THERE'S TOO MANY OF YOU OTHERS

Hardest hit by our sorry lack of space are usually the book reviews at the end;

Prof. William Allen's marvelous Midnight Economist, for example, deserved a lot more than the seven lines to which we had to cut our review last month.

So let's not short-change another economist, Julian L. Simon of the U. of Ill., whose articles we have noted before [AtE Aug 80, Feb 81], and whose book The Ultimate Resource has just been published ($14.50, Princeton Univ. Press). Its main ideas will be very familiar to readers of this newsletter: resources do not run out, they are replaced as they become uneconomical; energy is inexhaustible, but the access to it is blocked; people are an asset, not a liability. However, the volume contains masses of data, evidence, and arguments to substantiate these points, all brought to the lay reader in a highly readable style.

There are chapters on energy, but the book's forte is population: people, to Simon, are the ultimate resource; just as they are pollution to Ehrlich and Holdren, who would cleanse this contamination by voluntary means if possible, but by coercion if necessary. The population controller is, of course, a close brother of the energy stifler, de-industrializer, anti-nuke, and corporation baiter, with whom he shares resentment of the producers of mass affluence, and fear of being crowded by the others, when the world rightfully belongs only to him.

The figures alone are worth the price of this book; below we reproduce (part of) one showing how the world's food is increasing faster than its population. Simon's approach differs from Ehrlich's (a senior member of all five clubs mentioned above) in yet another way: Simon has no need to use handpicked, outdated, or outright false information to make his points.

One minor criticism: The discussion of the underlying reasons for population control does not do justice to the rest of the book; points like "the belief of the more educated that they know what is best for the less educated," "dislike of business," and "racism" would have deserved more than a paragraph each. (Population control as preached by Ehrlich and Holdren is distinctly racist in thrust and effect, though we doubt they have the intelligence to realize it.)

Simon's refreshing volume should be compared with all the rave reviews that, no doubt, will dutifully be published soon about Building a Sustainable Society (Norton & Co., of course) by the Worldwatch Institute's Lester Brown. We failed to detect a single point that has not been made many times in the unsubstantiated mush of Lovins, Schumacher and the other deindustrializers, except perhaps a call for an "Ecological Theology," based on such gospels as that of the National Council of Churches which condemns nuclear power [and collects money for terrorists]. We also found it interesting that the Worldwatch Institute estimates the contribution of photovoltaics to the world energy budget in the year 2,000 at 40 million tonnes of coal equivalent. Why is that interesting? Because it estimates the contribution of cow dung at 45 million tonnes.