Julian L. Simon

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Julian L. Simon ( Julian Lincoln Simon ; born February 12, 1932 in Newark , New Jersey , † February 8, 1998 in Chevy Chase , Maryland ) was Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute . Simon has authored a large number of books and articles, the best known being his works on population , raw materials and immigration .

The American is an important representative of the Cornucopian view, according to which the limits of growth and raw materials are not given by nature, but can be stretched and expanded almost at will through technical progress. In the natural sciences his theses are outright rejected by most scientists; However, he is considered an icon among environmental skeptics. It was also well received by some economists such as Friedrich Hayek .

Simon was married with three children and died of a heart attack at the age of 65.

theses

Oil price from 1861 to 2007
Oil price 1950 to 2010

"There is no reason to believe that at any given moment in the future the available quantity of any natural resource or service at present prices will be much smaller than it is now, or non-existent."

- Julian L. Simon : The Ultimate Resource, 1981

According to Simon, natural raw materials will always be available at comparable prices in the long term and will not run out in the future either. He explains this contradiction to the everyday wisdom of the limits of growth in detail in his book The Ultimate Resource , published in 1981. Simon researched the development of raw material prices over long periods of time. It struck him that the long-term inflation-adjusted mean did not rise, but rather remained constant and even fell.

As regards the price development of metals, it is stated, among other things, that at the time of the Paris World Exhibition in 1855 Napoleon III. had given a banquet where only the guests of honor received cutlery made of the then immensely valuable aluminum, the others such made of gold. The material value of iron knight armor was much more important in the Middle Ages than it is today. Simon assumed that rising market prices of a raw material (such as copper) would intensify the search for substitute materials (glass fibers instead of metal telephone cables). Adjusted for inflation, the price falls accordingly, and the range of economically accessible raw materials or reserves (cf. the so-called oil constant ) remains constant.

“This is my long-run forecast in brief: […] The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse. "

- Julian L. Simon : "The Doomslayer", Wired 2/1997

The above statement and other theses are considered to be a decisive inspiration for Bjørn Lomborg's book Apocalypse No! The Skeptical Environmentalist . Lomborg wanted to refute Simon's provocative thesis, according to which humanity is increasingly and in almost all aspects better, but this is not noticed, but he changed his mind after a closer look at the data.

As early as 1984 - together with Herman Kahn - in The Resourceful Earth, Simon had critically examined Dennis Meadow's Limits to Growth and the Global 2000 Report and - until recently, to everyone's surprise, rightly so - a significant fall in the inflation-adjusted oil price after the 1972 oil crisis predicted.

Bet with Paul R. Ehrlich

In 1980 he made a public bet with the entomologist Paul R. Ehrlich , who became known for his particularly drastic predictions about famine and shortages . Simon asked Ehrlich to give him 5 amounts of metal with a value of 1000 $, which, as Ehrlich and others assumed, would become scarce in the foreseeable future and would therefore have to expect significant price increases.

Ehrlich chose chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten in a 10 year timeframe. By September 1990, however, the total price of all of these metals had fallen and Ehrlich paid Simon the difference of $ 576.07. Ehrlich would also have lost if he had invested in gasoline, food, sugar, coffee, cotton, wool or phosphates, because all these goods had become cheaper when adjusted for inflation. Simon lost a comparable bet on wood prices with the forest scientist David South, but was not able to accept or make another one.

A retrospective investigation based on the real price development of the raw materials showed that Simon had only won through luck. Looking at all possible periods from 1990 to 2008, Simon would only have won the bet in 38.4% of all cases, while Ehrlich would not only have won more often, but also with a large profit margin. In fact, the period 1980–1990 in which the bet was run was one of the 15 worst during the entire study period 1900–2008. Contrary to popular public opinion, the conclusion of the bet is not that there is no shortage of raw materials, but that it is better to have luck on your side than expertise when betting.

Infinity of resources

For Simon it made no sense to look at the purely physically limited amount of elements on earth from an economic point of view - recycling and the development of new ideas and technologies through the market ultimately made raw materials endlessly available, just like energy (from the sun) always sufficiently available to human standards. In the end, human activity is small compared to the richness and diversity of nature, which also prompted Simon to be skeptical about fears about the ozone hole and global warming .

Among other things, Simon took the view that shortages of certain raw materials such as B. Copper could be solved by "simply" making it from other elements.

Simon turned against the population-related disaster scenarios of Paul R. Ehrlich and his Malthusian predecessors - for Simon, population growth was a positive basis for innovation and progress. In this context, Simon claimed, among other things, that the earth could feed the world's population even if the population continued to grow unchecked for seven billion years. In fact, as long as it continued at today's speed, population growth would result in a population density of 10 people per square meter in less than 800 years , after around 2000 years the mass of people would already correspond to the mass of the earth itself and after around 6000 the mass would be of humanity as large as the mass of the entire universe .

Trivia

Eminent economists such as Friedrich Hayek , Milton Friedman and Aaron Wildavsky agreed with Simon, Paul R. Ehrlich and Albert Bartlett are among his critics; outside of the libertarian scene ( Dirk Maxeiner , Michael Miersch ) he is hardly known in German-speaking countries . Working with Simon and a wired interview with him also inspired Bjørn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist .

The airlines' global practice today of systematically overbooking flights but paying an attractive premium to passengers who voluntarily withdraw is based on a suggestion by Simons. Previously, individual passengers had been randomly rejected in the event of overbooking.

John M. Tierney of the New York Times and peak oil specialist Matthew Simmons had - with reference to Simons - made a bet that ran until 2011 on (according to Tierney's assumption) that the oil price would fall again in the future. Tierney, a student of Julian Lincoln Simons won the bet, which continued after Simmons death and commented on this pointedly “for now I'd say that Julian Simon's advice remains as good as ever. You can always make news with doomsday predictions, but you can usually make money betting against them "(, German:" Julian Simon's advice remains correct: You can make headlines with doomsday prophecies, money is made by opposing them " )

Simon wrote his most successful book publication via mail order catalogs; Simon's writings never came close to the success of his adversaries.

Simon's optimistic attitude did not protect him from depression.

education

Fonts

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Riley E. Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright: Climate change denial: Sources, actors and strategies . In: Constance Lever-Tracy (Ed.): The Routledge Handbook of Climate Change and Society . Routledge 2010, 240-259, p. 243.
  2. ↑ S. Venetski: "Silver" from clay . In: Metallurgist . 13, No. 7, 1969, p. 451. doi : 10.1007 / BF00741130 .
  3. ^ "The Doomslayer" , Wired 2/1997
  4. ^ Katherine Kiel et al .: Luck or skill? An examination of the Ehrlich – Simon bet . In: Ecological Economics . tape 69 , 2010, p. 1365-1367 , doi : 10.1016 / j.ecolecon.2010.03.007 .
  5. ↑ a b Jared Diamond : Collapse. Why societies survive or perish . 4th edition, Frankfurt am Main 2010, p. 629.
  6. ^ Ed Regis: The Doomslayer . In: Wired (Issue 5.02) . Archived from the original on May 18, 2008. Retrieved May 18, 2008.
  7. ^ John Tierney: Economic Optimism? Yes, I'll Take That Bet . In: The New York Times . December 27, 2010
  8. ^ Julian L. Simon: Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression . ISBN 0-8126-9098-2 .
personal data
SURNAME Simon, Julian L.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Simon, Julian Lincoln
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American economist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH February 12, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Newark
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 1998
Place of death Chevy Chase