The late economist, Julian Simon, was a remarkable thinker and educator who taught for the entirety of his professional career at the University of Illinois and University of Maryland, College Park—my doctoral alma mater (woot!)
Simon placed major confidence in markets and human innovation. Indeed, it was this educated confidence that likely motivated his bet against the biologist, Paul Ehrlich. In 1968, Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which argued that mankind was facing a demographic catastrophe with the rate of population growth quickly outstripping growth in the supply of food and resources. Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. The bet was formalized on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990, as the payoff date. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period. Here’s a copy of the check:
I teach Julian Simon in my introduction to ethics and environmental ethic classes. After explaining the positions of Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon—doing my best to motivate both positions—their bet, and the results of the bet, I often ask students why Julian Simon was right, and Paul Ehrlich was wrong. Simon gives us more than a clue in his writings,
The most important benefit of population size and growth is the increase it brings to the stock of useful knowledge. Minds matter economically as much as, or more than, hands or mouths. Progress is limited largely by the availability of trained workers. The more people who enter our population by birth or immigration, the faster will be the rate of progress of our material and cultural civilization.
And,
More people, and increased income, cause problems in the short run. Short-run scarcity raises prices. This presents opportunity, and prompts the search for solutions. In a free society, solutions are eventually found. And in the long run the new developments leave us better off than if the problems had not arisen.
Ultimately, Simon was an optimist about markets and human creativity. That’s why he won, in a nutshell. Where Ehrlich saw self-interest and zero-sum interactions (win, lose), Simon saw cooperation and positive-sum interactions (win, win). Simon thought that economic prosperity and environmental health would benefit from more people properly incentivizes to seek out solutions to problems, and innovations that do an ever better job of maximizing finite resources.
At the heart of Simon’s vision are people and their creative and innovative capacity. And markets help to drive and incentivize people to engage that creative and innovative capacity. More people, on Simon's view, aren't sufficient for innovations and breakthroughs, but they are necessary.
Therein lies the problem: as societies grow richer, their citizens and members tend to have fewer children. This is something that is happening globally as nations around the world have gotten richer over the past century or so. People in wealthy nations are no longer having enough children to replace the population. This would mean that wealth somehow does the seeds of it's own demise. In that respect, it isn't much different than other things, e.g. we do too by being born.
Maybe Simon is wrong—but if his theory is right, prosperity (somehow) undercuts itself.