Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [13]
In 1865 the economist William Jevons published The Coal Question, which argued that Britain’s industrial growth would be jeopardized by its dwindling coal reserves. But “Jevons failed to anticipate fully the development of substitutes for coal, of new engines, and of other technologies that made more economical use of fuel,” writes Nobel economist Gary Becker. Obviously, Jevons’s fears were misplaced. Nearly a century and a half has passed, and Britain still hasn’t run out of coal.
Or take oil, another natural resource that we’re supposedly on the verge of exhausting. In their book, The Bottomless Well, Peter Huber and Mark Mills report that U.S. oil fields were scheduled to run dry by the early 1990s, based on a 1979 assessment that only about 30 billion barrels of “proven reserves” remained. “Nevertheless,” said the authors, “in the quarter century since 1979, U.S. wells alone yielded another 67 billion barrels.” And the United States isn’t the only place where predictions have been significantly wide of the mark. According to the American Petroleum Institute, the world’s known oil reserves more than doubled between 1969 and 1993.
Humans, incidentally, discovered petroleum more than four thousand years ago, but its potential as a significant energy resource only became apparent in the midnineteenth-century. Until then it was used to make asphalt and fake medicines, among other things. It took human ingenuity to transform a relatively valueless substance into a valuable natural resource. Similarly, we’ve turned common beach sand into computer chips and optic fiber. Who knew? Who could have known? All sorts of things that today seem worthless could tomorrow become valuable resources, thanks to human ingenuity, which has no obvious limits.
When it comes to the United States, today’s greens tend to steer away from fantastic tales of overpopulation-related privation. And rightly so. Our economy has been the world’s largest for more than a century and is still bigger than the next three (Japan, Germany, and China) combined. Hence, the ostensibly more reasonable environmental concern put forward vis-à-vis America is that additional residents—immigrants—will result in more detriment to nature in general. More global warming. More air and water pollution. More deforestation. More endangered species. More soil erosion. More sprawl.
Once again, however, this dour outlook is at war with the facts. To begin with, the United States is nowhere close to being overpopulated. America is a very large country, and the vast majority of it remains quite empty. About 75 percent of the population lives on 3.5 percent of the nation’s land. In all, only about 5 percent of America’s total land area is even developed. According to a 2006 U.S. Department of Agriculture report, “as of 2002, urban land plus rural residential areas together comprise 154 million acres, or almost 7% of total U.S. land area.”
As the economist Thomas Sowell has noted, “In reality, the entire population of the world today could be housed in the state of Texas, in single-story, single-family houses— four people to a house—and with a typical yard around each home.” Don’t believe him? Do the math: 7,438,152,268,800 square feet in Texas, divided by the world population of roughly 6,600,000,000, equals 1,126 square feet per person. And in terms of population density, Texas would still be less crowded than the Bronx is today.
Second, and despite what you might have heard about current “record rates of population growth,