By Jim Peron
The environmental Left has constantly chanted the mantra we are running out of everything. And it seems that a lot of people believe it. The problem with this claim is that it is contradicted by economic reality. As resources become scarcer they should increase in price. Yet the price of virtually every natural resource has dropped in real terms. And that trend has been going on for as long as humans have kept records.
For decades Paul Ehrlich has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from books like The Population Bomb and The End of Affluence. He has, quite literally, been racking in the profits of doom. In 1969 he wrote that by 1985 starvation would have killed so many people that the world population would drop to about 1.5 billion. For the record we just topped 6 billion. He forecast food riots in the United States by the 1980s and said he would bet even money that by the year 2000 England would no longer exist as a nation. In his The End of Affluence Ehrlich warned that before 1985 mankind will enter into a genuine age of scarcity….
As for mass hunger the world is better off today than any time in the past. Each year the percentage of people suffering from chronic hunger continues to drop. And this is in spite of rising population. The UNs Food and Agriculture Organization released a report in October, 1999 which said that the number of people suffering from chronic hunger world-wide was 790 million. This is a drop of 128 million since 1970. Even while human population has increased our ability to produce food has increased even more. The UNs State of the World Population1999 report admits: Between 1950 and 1991 global world food production outpaced population growth. While world population climbed from 3.1 billion in the 1960s to 5.7 billion in 1995, per capita food production
grew from the equivalent of 2,300 to 2,700 calories a day.
Of course we can grow corn but we cant grow copper or raise a crop of tin. But we can change how efficiently we use resources and we can find substitutes. Paul Ehrlich and friends dismiss this out of hand as the silly whisperings of economists. But anyone who looks around can see this process taking place every day. It wasnt that long ago that
international phone calls required tons of copper strung across the ocean floor. Now the same phone call is bounced off a satellite weighing a few hundred kilos. And when the call reaches earth again it doesnt use copper. Instead it travels across fibre optic cables made out of a resource which even Ehrlich hasnt claimed is in short supply: sand. And
with cellular phones no wires are used at all!
Today we have lightbulbs that use far less electricity and which last much longer than those produced a few years ago. Refrigerators produced today are somewhere around 65 percent more efficient than the ones produced in 1980. The World Resources Institute did a study on the amount of natural resources used to produce the total GNP for the United
States. What it found was that US production uses a reducing quantity of resources for the same output each year.
Mark Sagoff in The Atlantic Monthly reported that the energy intensity of production (the amount of fuel used per dollar of economic output) has been decreasing by about two percent a year. He also says that from 1973 to 1986 energy consumption in the United States remained virtually flat while economic production grew by almost 40 percent. And the US doesnt even have a particularly good record when it comes
to energy consumption. The Japanese use half as much as the US does to produce the same amount of goods.
One example Sagoff uses to illustrate our ability to make more with less is that of the toy manufacturer Sega which produced a childs hand-held game called Saturn. This childs toy has a greater computing power than that of the Cray supercomputer which the US, in 1976, tried to prevent from getting into the hands of the Soviets.
Humans learn and improve on what each preceding generation has done. The desire to earn a profit in a competitive market rewards entrepreneurs who figure out new methods to increase productivity. The result is that each year we learn how to use the resources we have more efficiently. Driven by the selfish desire to earn higher profits these
entrepreneurs make all of us wealthier in the long term.
The Nobel laureate economist, Rober Solow, asked: Why shouldnt the productivity of most natural resources rise more or less steadily through time, like the productivity of labour? He finds no reason that this shouldnt happen and predicts there will be prolonged and substantial reductions in natural-resource requirements per unit of real output.
Contrary to the apprehensions of the Ehrlichs of the world we are not entering an age of scarcity. Human productivity continues to become more efficient. The net result is declining prices in natural resources and food. Each generation of humans suffer less poverty and less hunger than the previous generation. The good news is that all the bad news is wrong.
