I remain shocked that the Malthusian population bomb theory was the basis for Thanos’ universe-spanning campaign of genocide in the latest Avengers film. That it was expounded by Thanos himself in such plain, Malthusian terms is even more shocking. While watching the film though, I wished that at least one Avenger had countered that ideology with facts and theories, instead of mere violence. An Avengers analog of Julian Simon to counter the biologist Paul Ehrlich embodied in Thanos. Because even if Thanos were destroyed, the population bomb thesis would still exist unrefuted in the Avengers universe.
Business professor Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich made a bet in 1980 on which direction the prices of certain resources would go over the next decade. Simon challenged Ehrlich, and gave him the option of picking which resources to track over the next years. All five commodities Ehrlich chose decreased in price over the next decade.
The population of the globe more than doubled over the past 50 years, yet food production tripled. According the overpopulation alarmists, this should have been impossible. Human life expectancy across the globe reached its highest level so far, and global poverty fell below 10%, the lowest on record.
Yet despite these facts, and despite the total failure of Ehrlich’s theory, academics and totalitarian governments around the world believe that it’s immoral to have more than one child, as it is has been in China, that the human race is dooming itself by not checking it’s growth.
The key to this rapid rise in living standards in the face of a seeming explosion in population has to do with what Julian Simon dubbed “the ultimate resource”. This resource is human creativity, and he believed that our rising living standards weren’t occurring despite population growth, but because of it. More people on the planet means more creators, innovators, and workers engaging in what Deirdre McCloskey calls “market-tested innovation“. The unrestricted innovation, entrepreneurship, and tinkering with new and different ideas, and the testing of all of it in the marketplace is the source of our prosperity. That’s why it is crucial that we protect that environment of market-tested experimentation in the face of an irrational fear of population growth. As long as the freedom to innovate and experiment in an unrestricted market economy, economic prosperity will always outstrip resource consumption. A politicized fear of overpopulation is what will doom our species, not population growth itself.
