- that resources are like a stock in a cupboard
- And that the more people born the more resources are used
In this sense a space race of scientific thought is produced. In this sense Julian Simone describes the human brain as the "infinite resource"
Book attached Below and Page numbers in front of the paragraphs
US Depopulating Third World
55 the Population Branch of the U.S. State Department Agency for International Development (AID)-for many years the single most important U.S. population official-publicly said that the United States should act to reduce fertility worldwide for the country~ own economic self-interest. And
55 And a secret policy assessment issued by the National Security Council in 1974 (U.S. National Security Council1974; Sobo 1991b)-finally declassified in 1989, but with many pages still blacked out-specifies population-control activities for U.S. governmental agents to carry out in various countries, especially Africa; this includes twisting the arms of foreign governments in a variety of ways to ensure "cooperation."
Anthropologist Thinks Expanded Population In China and India Will Collapse - Returns 10 years later to discover living standards have improved despite population growth
61 In chapter 34 you will read how journalist -anthropologist Richard Critchfield began "in the early 1960s reporting the seemingly hopeless crisis of people surplus and food scarcity in India and China" and gave up his beliefs in doom and gloom only after he revisited villages all over the world that he had studied earlier, and saw how they had progressed along with a growing population. "[T]here is a much happier ending than I ever expected to write when I set out ten years ago."3
540 growth: "The Coale-Hoover thesis eventually provided the justification for birth control as a part of U.S. foreign aid policy."1
Malthusians Are Pessimists Who Lack Imaginary Vision
63 Schumpeter, explains Malthus's error of "pessimism" by saying about the vision that underlay the theory and predictions: "The most interesting thing to observe is the complete lack of imagination which that vision reveals. Those writers lived at the threshold of the most spectacular economic developments ever witnessed. Vast possibilities matured into realities under their very eyes. Nevertheless, they saw nothing but cramped economies, struggling with ever-decreasing success for their daily bread. "4
Scarcity of Resources To CPI (Resources Get Cheaper Over Time Without Fail)
72 The Scarcity of Copper as Measured by Its Prices Relative to Wages and to the Consumer Price Index
78 But our expenditure on them has been falling as a proportion of total expenditures. "The gross value of extractive output [including agriculture, oil, and coal] relative to value of national product has declined substantially and steadily from 1870 to the present. In 1890, the extractive share was nearly 50 percent. By the tum of the century, it had fallen to 32 percent, and, by 1919, to 23 percent. In 1957, the figure was 13 percent and still trending downward";5 by 1988 the figure had fallen all the way to 3.7 percent. In 1988, minerals plus energy {but excluding food) accounted for only 1.6 percent of the U.S. GNP,6 and minerals alone (excluding energy sources) accounted for less than half a percent of total extractive value, or only about an amazing 0.0002 (a fiftieth of a percent of GNP). 7 This trend makes it clear that the cost of mineral~ven if it becomes considerably higher, which we have no reason to expect-is almost irrelevant to our standard of living, and hence an increased scarcity of minerals is not a great danger to our peacetime standard of living.
Resources Come From Unexpected Places
89 Often, new supplies of a resource come from areas outside the accustomed boundaries of our system, as resources from other continents came to Europe in past centuries and as resources may in the future be brought from the sea or from other planets. New supplies also arise when a resource is created from other materials, just as grain is grown and nuclear fuel is "bred." (Here we must avoid getting hung up on the word "natural," as in "natural resources.")
113 But then Crusoes find other islands. Humankind traveled farther and farther in search of resourcesfinally to the bounds of continents, and then to other continents. When America was opened up, the world, which for Europeans had been bounded by Europe and perhaps by Asia too, was suddenly expanded. Each epoch has seen a shift in the bounds of the relevant resource system. Each time, the old ideas about "limits," and the calculations of "finite resources" within those bounds, were thereby falsified. Now we have begun to explore the sea, which contains amounts of metallic and perhaps energy resources that dwarf any deposits we know about on land. And we have begun to explore the moon. Why shouldn't the boundaries of the system from which we derive resources continue to expand in such directions, just as they have expanded in the past? This is one more reason not to regard resources as "finite" in principle.
92 study what is used in these commodities
95 Summing it all up, for nearly all of the important nonrenewable resources, the known or confidently expected world stores are thousands of times as great as the annual world consumption. For the few which like petroleum are available in relatively small quantities, substitutes are known or potential sources of alternative supply are at hand in quantities adequate to meet our current needs for many thousands of years. There is no prospect of the imminent exhaustion of any of the truly essential raw materials, as far as the world as a whole is concerned. Mother Eanh's storehouse is far more richly stocked with goods than is ordinarily inferred. 7
Infinite Resources Due to Substitutability
96 We now state the principle of "infinite" substitutability: With three notable exceptions-phosphorus, a few trace elements for agriculture, and energy-producing fossil fuels (CH2)-society can subsist on inexhaustible or near-inexhaustible minerals with relatively little loss of living standard. Society would then be based largely on glass, plastic, wood, cement, iron, aluminum, and magnesium.9
96 Our technical message is clear: dwindling mineral resources in the aggregate, with the exception of reduced carbon and hydrogen, are per se unlikely to cause Malthusian catastrophe .... In the Age of Substitutability energy is the ultimate raw material. The living standard will almost surely depend primarily on the cost of prime energy. 10
Club Of Rome / Limits To Growth Scientific Fraud
96 But that book has been so thoroughly and universally criticized as neither valid nor scientific that it is not worthwhile to devote time or space to refuting its every detail. Even more damning, just four years after publication it was disavowed by its sponsors, the Club of Rome. The Club said that the conclusions of that first report are not correct and that they purposely misled the public in order to "awaken" public concern.
97 (See the afternote to chapter 34 for more discussion of the two Limits volumes.)
529 Whether mathematical or verbal, simple or complex, computerized or not, earlier models of the effect of additional people on the standard of living in MDCs-including those from Malthus to The Limits to Growth-share the common root of first-edition Malthus: Adding people who must work and live with the original fixed supply of land and capital implies less income for each person.
Infinite In All Directions
112 Physicist Freeman Dyson, in his book, Infinite in All Directions, takes this mode of thought much further and theorizes that even if the world were to get progressively colder forever, it would be possible for human beings to adapt in such fashion as to stay ahead of the cooling; consequently. he writes, "Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the consequent unboundedness of human destiny. "23
130 Layzers conclusion is optimistic: 'The new scientific worldview ... assures us that there are no limits to what we and our descendants can hope to achieve and to become."'17
112 And physicist Frank Tipler argues, on the basis of the established body of contemporary knowledge of physics, that the ultimate constraint is not energy but rather information. Because we can increase the stock of information without limit, there is no need to consider our existence finite.*
Human Beings Are Creators Not Destroyers
122 Our whole evolution up to this point shows that human groups spontaneously evolve patterns of behavior, as well as patterns of training people for that behavior, which tend on balance to lead people to create rather than destroy. Humans are, on net balance, builders rather than destroyers. The evidence is clear: the civilization which our ancestors have bequeathed to us contains more created works than the civilization they were bequeathed.
Malthusians Predict World Will Be Ruined By 2000
132 Population/Environment Balance* paid for a full-page advertisement in leading newspapers, signed by such dignitaries as author Isaac Asimov, presidential adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, author Malcolm Cowley, ecologist Paul Ehrlich, editor Clifton Fadiman, oilman ] . Paul Getty, Time Inc. executive Henry Luce III, poet Archibald Macleish, Nobel prize winner Albert SzentGyorgyi, Reader's Digest founder DeWitt Wallace, U.A.W President Leonard Woodcock, and many others, saying: The world as we know it will likely be ruined before the year 2000 and the reason for this will be its inhabitants' failure to comprehend two facts. These facts are 1. World food production cannot keep pace with the galloping growth of population. 2. "Family planning" cannot and will not, in the foreseeable future, check this runaway growth. 5
Malthusians Say Whole Nations Should Be Written Off
133 Some influential people even urge "triage-letting the least fit die in order to save the more robust victims of hunger." 11 The 196 7 book by William and Paul Paddock (Famine-1975!) applied this World War I medical concept to food aid, resulting in such judgments as Haiti Can't-be-saved Egypt Can't -be-saved The Gambia Walking Wounded Tunisia Libya India Pakistan Should Receive Food Walking Wounded Can't-be-saved Should Receive Food 12
Human Creativity
147 (a) orbiting giant mirrors that would reflect sunlight onto the night side of the Earth and thereby increase growing time, increase harvest time, and prevent crop freezes,
147 hydroponic farming as described in the next paragraph can feed 500 billion
Porkie Bastards Manipulate Food Prices
164 The devices that the nexus of government and farmer organizations invent to manipulate production and prices are never-ending. Fruit below a certain size is prohibited from sale, as a way of keeping out fruit from other countries as well as restricting domestic sales. Because of bountiful harvests in California in 1992, the minimum legal sizes were raised for such fruits as peaches, nectarines, and plums, resulting in tens or hundreds of millions of pounds of fruit dumped and left to rot;16 the Department of Agriculture estimates 16 to 40 million tons are dumped each year. 17 In the long run these policies are bad for everyone, even for the farmers.
Porkie Scientists Make More Stupid Predictions That Are Wrong
166 Paul Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb: "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971, if ever." He went on to quote Louis H. Bean, who said, "My examination of the trend on Indias grain production over the past eighteen years leads me to the conclusion that the present 196 7-1968 production is at a maximum level. "25 Yet, "net food grain availability" in kilograms per capita per year has been rising since at least 1950-1951. By September 1977, there was an "Indian grain reserve buildup of about 22 million tons, and U.S. grain exports to India ... [had) waned."26
169 When Bangladesh became independent after the devastating war in 1971, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called it "an international basket case." Over the next few years the food supply was sometimes so bad that some writers advocated "letting Bangladesh go down the drain," whatever that arrogant phrase might mean. Other persons organized emergency relief operations. A 1972 newspaper advertisement
169 Life expectancy in Bangladesh rose from 37.3 years at birth in 1960 to 47.4 years in 198035 to 55 years in 1984.36 Compare this actual long-term result with the pessimistic predictions in Lester Browns 1978 The Twenty Ninth Day, where he heads a section "The Tragic Rise in Death Rates," and puts into a table data that show increasing mortality in one area of Bangladesh from 1973-1974 to 1974-1975, and in three areas of India from 1971 to 1972.37 On the basis of just those two one-year reversals in the long-run trend, Brown built a prediction of decreasing life expectancy.
United Nations Filled With Malthusian Bastards
174 The title for this chapter comes from the 1976 book by Erik P. Eckholm, Losing Ground. That book was written "with the support and cooperation of the United Nations Environment Program," and contains a laudatory foreword by Maurice F. Strong, the executive director of the UN Environment Program. I draw attention to the auspices of Eckholms book because it was (and is) representative of the "official" position of the interlinked world community of environmental and population organizations.
265 great page on storing nuclear waste
Humans Limit Their Reproduction In Response to Resource Availability
393 One example is the "primitive" (as of 1936) Polynesian island of Tikopia, where "strong social conventions enforce celibacy upon some people and cause others to limit the number of their offspring, "20 and "the motive of a married pair is the avoidance of the extra economic liability which a child brings. "21 Another example is the effect of the size of the harvest on marriages in Sweden in the eighteenth century (a backward agricultural country then, but one that happened to keep good vital statistics). When the harvest was poor, people did not marry, as figure 24-1 shows. Birthrates were also responsive to the harvest, and even unmarried procreation was affected by objective economic conditions. This is clear evidence that poor people's sexual behavior is sensibly responsive to objective circumstances.
393 After an extensive study of the anthropological literature, A. M. Carr-Saunders concluded, "The mechanism whereby numbers may be kept near to the desirable level is everywhere present,"22 the particular mechanisms being "prolonged abstention from intercourse, abortion, and infanticide. "23 And as a result of a study of "data on 200 societies from all over the world ... from tropic to arctic ... from sea level to altitudes of more than 10,000 feet," Clellan S. Ford concluded that "both abortion and infanticide are universally known .... It is extremely common ... to find a taboo on sexual intercourse during the period when the mother is nursing .... In nearly every instance, the justification for this abstinence is the prevention of conception. "24 He also found instances of many kinds of contraceptive practices. Some are "clearly magical." Others "are relatively effective mechanical devices [for example] inserting a pad of bark cloth or a rag in the vagina ... [and] attempts to flush out the seminal fluid with water after intercourse. "
Malthus Believed Humans Used More Resources Than They Create
399 Malthuss theory of population asserts that because fertility goes up if income goes up due to new technical knowledge of agriculture, the extra population eats up the additional income. That is, Malthus asserted a tendency for humankind to be squeezed down to a long-run equilibrium of living at bare subsistence; this is Malthus's "dismal theorem." But when we examine the facts about fertility and economic development (as Malthus himself finally did, after he quickly dashed off his first edition), we find that the story does not end with the short-run increase in the birthrate as income first rises. If income continues to rise, fertility later goes down.
400 So the foundation is gone from under Malthus's grand theory and his dismal theorem. At the heart of Malthuss theory-quoting from his last edition-is the following: "(1) Population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence. (2) Population always increases when the means of subsistence increases. "39 The history of the demographic transition and the data in figure 23-8 disprove the second proposition. The first proposition is shown to be false in chapters S-8. Contrary to Malthus,
Not All Technological Advance Comes From Scientific Geniuses - But Workers In Production Process
421 Please note that "technological advance" as used in these examples most definitely does not mean only "science." Scientific geniuses-if that term is meaningful-are just one part of the knowledge process. Much technological advance comes from people who are neither well educated nor well paid-the dispatcher who develops a slightly better way of deploying the taxis in her ten-taxi fleet, the shipper who discovers that garbage cans make excellent cheap containers, the supermarket manager who finds a way to display more merchandise in a given space, the supermarket clerk who finds a quicker way to wrap the meat, the market researcher in the supermarket chain who experiments and finds more efficient and cheaper means of advertising the store's prices and sale items, and so on.
422 There have been many more discoveries and a faster rate of productivity growth in the past century than in previous centuries, when there were fewer people alive.
432 Furthermore, the salary of Bardeen, in the last year before he retired in the mid-1970s, was $46,500, and in the year when the transistor was invented he earned much much less. The difference between what society pays people like Bardeen, Shockley, and Brattain; and the benefit we get from such people, is a measure of the gain to the rest of us in our standard of living due to the advance in knowledge caused by the growth in population those inventors represent. This example should give some perspective to the rest of this afternote.
Increased Population Size Means Increased Efficiency In Productivity
440 Lets begin with an estimate of the overall effects of population size on productivity in less-developed countries (LDCs). Hollis B. Chenery compared the manufacturing sectors in a variety of countries and found that, all else being equal, if one country was twice as populous as another, output per worker was 20 percent larger. This is a very large positive effect of population size no matter how you look at it.
442 The larger the industry relative to the U.K. or Canada base, the higher its productivity. This effect is very large. Productivity goes up roughly with the square root of output. That is, if you quadruple the size of an industry, you may expect to double the output per worker and per unit of capital employed.
525 The idea is a simple one: The more units produced in a plant or an industry, the more efficiently they are produced, as people learn and develop better methods. Industrial engineers have understood learning by doing for many decades, but economists first grasped its importance for the production of airplanes in World War II, when it was referred to as the "80 percent curve": A doubling in the cumulative production of a particular airplane led to a 20 percent reduction in labor per plane. That is, if the first airplane required 1,000 units of labor, the second would require 80 percent of 1,000 (that is, 800) units, the fourth would require 80 percent of 800 (that is, 640) units, and so on, though after some time the rate of learning probably slows up.
540 And a study by ] . Dirck Stryker found that among the French-speaking African countries, lower population density is associated with lower economic growth-that is, higher population density implies a higher standard of living.
Nixon Calles Population Growth a "World Problem" - Commission Finds No Argument For Population Reduction/Antinatalism
529 The Presidents Commission on Population Growth and the American Future of the early 1970s sought hard to find such evidence. The Commissions creators clearly hoped and expected that it would bring in a report that called strongly for fertility reduction. Indeed, as thenPresident Nixon put it in a message to Congress, "Population growth is a world problem which no country can ignore."12
530 But despite its antinatalist origin, the worst the Commission could say was, "We have looked for and have not found any convincing economic argument for continued national population growth."13
530 It is instructive, I think, to note Kelley's own statement on the change in his views as a result of this research. Whereas he staned out in the expectation that an anti-natal government policy was justifiable on economic and ecological grounds, he ended up in a much more neutral position. In this respect, Kelleys experience is representative, I think, of that of many of us who have tried to look into the arguments and evidence about the "population problem."14
Low Population Growth Means Real Term Cut In Salary And Economic Growth
538 Low population growth brings a cut in real salaries for many, and a lack of the excitement that growth usually brings for all. In the 1960s Singapore gave people financial incentives to have fewer children. But after observing the results, Singapore turned completely around in the 1980s and gave incentives (though only to the middle class) to have more children.
540 Another sort of study plots the growth rate of per capita income as a function of population density. Roy Gobin and I found that density has a positive effect on the rate of economic growth, as seen in figure 34-1.5
540 And Kelley and Schmidt (1994) have massively confirmed the Simon-Gobin finding.
Simones Values Versus The Nihilistic Malthusians
558 I know that it is a hopeless undertaking to debate about fundamental value judgments. For instance, if someone approves, as a goal, the extirpation of the human race from the earth, one cannot refute such a viewpoint on rational grounds.
620 But perhaps this would seem more credible if you know that when I originally got interested in the economics of population I had exactly the opposite belief that I now have-I believed that population growth was, along with war, the greatest of dangers to humanity. It was only after I began to study the subject and found that the data did not support that original belief that my thoughts changed. And I was not disposed to close my eyes to the evidence because it did not square with my original beliefs. Rather, it was my beliefs that had to change, and I felt the need to study the subject more deeply to arrive at a satisfactory body of theory and empirical information. Thats how I got into this field-just the opposite of being drawn to the field by beliefs that I now hold. (Does this mean that I claim to be perfectly truthful in all aspects of my life? Of course not; I'm as human as the next person.) In my view, untruth is the ugliest and most dangerous pollution that huIt how be transformed into a product of value.
People Don't Read Non-Sensationlist Science
575 The great geologist Kirtley F. Mather wrote a book called Enough and To Spare in 1944 that reassured the public that resources would be plentiful; it was withdrawn from the University of Illinois library just twice in 1945 and 1952-prior
Forced Sterilisation By US State
591 In famous exemplary cases, a perfectly normal young black woman was sterilized under the guise of being given a birth-control shot, 22 and a childless married woman who went to have a small uterine tumor removed was sterilized without her knowledge or consent. 23 At just one institution in Virginiathe Lynchburg Training School and Hospital-four thousand "patients" were sterilized between 1922 and 1972 as "misfits" in order to avoid "racial degeneracy." The superintendent of the Lynchburg institution was a eugenics enthusiast who aimed to produce genetic purity.24 The law sanctioning this practice was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, though changed since then. And in 1976, a North Carolina law was upheld in state and federal courts that permitted the sterilization of "mentally retarded" or "mentally ill" persons.
592 The U.S. Federal District Coun said that "evidence that is clear, strong, and convincing that the subject is likely to engage in sexual activity without using contraceptive devices and that either a defective child is likely to be born or a child born that cannot be cared for by its parent" is grounds for sterilization. Perhaps most frightening, the Supreme Coun of Nonh Carolina stated that the state may sterilize because "the people of North Carolina also have a right to prevent the procreation of children who will become a burden to the State." In other words, if you do poorly on an IQ test, or if a physician says that you are mentally ill-both of which could happen to most of us under cenain circumstances, as happened to many antigovernment activists in the USSRthen you could be forcibly sterilized. 25
Bourgeois Rag Economist Says "Extinction of Human Race May Be a Good Thing
602 The Economist wrote in an editorial: "The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable, but a good thing.
Eugenicists Seeking To Forcibly Prevent Births Under A "Public Good"
604 just as we have laws compelling death control, so we must have laws requiring birth control-the purpose being to ensure a zero rate of population increase. We must come to see that it is the duty of government to protect women against pregnancy as it protects them against job discrimination and smallpox. and for the same reasonthe public good. No longer can we tolerate the doctrinaire position that the number of children a couple has is a strictly private decision carrying no social consequences. (Dr. Edward Chasteen)2
604 If the less stringent curbs on procreation fail. someday perhaps childbearing will be deemed a punishable crime against society unless the parents hold a government license. Or perhaps all potential parents will be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the governments issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing. (Stewart M. Ogilvy, Honorary President of Friends of the Earth) 1
the recently declassified U.S. National Security Council 197 4 basic plan describes continuing covert U.S. population-control programs in Africa that utilize just about every dirty political and media trick to coerce the Africans to have fewer children. These programs run the risk of causing destructive political fallout for the United States, as happened in India in the 1970s when the United States was implicated in coercive sterilization programs.
615 "We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.
615 Garrett Hardin is even more explicit in his famous "The Tragedy of the Commons," saying "Freedom to breed is intolerable."21
615 In conditions of scarcity the civil right to have unlimited births simply does not exist. Such a claim [the right to have children] is attention-getting and suspect. It is a favorite argument of minorities in suppon of their own overproduction of binhs. The right to have children fits into the network of other rights and duties we share and must dovetail with the rights of others. When all of us must cunail our production of children none of us has an overriding civil right of this kind. The closer we live together and the more of us there are, the fewer civil rights we can exercise before they infringe upon those of another. This adverse relation between dense population and personal freedom is easily documented around the world. It is time for people sincerely interested in civil rights to expose such special pleading, and to intervene when it is leveled against local or national programs. 22
617 A briefer statement is that of Kingsley Davis: "It can be argued that overreproduction-that is, the bearing of more than four children-is a worse crime than most and should be outlawed."23
619 In the state of Uttar Pradesh, "Any government servant whose spouse is alive and who has three or more children must be sterilized within three months, pursuant to a state government order issued under the Defense of Internal Security of India Rules. Those failing to do so will cease to be entitled to any rationed article beyond the basic four units. "25 In the state of Maharashtra, population fifty million, the legislature passed an act requiring compulsory sterilization for all families with three or more children (four or more if the children were all boys or all girls), but this measure did not receive the necessary consent of the president of India. And in other states in India, in Singapore, 26 and perhaps elsewhere, public housing, education, and other public services have been at times conditioned on the number of children a family has.
Julian Simone Points Out The Amount of Fake 'Science' In Bourgeois Society By Zealots Trying To Justify Their Cause
622 The fact that there are any such reports in print is amazing, because people try to hide evidence of dishonest tactics. The existence of such public reports is strong evidence that a lot of this is going on. And it suggests that the participants are so convinced of the virtue of their ends that they believe that any means are justified, no matter how indecent.
623 In the famine-stricken town of Baidoa, the crew set up an expensive satellite system in the counyard of the regional hospital, so the well-paid correspondent could broadcast live with scenes of people dying in the background. The crew also wanted to film a surgeon performing an abdominal operation-but asked to place a garbage pail filled with bloody, amputated limbs on the operating table, next to the patient, because it would make a better image. 36
624 Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the [Alaska National Wildlife Refuge pollution) debate is the false information being disseminated by well-meaning zealots who oppose any human activity on the Coastal Plain. Do they believe that their cause is so just that they are above and beyond the truth? (Walter Hickel, former governor of Alaska, 1991)
624 Reagan administration was closer to this view than the previous Caner administration, and closer than the Democratic Congress, Planned Parenthood has spent large sums of money "accusing" those who are against population control of being the "Radical Right."
Engels And Marx Was Right
624 It should be noted here, however, that the nineteenth-century writer who had the soundest understanding and presented the best statement of population economics, taking into account the role of knowledge creation, was Friedrich Engels, and through him, Marx.
No Rsason Human Resourcefulness Cannot Forever Continue To Respond To Shortages and Problems
627 There is no physical or economic reason why human resourcefulness and enterprise cannot forever continue to respond to impending shortages and existing problems with new expedients that, after an adjustment period, leave us better off than before the problem arose. Adding more people will cause us more such problems, but at the same time there will be more people to solve these problems and leave us with the bonus of lower costs and less scarcity in the long run. The bonus applies to such desirable resources as better health, more wilderness, cheaper energy, and a cleaner environment.
Agricultural Prices Lowest in History
641 The World Bank ... on the eve of a two-day conference on "Overcoming Global Hunger" ... sought to refute the Malthusian thesis that the world will reach a point where it cannot produce enough food for an expanding population. In fact, said bank Vice President Ismail S[i)rageldin, agricultural prices are "at their lowest levels in history" and world food production "rises faster than the population. "2
Asimov Concedes
657 Asimov read about the resources bet and then wrote: Naturally, I was all on the side of the pessimist and judge my surprise when it turned out he had lost the bet; that the prices of the metals had indeed fallen; that grain was cheaper; that oil . . . was cheaper; and so on. I was thunderstruck. Was it possible, I thought, that something that seemed so obvious to me-that a steadily rising population is deadly-can be wrong? Yes, it could be. I am frequently wrong.
