Who made bb simon2/10/2024 ![]() Adjusted for inflation, 19 declined in price, while 23 increased in price. The study looked at prices of 42 natural resources from 1960 to 2016, as tracked by the World Bank. What about natural resources? After all, as people grow richer, they consume more stuff. So, income grew 26 percent faster than population-just as Simon had predicted. Yet, inflation-adjusted gross domestic product (GDP) per person increased by 183 percent, from $3,689 to $10,391. Over these 56 years, world population increased by 145 percent, from 3 billion to almost 7.5 billion. It looked at population, prices, and income from 1960 to 2016. The Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., has recently published an update to the Simon story. Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 in October 1990… The price of the basket of metals chosen by Ehrlich and his cohorts had fallen by more than 50 percent.” The Data Is In ![]() If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. ![]() If the combined prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. “In October 1980, Ehrlich and Simon drew up a futures contract obligating Simon to sell Ehrlich the same quantities that could be purchased for $1,000 of five metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) ten years later at inflation-adjusted 1980 prices. As one of us wrote on these pages over a year ago, the two thinkers agreed to put their ideas to the test. They put him at odds with the doomsayers of his day, such as Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, whose best-selling 1968 book The Population Bomb argued that over-population would lead to the exhaustion of natural resources and mega-famines. Simon’s conclusions and forecasts were based on meticulous research, facts, and a deep understanding of human nature, intelligence, and creativity. Human ingenuity, in other words, is “the ultimate resource” that makes all other resources more plentiful. Unlike other animals, he argued, humans innovate their way out of scarcity by increasing the supply of natural resources or developing substitutes for overused resources. In the book, Simon dismissed the widely held belief that population growth must inevitably result in poverty and famine. That’s an unfortunate oversight, for Simon was a truly original thinker and author of The Ultimate Resource-surely one of the most contrarian books ever published. The University of Maryland professor, who died in 1998, would have been 86. Few, unfortunately, recalled the birthday of a relatively little-known US academic, Julian Simon. Last month, many Americans will have celebrated the birth of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ronald Reagan.
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