Extras: Marian Tupy on Superabundance
June 5, 2023
Are humans and the planet doomed? Or can we look to past successes to guide the future and find reasons for optimism?
Are humans and the planet doomed? Or can we look to past successes to guide the future and find reasons for optimism?
Are there too many humans? Is economic growth destroying the planet? Will humans run out of resources? These questions existed long before Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population and will likely remain. But is there a different way to think about population growth and natural resources?
Juliette Sellgren and Marian Tupy address these pessimistic worries about population booms and resource depletion with economic data and rational optimism in this episode of the Great Antidote podcast. Tupy is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute fellow and co-author with Gale Pooley of the new book Superabundance (Cato Institute, 2022).
Listen here: Marian Tupy on Superabundance
Sellgren opens the podcast with a question to Tupy, “What is the most important thing that people my age or generation need to know that we don’t?” Tupy responds with, “You should know that you are not a cancer on the planet, you should know that you are both a consumer and a destroyer, but also a creator and an innovator.”
Tupy says what separates humans from other animals is our ability to innovate, and not just consume resources but also create. This is the fundamental reason behind the great enrichment of humanity’s skyrocketing prosperity over the past two hundred years or so. Tupy cites examples of technological innovations such as fertilizer and genetically modified foods which have helped humanity practically eliminate famine while making “more room for nature.”
The conversation then shifts to examining the common claim of environmentalists regarding the supposed link between environmental decay and economic growth; the zero-sum game between the economy and the environment. Tupy counters with his claim that nations which are economically prosperous also tend to produce healthy environments, with some exceptions such as China.
What I saw was that the richer the country, the better the environment, okay…it wasn’t that sparse populations have great environments. In fact, go anywhere into the third world…and you’ll notice that people don’t care very much about the environment. It seemed to me there was a strong correlation between economic growth and general wealth of a society, and good environments.
Next, Sellgren and Tupy discuss the 1980 Simon-Ehrlich wager, between biologist and author of ‘The Population Bomb’ Paul Ehrlich, and economist Julian Simon. Ehrlich’s book argued that the growth in human population would lead to resource depletion, significant price increases and rampant famine, claims which Simon doubted. To settle the disagreement Simon challenged Ehrlich to a bet. Ehrlich chose five resources to measure the price of over a decade and if three of the five resources increased in price, Ehrlich would win. If three of the resources declined in price, Simon would win. Predictably, Simon won emphatically as every single one of the resources declined in price. Tupy states,
That should’ve been the end of the discussion…all the doomsters would stop promoting their message, but in fact that hasn’t happened.
This has inspired Tupy’s own research laid out in the book ‘Superabundance’ addressing the common view that population growth is inherently linked to resource depletion. According to Tupy’s research, the prices of hundreds of different goods such as “minerals, metals, fuels, food items” since 1850 have declined in time price even though the human population has increased by nearly sevenfold since the mid 1800’s.
Tupy says the reason behind significant human progress over the past 150-200 years has been due to the “embrace of reason, logic, human dignity, greater freedom, some form of free market capitalism…but there’s no reason to be certain that this has to continue.”
One of the most compelling points in the podcast is when Tupy asks extreme environmentalists to evaluate their position through the eyes of those in the developing world,
all those extreme environmentalists in the world that think we have enough growth, we must never forget that there are billions of people in the world that have much less than people in the United States or in Western Europe…when you look at Africa, and Latin America and parts of Asia…you see there is still a lot of goodness you can do with rapid economic growth.
Tupy states that population growth is not a concern because when there are more people to share ideas with and experiment with, there is more innovation to create more efficient ways to use resources, or the creation or harnessing of new resources altogether hence creating a world of superabundance.Sellgren and Tupy finish the podcast with a dialogue about where the pessimistic views regarding population growth and decline come from.
The reason why so much in the United States is dominated by negativity, anxiety, depression, and very often suicide has actually to do with the fact that news over the past twenty years has become much darker, and much more negative than it used to be.
Tupy asserts that this is due to competition among media sources attempting to garner more clicks through a bombardment of negative headlines and stories. This trend causes people to be overly critical of new ideas as innovations because of their potential for disaster, hence limiting the ability of humanity to solve problems.
Some questions I had while listening are below. Feel free to share yours as well.
1. What does Tupy mean by “destroyer and creator” and how does this relate to the concept of superabundance? Where does Tupy think this belief stems from? And how can consistent pessimism affect the ability of younger generations to solve the world’s socio-economic problems?
2. What if innovation slows down? How will humanity respond to problems of resource depletion in a world of a great stagnation?
1. What does Tupy mean by “destroyer and creator” and how does this relate to the concept of superabundance? Where does Tupy think this belief stems from? And how can consistent pessimism affect the ability of younger generations to solve the world’s socio-economic problems?
2. What if innovation slows down? How will humanity respond to problems of resource depletion in a world of a great stagnation?
3. Is the reason the apocalyptic predictions of figures such as Paul Ehrlich often go unfulfilled simply due to short-termism? Furthermore, are these predictions of humanity running out of resources becoming a legitimate possibility given the presence of climate change causing natural disasters affecting resource availability such as longer, more severe, and more prevalent droughts? Or will humanity adjust and respond to these problems as we have in the past with new innovations such as green energy?
4. Why are the successes in improving environmental metrics in the First World, such as for cleaner air and water since the 1960’s, often unreported and overlooked?
5. Why are free markets the key variable in sustained economic growth? Under what circumstances does Tupy believe could halt human progress? How can life be made “awesome” instead of “pretty good” as it is now?
6. To those who see a dichotomy between human economic progress and a healthy environment, what ought to be the cap on human progress? Shall we turn developing nations away from using fossil fuels, which the first world has used to get rich, in the name of saving the environment? What would the potential consequences of this be?
7. Are declining birth rates across the first world due to the progression of the demographic transition concerning? If so, how can people be encouraged to have more children or does the solution lie elsewhere? How is this concern different to those revolving around overpopulation? Or are they rightfully analogous due to their apocalyptic predictions?
If you enjoyed this Extra and/or the episode, here are some related episodes and works:
Great Antidote: Eli Dourado on Energy Abundance
Great Antidote: Adam Thierer on Permissionless Innovation
Great Antidote: Ed Glaeser on the Unseen Beauty of Cities
Ross Emmett’s Adam Smith and T. Robert Malthus
Robert Bradley, Resourceship: Expanding 'Depletable' Resources, at Econlib.
Great Antidote: Eli Dourado on Energy Abundance
Great Antidote: Adam Thierer on Permissionless Innovation
Great Antidote: Ed Glaeser on the Unseen Beauty of Cities
Ross Emmett’s Adam Smith and T. Robert Malthus
Robert Bradley, Resourceship: Expanding 'Depletable' Resources, at Econlib.