“Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is either a madman or an economist.”
David Attenborough
If you are only vaguely familiar with the tidal wave of superhero movies that have flooded theaters over the past decade, you have probably heard of Thanos, the evil alien supervillain in the Avengers movies. Thanos’s main objective is to kill half of all living things in the universe. He thinks that since planets only have limited resources, if a population exceeds the sustainable threshold, the result is mass extinction and destruction. A one-time halving of all populations in the universe would avoid this inevitable future extinction.
Media, politicians, scientists, and environmental activists have been telling us for decades that in the age of industrialization, our planet will not be able to support the exponential population growth of humans. Eventually, we are told, we will reach a tipping point where there is no more food, or too much pollution, or too much change in the climate, and we will not be able to save ourselves from mass death and destruction.
The Avengers producers knew this is what we have been taught, and so in their movie they play a little trick on the audience to cause some moral confusion. They create an imaginary world where all this death and destruction from overpopulation actually occurs. The evil villain Thanos saw it happen on his own planet in his youth, and so in the eyes of the audience he seems somewhat justified in thinking that he is doing everyone a favor by killing them.
So is Thanos the savior of the universe? Does he have the right intentions but is just a bit misguided in his thinking? Or is he an evil, megalomaniacal psychopath?
If you think he is anything other than an evil, megalomaniacal psychopath, then allow me to convince you otherwise.
Thomas Malthus and Overpopulation
During the Industrial Revolution in England, an economist named Thomas Malthus published various theories regarding population growth. Observing how industrialization was reducing mortality rates and extending life expectancy, Malthus grew concerned about how it would be possible to provide food for the growing population.
He theorized that industrialization allows a population to grow geometrically. The increasing workforce is able to produce more food, but only at an arithmetic rate. The result is that at some point in the not-too-distant future, population will exceed food production capacity. Consumption levels would be difficult to change, and as a result, populations would need to be reduced through famine, war, or some other calamity in order to bring population numbers in line with what could be supported by food production.
Real wages would also fall as the population rose. As food and resources would become more scarce, the cost of living would rise, and people would not be able to afford as much as before.
Two-hundred years later, we see that Malthus could not have been more wrong. The world population continues to grow, life expectancy increases, infant mortality continues to plummet, real wages have steadily increased, and there are more food and resources today than ever before.
Year after year, we hear scientists, politicians, and activists warn of the inevitable Malthusian disaster and extinction of the human race. Year after year, their predictions fail to materialize, and the apocalypse keeps getting postponed.
So what happened? Why was Malthus so incredibly wrong?
Julian Simon and the Ultimate Resource
In 1968, a renowned biologist from Stanford University, Paul Ehrlich, set off a wave of alarmism when he published The Population Bomb. The book essentially repeated many of the concerns expressed by Malthus 170 years earlier. Population growth was exploding, and there was no way that human civilization could be maintained due to limited resources and food production. Ehrlich went so far as to predict catastrophe in the 1980’s due to food shortages.
Ehrlich’s intellectual arch-nemesis was economist Julian Simon. In stark contrast to the Stanford professor’s environmental alarmism, Simon argued that when it came to natural resources, there was nothing to worry about. That’s because even though there is a finite amount of physical resources in a natural sense, there is an infinite amount of resources in an economic sense.
In a free market, prices communicate the availability of a resource in connection with consumer demand. If copper was needed for communication wiring, copper miners have an incentive to dig up copper and sell it to wire manufacturers. If the world’s supply of copper was getting depleted but the demand didn’t change, the price of copper would go up. Miners would then look for new ways to mine for copper in order to find more and benefit from the higher prices. Innovators would try to invent new communication technologies, as was the case with optical fiber, in order to replace copper wiring with a less expensive alternative.
As long as humans had the freedom to innovate and protect their property, they would always find new ways to meet their needs regardless of environmental challenges.
In Simon’s analysis, our most valuable resource is not what we can get out of the ground. It is ourselves and our time. The more humans we have on the planet, the more time we can devote to efficiently utilizing Earth’s resources to meet our needs. Instead of running out of resources, we would innovate and find new ways to utilize the resources available to us or look for new ways to find more of the depleted resources. The key to making this all happen is freedom, the rule of law, and property rights.
Free Market Environmentalism and the Paradox of Economic Progress
To many, the free market looks like a recipe for decimating Earth’s resources. On the contrary, what we have seen happen since the Industrial Revolution runs counter to what the alarmists tell us to expect.
In a developing economy, people are focused on day-to-day survival and are less concerned with the environment. Where there is economic freedom, the real income per capita increases over time. At first, the health of the environment is ignored as people focus on creating wealth. As people become wealthier, however, they are able to invest more of their income into maintaining a healthier and safer environment. This phenomenon is called the environmental Kuznets curve.
As the economy develops and the population grows, we might want to think along the same lines as Malthus and assert that increasing consumption will lead to resource depletion.
But what has happened in the past is quite the opposite. Resource availability grows because producers have an incentive to search for newer reserves.
We often hear about how climate change poses a serious threat to humanity. What we usually don’t hear about is the steep drop in climate-related deaths over the past 100 years. Despite any challenges that climate change may pose, humans are able to innovate and make their environment a safer place to live.
These are just a few examples of how reality clashes with what the media and politicians consistently tell us about our destructive relationship with the environment. It seems like an increasing population should lead to careless exploitation of Earth’s resources. But in fact, the socio-economic system that enables such population growth also tends to harbor the institutions that help preserve the environment for prolonged future use.
Anti-Humanism
Much of the environmental alarmism today is built upon the assumption that the Earth is the Garden of Eden and humans are a destructive plague. Industrialization has placed an inordinate amount of stress on the fragile environment that cannot support such an unnatural way of life. If we reverted to our ancient state when we lived in trees or caves, we would not stress the fragile balance of nature and the Earth will flourish.
This assumption is easy to adopt when you live a life of comfort. In reality, the Earth is a dangerous place that is constantly trying to kill us. To paraphrase Alex Epstein, human progress has not taken a safe environment and made it dangerous. It has taken a dangerous environment and made us safe.
The anti-human movement asserts that the modern socio-economic system in advanced countries is destroying planet Earth. In reality, a country with economic freedom, strong property rights protection, and the rule of law is less likely to cut down its trees, pollute its rivers, and kill all its animals.
The atrocious environmental record of the Soviet Union serves as an extreme example of what would happen to the natural environment with economic central planning and no private property. Today’s alarmists often use environmental hysteria as a pretext to centralize government control over our lives and deny us our rights. What concerns those of us who care about the environment and human flourishing is that the alarmists’ demands to “save” the environment often include implementing the very policies that cause enormous harm to the environment.
Conclusion
Though Thanos is a fictional character, his worldview epitomizes the logical conclusions of the anti-human Malthusian.
Overpopulation will inevitably lead to a Malthusian catastrophe.
Therefore, we must reduce the population.
This is a sick, delusional conviction disguised as concern for the whole of humanity. Underlying this belief is the assumption that humans are a plague upon the Earth. The prosperity of modern civilization is unsustainable and must be torn down. The result will be a cleaner, greener, healthier Earth.
The media, politicians, and activists have been feeding us with this assumption for years. What sort of message does this send? No wonder so many people feel that it would have been better had they never been born. They’ve been consistently told all their lives that their existence is a scourge to Mother Earth.
But we are not a plague. In a free society, each person plays a vital role in contributing to the well being of others and the environment. We find ways to create value and are rewarded when we meet the needs of others. Each of us is essential in building up a free and prosperous society. Each of us is needed to create a world where humans can peacefully thrive. Doing so will not destroy our planet. As long as we maintain a society with economic freedom, the rule of law, and respect for private property, we each can contribute to human flourishing while living in harmony with Mother Nature.