RIP Julian Simon
Libertarian University of Maryland professor Julian Simon died 10 years ago today. Here's a column I wrote at the time for The Sun. It fits quite well with the post below on money and happiness.
THE GALLUP people were at it again this month, phoning up Americans and asking, "Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?"Gallup never polled Julian Simon, to my knowledge. But I know what his answer would have been."Compared to what?"
You or I, queried on the course of the nation, would think about our MasterCard balance. We'd consider the recent burglary down the street, our job, the neighbor's new Chevy. Maybe we'd weigh school test scores, and we'd account for shenanigans in Washington.
Simon would have rubbed his shiny knob of cranium and noted that, a century ago, a tenth of American babies died before their first birthday.
Life expectancy in 1900, he would have told the pollster, was 48 years. Feeding the nation required almost half the country's workers to toil on farms. The average workday was 10 hours, and it didn't include lunch at Le Cirque.
Air pollution in big cities was worse than now. Indoor plumbing barely existed. Americans with brown or black skin couldn't vote, were banned from good schools and were subject to lynching at the rate of about one every three days.
Satisfied with the way things are going?
Simon was overjoyed.
His death last week deprives the country of an antidote to pessimism, self-absorption and historical nearsightedness. A professor in business administration...
... at the University of Maryland, Simon, 65, was best known for betting against global doom-sayers on economic trends.In 1980 he bet biologist Paul Ehrlich about the future prices of five strategic metals. Ehrlich, who was warning of swelling populations and resource shortages, wagered that prices would spike. Simon, who made a career of showing how human ingenuity has consistently boosted resources to the blessing of mankind, bet they would fall.
Ehrlich was spectacularly wrong, and in 1990 he paid Simon $576.07.
But Simon was more than a provocateur. His optimism grew from hard scholarship and statistical rigor. In books such as "The State of Humanity" and "The Ultimate Resource," he charted the once and future ascent of man.
He didn't deny that problems exist. He just argued convincingly that they're often exaggerated and that what he called "the long-run measures of human welfare" are bullish. Population explosion will halt as global standards of living rise, he believed, and future generations will continue to advance against the forces of poverty, crime, pollution and hate.
He was hard to classify politically.
He promoted immigration, which infuriated conservatives. His belief in liberty and free markets put him in the conservative boat, but he disavowed that label.
He came with a gentility, curiosity and lack of ostentation and presumption that set him apart from the Forbes magazine crowd, the yahoo capitalists with trophy wives.
At heart, Simon was a humanist in the Renaissance sense, a believer in the dignity, potential and destiny of the species. "The ultimate resource," he held, isn't oil or titanium or wheat. It's people's brains.
Here on Earth, war looms in Iraq. Indonesians are rioting over food prices. The rain forest is under attack. Graduates of Baltimore high schools can't read. AIDS continues to slay hundreds of thousands.
"Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible," said Edward Teller.
Simon helped us peer through the haze to detect life's gradual but persistent betterment and its fundamental goodness. Without him, the murk deepens.
