Michael, people will say you can't just hand wave childhood obesity. They'll say that
if there's so much food, that implies a lot more people eating the food, and more people
period. And when you have that many people it's going to destroy the earth. We can't sustain
that many people. Thanks capitalism! You just caused a new problem: overpopulation. At least
that was the thesis of Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich who wrote books laying out catastrophic
scenarios for the future of mankind and the earth. Ehrlich thought overpopulation was a major problem
because we were using so many resources they were going to suddenly run out,
setting us up for a system-wide collapse. Now Julian Simon, who's another economist,
thought Ehrlich was 100% wrong to worry about this. In Simon's book The Ultimate Resource, he
points out that more people means more minds, and these are minds which are capable of innovating;
minds which are capable of solving problems. So more people isn't a bad thing, it's more of the
most productive resource in history: the human mind. And there's a famous bet between these two.
So Simon says to Ehrlich, "all right, if all these people are draining resources,
you pick five metals that you think we're gonna run out of,
or because we're going to be running out of them they're going to be prohibitively expensive
and prices will shoot up, as with anything that becomes scarce, and over the next 10 years we'll
see if those prices go up or go down. If it goes up, they're getting more scarce; if it goes down.
they're getting more abundant. And you can pick them!" Again, Simon let Ehrlich pick the metals.
So Ehrlich went ahead, he picked his five metals, and guess what, the price of every single one of
them fell. And he ended up having to write Julian Simon a check and Simon had that check displayed
on his wall until the day he died. And by the way Michael, it's not like Julian Simon is saying
that we're going to discover more of these metals necessarily, it could mean that human innovation
either finds a better resource than these or just figures out how to use them more efficiently.
We've been through this in the past. In 1920 people were saying, "oh, we've only got 20
years left of oil." In 1940, "oh, there's only 20 years left of oil." Now two things are happening:
one is they're finding more oil, but they're also developing new ways to make the oil that we do
have more effective. If I invent an engine that uses one tenth the oil to run a car,
I have effectively increased the amount of oil in use tenfold. And that is what Julian Simon
was referring to when he referred to the human mind as the ultimate resource. Matt Ridley, a
famous science writer, puts it this way: mobile phones have the computing power of room-sized
computers of the 1970s, I use mine instead of a camera, radio, torch, compass, map, calendar,
watch, CD player, newspaper, and pack of cards. LED light bulbs consume about a quarter as much
electricity as incandescent bulbs for the same light. Modern buildings generally contain less
steel and more of it is recycled. Offices are not yet paperless but they use much less paper. And
even in cases when the use of stuff is not falling, it's rising more slowly than expected. So experts
in the 1970s forecast how much water the world would consume in the year 2000, in fact the total
usage that year was half as much as predicted, not because there were fewer humans, but because human
inventiveness allowed more efficient irrigation for agriculture, the biggest user of water.