Bogus Gold

Dean Esmay has a nicely succinct post on one of the great fallacies of our time: the fallacy of overpopulation. Here's a nice quote from it .

In free societies--even just relatively free societies--a human being is not "one more mouth to feed." A human being is one more set of hands and eyes and feet to work and produce. Most important of all, one more human being is one more brain to help solve problems

The late economist Julian Simon was perhaps the best champion of this perspective. In an article commemorating Simon, Stephen Moore noted:

Simon’s central premise was that people are the ultimate resource. "Human beings," he wrote, "are not just more mouths to feed, but are productive and inventive minds that help find creative solutions to man’s problems, thus leaving us better off over the long run." As Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute explained in his brilliant tribute to Simon in the Wall Street Journal, "Simon’s central point was that natural resources are not finite in any serious way; they are created by the intellect of man, an always renewable resource." Julian often wondered why most governmental economic and social statistics treat people as if they are liabilities not assets. "Every time a calf is born," he observed, "the per capita GDP of a nation rises. Every time a human baby is born, the per capita GDP falls." Go figure!

The tremendous value of human life is not merely some metaphysical abstraction. Much of Simon's work was devoted to empirically demonstrating that people are on balance assets rather than drains upon a nation's economy. He drove his critics nuts (especially doomsayers like Paul Erlich, author of the insidious and false but extremely influential Population Bomb), but they were unable to disprove his data.

Why does this matter? Because the notion that "overpopulation" is a problem persists to this day. If you have more than two children you have likely at least once heard someone make a comment about how such a thing is "irresponsible." However, time is showing that the opposite is true. Underpopulation stemming from the collapsing birthrates of Western nations presents a far more tangible threat than the overpopulation doomsayers ever suspected.

There is a demographic time-bomb inherent in the aging populations of welfare states when there simply aren't enough babies being born to sustain the system. One of the principal reasons for this problem is the deeply ingrained cultural belief that the world is overpopulated. Hope for the future relies upon people shaking off this fallacy.