With the repeated failure of
the doomsayersÂ’ prediction, an alternative hypothesis about the relation
between population and resources began to receive more attention. This
new theory turned the ideas of Paul Ehrlich
and others on their head – world population would never outstrip the Earth’s
limited resources because the EarthÂ’s resources are unlimited.

The most famous proponent
of this view was the economist Julian
Simon whose 1980 book, The Ultimate Resource, argued the resources
available to human beings were literally infinite. Simon claimed that
people afraid of overpopulation fundamentally misunderstood the nature
of natural resources. Specifically, the phrase “natural resources”
is a bit of a misnomer since resources are always human inventions. Gasoline
can be made from oil, but isnÂ’t much of a natural resource until the human
invention of the combustion engine. Plants growing wild may constitute
a true natural resource, but most human beings today get their food entirely
from agriculture – a human invention.

For the purposes of whether or not
resources are limited, the key thing to remember is that ultimately people
donÂ’t care about resources per se but what they can accomplish with the
resources. Human beings value gasoline, for example, not because it has
some intrinsic properties that make it important but because we can use
it to move ourselves and physical objects around the world as well as
generate electricity and a whole host of other uses. By changing technology,
however, we change what and how much resources are required.

Earlier in this century, for example,
copper was used extensively in the construction of telephone systems.
Along with the copper wires to connect millions of telephones, the metal
was used in switches and other important roles. Copper was being used
so quickly that some feared copper shortages. Yet today copper is probably
more abundant than it was at the beginning of the century. What happened?
Scientists developed one technological innovation after another that gradually
reduced the amount of copper required. From electronic switching systems
to fiber optics to satellite transmission to the current worldwide adoption
of cellular phone technology, those who thought telephones were inherently
tied to copper wires were proven very wrong indeed.

SimonÂ’s ideas were ridiculed by Paul
Ehrlich and others, but Simon gained a victory of sorts in an
audacious bet with Ehrlich. At the beginning of the 1980s, Simon offered
to bet that the price of 6 metals would decline in price by then end of
the decade. Calling it easy money, Ehrlich took up the challenge. Unfortunately
for Ehrlich, the price of the 6 metals declined so substantially that
Simon would have won the bet even without taking inflation into account.
After losing the bet, Ehrlich said the bet was just a gimmick and SimonÂ’s
win due to pure chance. Others question just how much the bet really proves.

Certainly a single bet over 6 metals
proves little in isolation, but that bet was not an isolated incident
but rather the latest in a series of failures by Ehrlich and his ilk.
Time after time Ehrlich and others the world is on the edge of running
out of this or that resource, only to see precisely the opposite happen.
Inevitably Ehrlich and other forecasters claim that the continuing abundance
of natural resources is just a fluke and if we just wait enough we truly
will see the predicted apocalypse. But after almost 30 years of failed
prediction after failed prediction, it might just be that something is
fundamentally wrong with the way that Ehrlich and others explain resource
consumption.

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