Fumento on Erlich

Michael Fumento considers some of the late Paul Erlich's ridiculous prognostications -- as well as one that was less "off" than popularly believed -- and declares him "wicked."

In addition to providing a quick primer of these predictions of doom, Fumento deserves credit for essentializing what is wrong with the thinking behind those predictions, and which remains so common today:

Ehrlich's pronunciations treated "resources" as static piles of stuff hidden in the ground. In reality, a resource is only a resource because of human knowledge. Oil was often considered that ruined farmland until Canadian scientist Abraham Gesner converted it to kerosene that proved great for oil lamps (ensuring that whales weren't hunted to extinction). Then came the internal combustion engine, and the rest as they say ... Sand was essentially dirt and a co-star in Frankie and Annette movies until we learned to turn it into silicon chips.

Yet as [economist Julian] Simon, a personal friend and lovely human being, argued in his book The Ultimate Resource (1981), the human imagination is the only limit to growth. When a resource becomes scarce, its price rises. That price spike acts as a signal for people to find more of it, use it more efficiently, or invent something better to replace it entirely. You don't restock the refrigerator if it's full. This is the feedback loop Ehrlich's biological models could never account for. [bold added]

Fumento memorably sums this up in his closing:

We are not fruit flies in a jar. We are the architects of the jar, and we've proven repeatedly that we can make the jar bigger, better, and more bountiful.

My main complaint is that Fumento comes so close to naming the fundamental error behind Erlich's arguments without doing so explicitly: Erlich was hoping we'd accept the deterministic premise he smuggled into his doomsday predictions despite the kind of evidence Simon marshaled for optimism. We have the faculties of reason -- which manifests as both imagination and awareness of limits other living things run up against all the time -- and free will -- which manifests as the choice to overcome those limits with our imaginations.

Erlich's conclusions were wrong, and so was his goal of causing us to forget how to command nature by creatively obeying her.

-- CAV