The Scarcity Myth

For over 200 years the doomsayers have predicted that with finite resources and a geometrically increasing population the world was headed for disaster, and for some reason we humans love to listen to them.  Ed Regis, in his remarkable article "The Doomslayer" in the February 1997 issue of Wired Magazine summarized the rhetoric of the popular prophets of doom this way:

This is the litany: Our resources are running out. The air is bad, the water worse. The planet's species are dying off - more exactly, we're killing them -at the staggering rate of 100,000 peryear, a figure that works out to almost 2,000 species per week, 300 per day, 10 perhour, another dead species every six minutes.We're trashing the planet, washing away the topsoil, paving over our farmlands, systematically deforesting our wildernesses, decimating the biota, and ultimately killing ourselves.  The world is getting progressively poorer, and it's all because of population, or more precisely, overpopulation. There's a finite store of resources on our pale blue dot, spaceship Earth, our small and fragile tiny planet, and we're fast approaching its ultimate carrying capacity. The limits to growth are finally upon us, and we're living on borrowed time. The laws of population growth are inexorable. Unless we act decisively, the final result is written in stone: mass poverty, famine, starvation, and death.  Time is short, and we have to act now.

The Theories of Scarcity and Overpopulation

These theories, based on the seemingly obvious premise that there is a scarcity of resources available to humanity, began with an influential text by Robert Malthus in 1798 titled "An Essay on the Principle of Population" where he observed:

"Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second."

Malthus' views became influential, and controversial, across economic, political, social and scientific
thought and his writings influenced many of the pioneers of evolutionary biology including Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.  They were launched into even greater prominence by Stanford Biologist Paul Ehrlich's controversial 1968 book "The Population Bomb" which began with this statement:

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over.  In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to 'stretch' the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production and providing for more equitable distribution of whatever food is available. But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control."

These theories resonated with the public and became the seminal ideas behind a plethora national and international policies that range from the USA's immigration system, to China's birth-control laws, to agricultural and environmental strategies the world over, not to mention thematic material for countless post-apocalyptic books and movies (think Avatar).

Regis goes on to say that standard and canonical litany has been drilled into our heads so far and so forcefully that to hear it has become almost reassuring. He says "It's comforting, oddly consoling - at least we're face to face with the enemies: consumption, population, mindless growth. And we know the solution: cut back, contract, make do with less. 'Live simply so that others may simply live.'"  Our moms always told us to finish what was on our plate because there were starving children in Africa though we never understood how eating more on this side of the ocean was going to help the kids with haunted eyes and distended bellies we'd seen on the news.

There is one teeny weeny problem with the litany of predictions by the doomsayers--every item in that dismal incantation, each and every last claim, is false.

The Facts

While Paul Ehrlich's book rocketed up the best-seller list and while he was captivating Johnny Carson's audience with appearances on the Tonight Show there was one lonely voice offering an opposing view.    He was an long-time economist at the at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign named Julian L. Simon, who Regis nicknamed "The Doomslayer".  Simon had an inexplicable penchant for examining actual data to sort out theoretical fact from fiction, and he used them to paint a somewhat different picture of the human condition circa 1997 (just a year before his death):

"Our species is better off in just about every measurable material way.  Just about every important long-run measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials - all of them - have become less scarce rather than more. The air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe. Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy, with every prospect that this trend will continue.  Fear is rampant about rapid rates of species extinction, but the fear has little or no basis. The highest rate of observed extinction, though certainly more have gone extinct unobserved, is one species per year in contrast to the 40,000 per year that some ecologists have been forecasting for the year 2000.  The scare that farmlands are blowing and washing away is a fraud upon the public. The aggregate data on the condition of farmland and the rate of erosion do not support the concern about soil erosion. The data suggest that the condition of cropland has been improving rather than worsening.  As for global deforestation, the world is not being deforested; it is being reforested in general."

Simon first got a taste of those facts while studying the data amassed by the economic demographer Simon Kuznets (winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in economics) and by economist Richard Easterlin, in the mid-1960s. Kuznets had followed population growth trends that went back 100 years and compared them against standard of living, while Easterlin analyzed the same data for selected countries since World War II. The studies showed that while population growth rates varied from country to country and from year to year, there was no general negative correlation with living standards. People did not become poorer as the population expanded; rather, as their numbers multiplied, they produced what they needed to support themselves, and they prospered.

The trends have been the same for the food supply. While there have been periodic regional droughts and famines (many of those are the result of political instability and chronic war), rising population has not meant less food, just the opposite: instead of skyrocketing as predicted by the Malthusian theory, food prices, relative to wages, have declined historically.  For example in the United States between 1800 and 1980 the price of wheat plummeted while the population grew from 5 million to 226 million. According to Malthus, all those people should have been long dead, the country reduced to a handful of fur trappers on the brink of starvation. In fact, there was a booming and flourishing populace, one that was better-fed, taller, healthier, more disease-free, with far less infant mortality and longer life expectancy than ever before in human history. Obesity, not starvation, is the major American food problem today.

Those same long-term trends (i.e. prices fall and global availability increases as the population increases) can be seen with virtually every natural resource as well, from metals to energy to potable water.

The Fatal Flaw

The problem with the Malthusian theory is that it assumes that the earth provides a limited set of finite resources--a fixed pie that has to be cut up in thinner and thinner slices as our collective global family grows.  That however is a a false assumption.  It doesn't factor in the inventiveness and creativity of human beings who always find a way to expand the pie.  Usually we expand it faster than the population growth--hence the improved average standard of living across the world even as we denizens on this remarkable rotating rock reached 7 Billion!  It turns out that there is a paradoxical difference between the very plausible theories about what will happen and the empirical facts regarding what does happen.

A Paradox

The paradox is that those predictive theories and speculative analyses seem completely logical and believable, while the reality of what has happened, seems completely illogical and impossible to explain.  Despite some disturbing trends in the last 50 years relative to marriage and child-bearing, human beings, in aggregate, continue to fulfill God's mandate to Adam and Eve that they "multiply and replenish the earth".  People are multiplying but the stores of raw materials in the earth's crust certainly are not, so how can it be possible that, as the world's population doubles, the price of raw materials is cut in half?  It makes no sense. Yet it has happened. So there must be an explanation.

The Explanation

Regis points out in his article that "resources, for the most part, don't grow on trees. People produce them, they create them, whether it be food, factories, machines, new technologies, or stockpiles of mined, refined, and purified raw materials".  Simon's conclusions are that:

"Resources come out of people's minds more than out of the ground or air.  Minds matter economically as much as or more than hands or mouths. Human beings create more than they use, on average. It had to be so, or we would be an extinct species.  These models simply do not comprehend key elements of people - the imaginative and creative."

The Future

As for the future Simon stated over 15 years ago (not long before he died):

"This is my long-run forecast in brief--the material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards.  I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse."

He has been right on both counts.  The chicken-littles of the world are alive and well, and their dogma of doom and destruction drones on like a depressing drumbeat of dread and death.  However, we don't need to fall for the fatalistic frenzy.

Conclusions

God made us, and He made the earth for us with enough and to spare.  He gave us stewardship over the world and He expects us to care for it and be grateful--not to grab at the goods like greedy children, nor to abstemiously forego His bounty, but to "give thanks unto the God of heaven...who giveth food to all flesh, for His mercy endureth forever".  --Psalms 136:25-26--

It may sound snobbish and self-serving but we human beings are the most valuable natural resource in the world and we need more, not less of us.  That's because on the average we are net producers--we improve and increase the resources about us.  A scarcity complex may lead us to snatch at more than we need or to jockey for more than our share (which is what a selfish person might do if we're fighting over a fixed pie), but if we accept that we stewards over a blessed and abundant inheritance we'll be grateful and generous.