Overpopulation concerns, particularly on the fake holiday of Earth Day, were recently once again noised about in the news. In honor of this ever-looming yet centuries-old threat, I offer a reprint of an essay of mine from decades ago.
Nothing has changed since then. The certain doom of the planet is still twelve years in the future, even as it was twenty years ago, even as it was half a century ago.
Correction: one thing changed. Shale oil extraction, now called fracking, in this column was a speculation, and is now fact. Since my prediction was perfectly accurate, I merely changed the tense of those sentences from future to past.
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A Cornucopian is the opposite of a Malthusian.
The term Cornucopian was coined to define the position of economist Julian Simon whose famous wager with doomsayer Paul Ehrlich in a sane world would would have put paid to the Malthusian predictions of the latter. (You can see more about the Simon-Ehrlich wager here.)
The term Malthusian was coined to define the position, now mainstream, based on airy speculations by Rev. Thomas Malthus as laid out in his 1798 writings, An Essay on the Principle of Population which holds that population grows geometrically while the growth of other resources, such as arable land, cannot be but linear.
A Malthusian concludes that population growth (especially of races distasteful to Malthusians occupying Africa, India and Ireland) always outstrips available resources, and this inevitably leads to disastrous scarcity, resulting in mass famine, war, and apocalyptic megadeath.
More people means less stuff.
A Cornucopian says that population growth, while it creates dislocations and even disasters (such as the enclosure laws of England) does not necessarily lead to the scarcity of any particular resource, nor all of them.
More people does not mean less stuff.
Let me make a startling suggestion — that we look at the evidence that overpopulation exists, ever had existed, or ever will exist.
What evidence is there?
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