly wrong when he writes that a child grows up in the Northeast without hearing birds sing nowadays. There are more different birds around now than there were 45 years ago, when I first started watching them. (The mulberry tree is a great attraction, of course.) As to my concern for other species: I don't like to kill even spiders and cockroaches, and I'd prefer to shoo flies outside of the house rather than swat them. But if it's them versus me, I have no compunction about killing them even if it is with regret. The best part of my years in the Navy were the sunsets and sunrises at sea, the flying fish in tropical waters, the driving rain and high waves, too, even at the cost of going without sitdown meals. And being aboard a small ship smack in the middle of a killer typhoon - the same spot where thirteen U.S. ships foundered and sank in World War II - was one of the great experiences of my life. There is no more compelling evidence of the awesome power of nature. When I was an Eagle Scout I delighted in the nature-study merit-badge learning. I loved building bridges over streams using only vines and tree limbs, and I was proud of my skill at making fires with flint and steel or Indian-style with bow-and- drill and tinder. The real issue is not whether one cares about nature, but whether one cares about people. Environmental sympathies are not in dispute; because one puts the interests of one's children before the interests of the people down the street does not imply that one hates the neighbors, or even is disinterested in them. The central matters in dispute here are truth, and liberty, and the desire to impose one's aesthetic and moral tastes on others. *** page 2 \whittle \norton09 January 20, 1993 In the short run, all resources are limited. An example of such a finite resource is the amount of time allotted to me to speak. The longer run, however, is a different story. The standard of living has risen along with the size of the world's population since the beginning of recorded time. There is no convincing economic reason why these trends toward a better life should not continue indefinitely. The key theoretical idea is this: The growth of population and of income create actual and expected shortages, and hence lead to price run-ups. A price increase represents an opportunity that attracts profit-minded entrepreneurs to seek new ways to satisfy the shortages. Some fail, at cost to themselves. A few succeed, and the final result is that we end up better off than if the original shortage problems had never arisen. That is, we need our problems though this does not imply that we should purposely create additional problems for ourselves. I hope that you will now agree that the long-run outlook is for a more abundant material life rather than for increased scarcity, in the United States and in the world as a whole. Of course such progress does not come about automatically. And my message certainly is not one of complacency. In this I agree with the doomsayers - that our world needs the best efforts of all humanity to improve our lot. I part company with them in that they expect us to come to a bad end despite the efforts we make, whereas I expect a continuation of humanity's history of successful efforts. And I believe that their message is self- fulfilling, because if you expect your efforts to fail because of inexorable natural limits, then you are likely to feel resigned; and therefore to literally resign. But if you recognize the possibility - in fact the probability - of success, you can tap large reservoirs of energy and enthusiasm. Adding more people causes problems, but people are also the means to solve these problems. The main fuel to speed the world's progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brakes are a) our lack of imagination, and b) unsound social regulations of these activities. The ultimate resource is people - especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty - who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so inevitably they will benefit not only themselves but the rest of us as well. Thank you. page 3 \whittle \norton09 January 20, 1993 CONCLUDING STATEMENT[Is this in my text? If yes, take out here] Here are some additional thoughts that I would have spoken during the debate if there had been the opportunity to do so: 1. This is the overarching theory that I offer you to explain why things happen exactly the opposite of the way Malthus and the contemporary Malthusians predict - and why I offer to bet that any measure of human welfare that you choose will show improvement rather than deterioration. In 1951, Theodore Schultz published an article called "The Growing...". He showed that because of technological change, two related things were happening: Food production per person was going up, and the need for agricultural land was going down - even as population was growing very fast. In 1963, Harold Barnett and Chandler Morse showed that despite all the theory about limited quantities of raw materials, and reducing richness of the lodes that are mined, all the raw materials they studied had become less expensive and more available for the decades since the 1870s. A general process underlies these specific findings: Human beings create more than they use, on average. It had to be so, or we would be an extinct species. And this process is, as the physicists say, and invariancy (see E. Wigner). It applies to all metals, all fuels, all foods, and all other measures of human welfare, and it applies in all countries, and at all times. In other words, this is a theory of "everything economic", or really a theory of economic history, the way the physicists are searching for a Theory of Everything in the physicists' domain. [Note that this is a theory, as distinction from theory as in "economic theory".] page 4 \whittle \norton09 January 20, 1993 2. Consider this example of the process by which people wind up with increasing availability rather than decreasing availability of resources. England was full of alarm in the l600's at an impending shortage of energy due to the defor- estation of the country for firewood. People feared a scarcity of fuel for both heating and for the iron industry. This impending scarcity led to the development of coal. Then in the mid-l800's the English came to worry about an impending coal crisis. The great English economist, Jevons, calculated that a shortage of coal would bring England's industry to a standstill by l900; he carefully assessed that oil could never make a decisive difference. Triggered by the impending scarcity of coal (and of whale oil, whose story comes next) ingenious profit-minded people developed oil into a more desirable fuel than coal ever was. And in l990 we find England exporting both coal and oil. Another element in the story: Because of increased demand due to population growth and increased income, the price of whale oil for lamps jumped in the l840's, and the U.S. Civil War pushed it even higher, leading to a whale oil "crisis." This provided incentive for enterprising people to discover and produce substitutes. First came oil from rapeseed, olives, linseed, and camphene oil from pine trees. Then inventors learned how to get coal oil from coal. Other ingenious persons produced kerosene from the rock oil that seeped to the surface, a product so desirable that its price then rose from $.75 a gallon to $2.00. This high price stimulated enterprisers to focus on the supply of oil, and finally Edwin L. Drake brought in his famous well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Learning how to refine the oil took a while. But in a few years there were hundreds of small refiners in the U.S., and soon the bottom fell out of the whale oil market, the price falling from $2.50 or more at its peak around l866 to well below a dollar. And in 1993 we see Great Britain exporting both coal and oil. We should note that it was not the English government that developed coal or oil, because governments are not effective developers of new technology. Rather, it was individual entrepreneurs who sensed the need, saw opportunity, used all kinds of available information and ideas, made lots of false starts which were very costly to many of those individuals but not to others, and eventually arrived at coal as a viable fuel -- because there were enough independent individuals investigating the matter for at least some of them to arrive at sound ideas and methods. And this happened in the context of a competitive enterprise system that worked to produce what was needed by the public. And the entire process of impending shortage and new solution left us better off than if the shortage problem had never arisen. Here we must address another crucial element in the economics of resources and population -- the extent to which the political-social-economic system provides personal freedom from government coercion. Skilled persons require an appropriate social and economic framework that provides incentives for working hard and taking risks, enabling their talents to flower and come to fruition. The key elements of such a framework are economic liberty, respect for property, and fair and sensible rules of the market that are enforced equally for all. 3. The world's problem is not too many people, but lack of political and economic freedom. Powerful evidence comes from pairs of countries that have the same culture and history, and had much the same standard of living when they split apart after World War II -- East and West Germany, North and South Korea, Taiwan and China. In each case the centrally planned communist country began with less population "pressure", as measured by density per square kilometer, than did the market-directed economy. And the communist and non-communist countries also started with much the same birth rates. But the market-directed economies have performed much better economically than the centrally-planned economies. This powerful explanation of economic development cuts the ground from under population growth as a likely explanation. 4. My talk discussed the factual evidence concerning population, resources, and the environment. But in 1993 there is an important new element not present twenty years ago. The scientific community now agrees with almost all of what you have just heard. My comments today do not represent a single lone voice, but rather the scientific consensus. The earlier remarks about agriculture and resources have always represented the consensus of economists in those fields. And now the consensus of population economists also is now not far from what I have said to you. In 1986, the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences published a book on population growth and economic development prepared by a prestigious scholarly group. This "official" report reversed almost completely the frightening conclusions of the previous 1971 NAS report. "Population growth at most a minor factor..." "The scarcity of exhaustible resources is at most a minor constraint on economic growth", it now says. It found benefits of additional people as well as costs . A host of review articles by distinguished economic demographers in the last three or four years have confirmed that this "revisionist" view is indeed consistent with the scientific evidence, though not all the writers would go as far as I do in pointing out the positive long-run effects of population growth. The consensus is more toward a "neutral" judgment. But this is a huge change from the earlier judgment that population growth is economically detrimental. By 1993, anyone who asserts that population growth damages the economy must either be unaware of the recent economic literature on the subject, or turn a blind eye to the scientific evidence. 5. There are many reasons why the public hears false bad news about population, resources, and the environment. Many of these matters are discussed in my earlier books. But lately I have come to emphasize the role of unsound logic and scientiic understanding. These are some of the elements of bad thinking that predispose people to doomsday thinking: 1) Lack of understanding of statistical variability, and of the consequent need for looking at a large and representative sample and not just a few casual observations. 2) Lack of historical perspective, and the need for looking at long time series and not just a few recent observations. 3) Lack of proportion in judgments. 4) Lack of understanding of the Hume-Hayek idea of spontaneously evolving cooperative social systems -- Adam Smith's "invisible hand". 5) Seduction by exponential growth and the rest of Malthusian thinking. 6) Lack of understanding of Frederic Bastiat's and Henry Hazlitt's one key lesson of policy economics -- that we must consider not just the short-run effects of an action that we might take but also the effects well into the future, and not just the local effect but also the effect on faraway communities. That is, we must take into account not just the immediate and obvious impacts, but also the slow-responding adjustments that diffuse far from the point of initial contact, and which often have the opposite result from the short-run localized effects. 6. The most important difference between my and Norman Myers's (and the doomsters') approach to these issues is that I base my conclusions on the historical record of the past rather than Malthusian speculation that is inconsistent with the historical statistical record. For that reason, I shall now present, with little or no commentary, some striking examples of data showing that human welfare has been improving rather than deteriorating, while (and because) population has been growing. page 5 \whittle \norton09 January 20, 1993 No trend data given by Myers. Show his book. Only pop and life expectancy. Reasonable that two series are causal, in my view. No other data. In the absence of trend data, his and his colleague's argument is: Problem A - whether it be desertification or famine or dirtier air - must happen for the following reasons, and then various theoretical arguments plus statements of given one-time facts are presented. But these arguments about what "must" happen have been stated in the same form for thousands of years, and they haven't happened. But this doesn't faze them. When faced with the data, these persons often say to people like me, "You don't understand. You're not a biologist" or "ecologist" or whatever. This is patently the way of thinking of the true believer with whom it is hopeless to discuss, because there is no conceivable data which would overturn that belief. This is the sort of thinking that, when the predicted doomsday does not happen, the true believer comes down off the mountain and says, "The prediction that the world would end was simply off by the date". This is not the way of thinking of science, which only accords respect to theories when they fit facts, and relinquishes the theories when they fail to be proven empirically. Everything is "yes but", like statement that food has kept ahead of pop - just the opposite of what has been warned. Impossible to pin them down for a test. What data would they consider? page 6 \whittle \norton09 January 20, 1993 page 7 \whittle \norton09 January 20, 1993