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I discovered this in the 80s, when I wrote two stories for the downstate weekly Illinois Times about Julian Simon, a marketing prof then at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who pointed out a number of fallacies in green orthodoxy, including the notion that we’re running out of raw materials. Since he’d published an article in Science magazine (June 27, 1980) and later a book, The Ultimate Resource, I figured environmentalists would take his valid criticisms to heart and pay more attention to economic ways of thinking.
“About 15 years ago I met an economist with a bald head, a crooked smile, and some of the most outrageous ideas I’d ever heard. Our air and water are cleaner than they’ve been for decades, he said. There’s more food per capita in the world every year. Supposedly scarce energy and mineral resources have been getting cheaper over the decades, not more expensive. Population growth is good because it adds to the number of active, inquiring, innovative human minds–the ultimate resource of civilization.
A movement that can’t learn from its critics is, by definition, a movement in trouble.
