Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [12]
“For the socialist eugenicists and population controllers of the 1960s,” Eberstadt tells me, “the proof of the righteousness of their viewpoint seemed to be the acceleration and rapid growth of population in the lowest-income areas of the world; the seeming slowdown of world cereal production; and the growing gap in food production generally between rich and poor areas.” Unfortunately for the doomsayers, however, things got a lot better in much of the world after the 1960s, and in very demonstrable ways. “The availability of food increased,” says Eberstadt, “and the nutritional status of virtually all of the planet substantially improved, as reflected in further drops in death rates and further increases in life spans.”
There are exceptions to this good news, such as in sub-Sahara Africa, but they remain exceptions, and trying to link that region’s troubles to “overpopulation” is highly implausible given that Africa is the world’s most thinly populated continent. Overall, however, the second half of the last century saw humans living longer and family sizes dropping. It also saw a steady decrease in the inflation-adjusted price of food, a trend that by itself should be the death knell to the Ehrlichean worldview. After all, prices are an objective measure of scarcity, and the price of major cereals have fallen dramatically over the past hundred years, despite the fact that the Earth’s population nearly quadrupled between 1900 and 2000.
Economic historian Angus Maddison’s Monitoring the World Economy: 1820-1992 and The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective were published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1995 and 2001, respectively. Students of economic history consider his calculations to be the gold standard, and the trends he documents present a devastating blow to those trying to link population increases to resource reductions.
Between 1900 and 2000, infant mortality rates fell while life expectancy doubled, and the earth’s population proceeded to swell from around 1.6 billion to more than 6 billion. Both the rapidity and the magnitude of the growth were unprecedented. It was a full-fledged neo-Malthusian nightmare. Yet over the same period, according to Maddison, global gross domestic product per capita more than quadrupled, and global economic output grew by a factor of eighteen. Remarking on the significance of Maddison’s findings, Eberstadt noted, “If the demand for goods and services has multiplied nearly 20-fold during the 20th century, humanity’s demand for, and consumption of, natural resources has also rocketed upward. But despite humanity’s tremendous new pressures on planetary resources, the relative prices of virtually all primary commodities have fallen over the course of the 20th century, and many of them, quite substantially. ”
Back in 1980, Julian Simon wagered Ehrlich that Ehrlich and several of his pessimistic colleagues couldn’t name any natural resources that would become more expensive over the next decade. Ehrlich and Co. chose copper, chromium, tin, nickel, and tungsten. They lost the bet handily. Every single one of the minerals declined in price. Maddison’s research justifies Simon’s optimism. Between 1900 and 1998, the price of corn, wheat, and rice fell by 70 percent. Between 1900 and 1999, the price of metals and nonfood agricultural commodities—including aluminum, copper, nickel, zinc, tin, lead, cotton, rubber, palm oil, and wool— also declined. “Suffice then to say,” writes Eberstadt, “that the 20th century’s population explosion did not forestall the most dramatic and widespread improvement in output, incomes, and living standards that humanity had ever experienced. ”
THE ULTIMATE RESOURCE
What went on in the twentieth century may be inexplicable in neo-Malthusian theology, but it’s little more than the by now predictable workings of the human economy, where people maximize productivity through the augmentation of human resources. Ultimately, it’s those