Life on Earth is Getting Better, Not Worse

Julian Simon

The Futurist, August 1983, pp. 7-12, 14

(Julian L Simon was professor of economics and business administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. )

If we lift our gaze from the frightening daily headlines and look instead at wide-ranging scientific data as well as the evidence of our senses, we shall see that economic life in the United States and the rest of the world has been getting better rather than worse during recent centuries and decades. There is, moreover, no persuasive reason to believe that these trends will not continue indefinitely.

But first: I am not saying that all is well everywhere, and I do not predict that all will be rosy in the future. Children are hungry and sick; people live out lives of physical or intellectual poverty, with little opportunity for improvement; war or some new Pollution may finish us. What I am saying is that for most relevant economic matters I have checked, aggregate trends are improving rather than deteriorating. Also, I do not say that a better future will happen automatically or without effort. It will happen because men and women will use muscle and mind to struggle with problems that they will probably overcome, as they have in the past.

Longer and Healthier Lives

Life cannot be. good unless you are alive. Plentiful resources and a clean environment have little value unless we and others are alive to enjoy them. The fact that your chances of living through any given age now are much better than in earlier times must therefore mean that life has gotten better. In France, for example, female life expectancy at birth rose from under 30 years in the 1740s to 75 years in the 1960s. And this trend has not yet run its course. The increases have been rapid in recent years in the United States: a 2.1-year gain between 1970 and 1976 versus a 0.8-year gain in the entire decade of the 1960s. This pattern is now being repeated in the poorer countries of the world as they improve their economic lot. Life expectancy at birth in low- income countries rose from an average of 35.2 years in 1950 to 49.9 years in 1978, a much bigger jump than the rise from 66.0 to 73.5 years in the industrialized countries.

The threat of our loved ones dying greatly affects our assessment of the quality of our lives. Infant mortality is a reasonable measure of child mortality generally. In Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 200 or more children of each thousand died during their first year. As late as 1900, infant mortality was 200 per 1000 or higher in Spain, Russia, Hungary, and even Germany. Now it is about 15 per 1000 or less in a great many countries.

Health has improved, too. The incidence of both chronic and acute conditions has declined. While a perceived 'epidemic" of cancer indicates to some a drop in the quality of life, the data show no increase in cancer except for deaths due to smoking- caused lung cancer. As Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said:

The United States is not suffering an epidemic of cancer," it is experiencing an 'epidemic of life'-in that an ever greater fraction of the population survives to the advanced ages at which cancer has always been prevalent. The overall, age-corrected incidence of cancer has not been Increasing; It has been declining slowly for some years.

Abating Pollution

About pollution now- The main air pollutants-particulates and sulfur dioxide-have declined since 1960 and 1970 respectively, the Periods for which there is data in the U.S. The Environmental Protection Agency's Pollutant Standard Index, which takes into account all the most important air pollutants, shows that the number of days rated "unhealthful" has declined steadily since the index's inauguration in 1974 (see Figure 1). And the proportion of monitoring sites in the U.S. having good drinking water has greatly increased since record- keeping began in 1961 (see Figure 2).

Pollution in the less-developed countries is a different, though not necessarily discouraging, story. No worldwide pollution data are available. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that pollution of various kinds has increased as poor countries have gotten somewhat less poor. Industrial pollution rises along with new factories. The same is true of consumer pollution-junked cars, plastic wrappers, and such oddments as the hundreds of discarded antibiotics vial I saw on the ground in an isolated Iranian village. Such industrial wastes do not exist in the poorest pre-industrial countries. And in the early stages of development, countries and people are not ready to pay for clean-up operations. But further increases in income almost surely will bring about pollution abatement, just as increases in income in the United States have provided the wherewithal for better garbage collection and cleaner air and water.

The Myth of Finite Resources

Though natural resources are a smaller part of the economy with every succeeding year, they are still important, and their availability causes grave concern to many. Yet, measured by cost or price, the scarcity of all raw materials except lumber and oil has been decreasing rather than increasing over the long run. Figure 3 shows an enormous decline in the price of copper relative to wages in the U.S.; this relative price is the most important measure of scarcity because it shows the cost of the material in the most valuable of goods: human time. Figure 4 shows that the price of copper has even been declining relative to the consumer price index.

Perhaps surprisingly, oil also shows a downward cost trend in the long run (see Figures 5 and 6). The price rise in the 1970s was purely political; the cost of producing a barrel of oil in the Persian Gulf is still only perhaps 15 to 25 cents.

There is no reason to believe that the supply of energy is finite, or that the price will not continue its long- run decrease. This statement may sound less preposterous if you consider that for a quantity to be finite it must be measurable. The future supply of oil includes what we usually think of as oil, plus the oil that can be produced from shale, tar sands, and coal. It also includes the oil from plants that we grow, whose key input is sunlight. So the measure of the future oil supply must therefore be at least as large as the sun's 7 billion or so years of future life. And it may include other suns whose energy might be exploited in the future. Even if you believe that one can in principle measure the energy from suns that will be available in the future-a belief that requires a lot of confidence that the knowledge of the physical world we have developed in the past century will not be superseded in the next 7 billion years, plus the belief that the universe is not expanding-this measurement would hardly be relevant for any practical contemporary decision-making.

Energy provides a good example of the process by which resources become more abundant and hence cheaper. Seventeenth-century England was full of alarm at an impending energy shortage due to- the country's deforestation for fire- wood. People feared a scarcity of fuel for both heating and the vital iron industry. This impending scar- city led inventors and businessmen to develop coal.

Then, in the mid-1800s, the English came to worry about an impending coal crisis. The great English economist William Stanley Jevons calculated then that a shortage of coal would surely bring England's industry to a standstill by 1900; he carefully assessed that oil could never make a decisive difference. But spurred by the impending scar- city of coal (and of whale oil, whose story comes next), ingenious and profit-minded people developed oil into a more desirable fuel than coal ever was. And today England exports both coal and oil.

Another strand in the story: Because of increased demand due to population growth and increased income, the price of whale oil used in lamps jumped in the 1840s. Then the Civil War pushed it even higher, leading to a whale oil "crisis.' The resulting high price provided an incentive for imaginative and enterprising people to discover and produce substitutes. First came oil from rapeseed, olives, linseed, and pine trees. Then inventors learned how to get coal oil from coal, which became a flourishing industry. Other ingenious persons produced kerosene from the rock oil that seeped to the surface. Kerosene was so desirable a product that its price rose from 75 cents to $2 a gallon, which stimulated enterprisers to increase its supply. Finally, Edwin L. Drake sunk his famous oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Learning how to refine the oil took a while, but in a few years there were hundreds of small refiners in the U.S. Soon the bottom dropped out of the whale oil market: the price fell from $2..50 or more a gallon at its peak around 1866 to well below a dollar.

Lumber has been cited as an exception to the general resource story of failing costs. For decades in the U.S., farmers clearing land disposed of trees as a nuisance. As lumber came to be more a commercial crop and a good for builders and railroad men, its price rose. For some time, resource economists expected the price to hit a plateau and then follow the course of other raw materials as the transition to a commercial crop would be completed. There was evidence consistent with this view in the increase, rather than the popularly supposed decrease, in the tree stock in the U.S., yet for some time the price did not fall. But now that expectation seems finally to have been realized as prices of lumber have fallen to a fourth of their peak in the late 1970s.

More Food for More People

Food is an especially important resource, and the evidence indicates that its supply is increasing despite rising population. The long-run prices of food relative to wages, and even relative to consumer goods, are down (see Figures 7and 8). Famine deaths have decreased in the past century even in absolute terms, let alone relative to the much larger population, a special boon for poor countries. Per person food production in the world is up over the last 30 years and more (see Figure 9). And there are no data showing that the people at the bottom of the Income distribution have fared worse, or have failed to share in the general improvement, as the aver- .age has improved. Africa's food production per capita is down, but that clearly stems from governmental blunders with price controls, subsidies, farm collectivization, and other Institutional problems.

There is, of course, a food-production problem in the U.S. today: too much production. Prices are falling due to high productivity, failing consumer demand for meat in the U.S., and increased foreign competition in such crops as soybeans. In response to the farmers' complaints, the government will now foot an unprecedentedly heavy bill for keeping vast amounts of acreage out of production.

The Disappearing-Species Scare

Many are alarmed that the earth is losing large numbers of its species. For example, the Global 2000 Report to the President says: "Extinctions of plant and animal species will increase dramatically. Hundreds of thousands of species-perhaps as many as 20 percent of all species on earth-will be irretrievably lost as their habitats vanish, especially in tropical forests," by the year 2000.

The available facts, however, are not consistent with the level of concern expressed in Global 2000, nor do they warrant the various policies suggested to deal with the purported dangers.

The Global 2OOO projection is based upon a report by contributor Thomas Lovejoy, who estimates that between 437,000-and 1,875,000 extinctions will occur out of a present estimated total of 3 to 10 million species. Lovejoy's estimate is based on a linear relationship running from 0% species extinguished at 0% tropical forest cleared, to about 95% extinguished at 100% tropical forest cleared. (The main source of differences in the range of estimated losses is the range of 3 to 10 million species in the overall estimate.)

The basis of any useful projection must be a body of experience collected under a range of conditions that encompass the expected conditions, or that can reasonably be extrapolated to the expected conditions. But none of Lovejoy's references seems to contain any scientifically impressive body of experience.

A projected drop in the amount of tropical forests underlies Lovejoy's projection of species losses in the future. Yet to connect these two events as Lovejoy has done requires systematic evidence relating an amount of tropical forest removed to a rate of species reduction. Neither Global 2000 nor any of the other sources I checked give such empirical evidence. If there is no better evidence for Lovejoy's projected rates, one could extrapolate almost any rate one chooses for the year 2000. Until more of the facts are in, we need not undertake alarmist protection policies. Rather, we need other sorts of data to estimate extinction rates and decide on policy. None of this is to say that we need not worry about endangered species. The planet's flora and fauna constitute a valuable natural endowment; we must guard them as we do our other physical and social assets. But we should also strive for a clear, unbiased view of this set of assets in order to make the best possible judgments about how much time and money to spend guarding them, in a world where this valuable activity must compete with other valuable activities, including the preservation of other assets and human life.

More Wealth from Less Work

One of the great trends of economic history is the shortening of the workweek coupled with increasing income. A shorter workweek represents an increase in one's freedom to dispose of that most treasured possession-time-as one wishes. In the U.S., the decline was from about 60 hours per week in 1870 to less than 40 hours at present. This benign trend is true for an array of countries in which the length of the workweek shows an inverse relationship with income.

With respect to progress in income generally, the most straight- forward and meaningful index is the proportion of persons in the labor force working in agriculture. In 1800, the percentage in the U.S. was 73.6%, whereas in 1980 the proportion was 2.7%. That is, relative to population size, only 1/25 as many persons today are working in agriculture as in 1800. This suggests that the effort that produced one bushel of grain or one loaf of bread in 1800 will now produce the bushel of grain plus what 24 other bushels will buy in other goods, which is equivalent to an increase in income by a factor of 25.

Income in less-developed countries has not reached nearly so high a level as in the more-developed countries, by definition. But it would be utterly wrong to think that income in less-developed countries has stagnated rather than risen. In fact, income per person has increased at a proportional rate at least as fast, or faster, in less-developed than in more-developed countries since World War II.

The Ultimate Resource

What explains the enhancement of our material life in the face of supposed limits to growth? I offer an extended answer in my recent book, The Ultimate Resource (1981). In short, the source of our increased economic blessings is the human mind, and, all other things being equal, when there are more people, there are more productive minds. Productivity increases come directly from the additional minds that develop productive new ideas, as well as indirectly from the impact upon industrial productivity of the additional demand for goods. That is, population growth in the form of babies or immigrants helps in the long run to raise the standard of living because it brings increase productivity. Immigrants are the best deal of all because they usually migrate when they are young and strong; in the U.S., they contribute more in taxes to the public coffer than they take out in welfare services.

In the short run, of course, additional people mean lower income for other people because children must be fed and housed by their parents and educated and equipped partly by the community. Even immigrant are a burden for a brief time until they find jobs. But after the children grow up and enter the work force and contribute to the support of others as well as increasing productivity, their net effect upon other becomes positive. Over their life times they are a boon to others.

I hope you will now agree that the long-run outlook is for a more abundant material life rather that for increased scarcity, in the U.S and in the world as a whole. 0f course, such progress does not come about automatically. And my message certainly is not one of complacency. In this I agree with the doomsayers-that our world needs the best efforts of all humanity to improve our lot. I part company with them in that they expect us to come to a bad end despite the effort we make, whereas I expect a continuation of successful efforts. Their message is self-fulfilling because if you expect inexorable natural limit to stymie your efforts you are likely to feel resigned and give up. But if you recognize the possibility-indeed, the probability-of success you can tap large reserves of energy and enthusiasm. Energy and enthusiasm, together with the human mind and spirit, constitute our solid hope for the economic future, just as they have been our salvation in ages past. With these forces at work we will leave a richer, safer, and more beautiful world to our descendants, just as our ancestor improved the world that they bestowed upon us.

Supplemental graphs: Simon's article was written in 1983, so his graphs do not contain recent data. The following graphs are provided for comparison with the trends he showed in his graphs.