H/T Not PC.

I’ve been aware of the economist Julian Simon for decades now, ever since I read about him winning a bet he had with arch catastrophist scientist, Paul Erlich, but I’d never heard of the Simon Abundance Index (SAI) until now.

Erlich’s most famous prediction, pumped by him from the late 1960’s on, was that human population growth was outpacing food production: so much so that it was a certainty that hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation in the 1970’s, in the West! One my favourite debunkers of this was a little known British writer called Adrian Berry, author of techno-optimist book, The Next Ten Thousand Years. You can read his concise argument from 1974 against Erlich here. (Berry’s prediction of a human population of 10 billion in the 21st century is looking pretty accurate as well – far more so than others of that time).

It turned out that Erlich was also a doomster about almost everything else human. If it wasn’t food we’d run out of it would be other resources like the metals we use. The most famous debunker of that was Simon, who won a famous victory in a 1980 wager with Ehrlich over whether or not a bundle of five natural resources would become more scarce over the course of a decade. Simon won the bet easily.

That bundle has been expanded to create the SAI graph above and things continue on as they have been now for centuries:

[The SAI] now stands at 609.4. Meaning that in 2023, the Earth was 509.4 percent more abundant in 2023 than it was in 1980!

How astonishing is that! World population since 1980 has almost doubled; while resources produced by human beings have multiplied by more than five times!! 

Turns out that as global population increases, that “virtually all resources became more abundant. How on earth (literally) is that possible?”

Because the ultimate resource is the human mind which – as PC puts it pungently, is a machine for turning shit into useful stuff.

And yet, sadly and incredibly, this catastrophist shit never goes away, no matter how many times it has failed since the original theory of Malthus.