{"id":1646676,"date":"2022-09-19T08:10:11","date_gmt":"2022-09-19T12:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1646676"},"modified":"2022-09-19T08:10:50","modified_gmt":"2022-09-19T12:10:50","slug":"marian-tupy-does-the-world-face-an-underpopulation-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/marian-tupy-does-the-world-face-an-underpopulation-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"Marian Tupy: Does the World Face an Underpopulation Problem?"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fmarian-tupy-does-the-world-face-an-underpopulation-problem%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1646676&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><\/div>\n<aside id=\"aside1\" class=\"left aside-wrapper aside-wrapper-950\">\n<\/aside>\n<p>\u201cThere are not enough people. \u00a0I can\u2019t emphasize this enough &#8230; And I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birth rate and the rapidly declining birth rate,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/podcasts\/the-journal\/elon-musk-on-why-he-wants-more-robots-and-less-government\/2504773d-8111-494c-a4e6-1f708d2526f8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">argued<\/a> the Tesla CEO Elon Musk last year. \u00a0He has returned to the subject of \u201cpopulation collapse\u201d on several subsequent occasions. \u00a0Contrast Musk\u2019s position with that of the Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who <a href=\"https:\/\/www.realclearpolitics.com\/video\/2019\/02\/25\/alexandria_ocasio-cortez_ponders_moral_climate_change_question_is_it_still_okay_to_have_children.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told<\/a> her Instagram viewers that \u201cIt is basically a scientific consensus that the lives of our children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: is it OK to still have children?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Humans impact the world in both good and bad ways. \u00a0In a new book, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.superabundance.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet<\/a><\/em>, my co-author and I have revisited a subject that\u2019s intimately connected to population growth: resource scarcity. \u00a0This debate goes back to the 5<sup>th<\/sup> century BC, with both Confucians and the Greeks agreeing that population growth needed to be controlled lest excessive fecundity overwhelmed the food supply and famine ensued. \u00a0The English prelate, Thomas Malthus, resurrected the idea in his influential <em>Essay on the Principle of Population<\/em> in 1798, and people have been arguing about the advisability of population growth ever since.<\/p>\n<p>The debate has given us the Chinese one-child policy (1980\u20132015) and mass sterilizations during India\u2019s Emergency (1975\u00ad\u20131977). \u00a0HBO\u2019s Bill Maher <a href=\"https:\/\/www.realclearpolitics.com\/video\/2019\/04\/13\/maher_falling_birth_rates_are_a_good_thing_world_is_too_crowded.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">joked<\/a> a couple years back that \u201cthe great under-discussed factor in the climate crisis is there are just too many of us and we use too much shit.\u201d \u00a0More seriously, Patrick Crusius, the shooter of 22 people in an El Paso Walmart wrote, \u201cOur lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. \u00a0But G** d*** most of y\u2019all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. \u00a0So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. \u00a0If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.\u201d \u00a0The stakes, in other words, are as high as they have ever been.<\/p>\n<p>The relative scarcity of resources is typically measured by looking at prices. \u00a0If prices rise, resources are deemed to be getting scarcer, and, if they fall, more abundant. \u00a0The media sometimes scare their readers by reporting \u201cnominal\u201d prices (hence all the headlines about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/world\/food-prices-surge-new-record-high-march-un-agency-says-2022-04-08\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">food<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2022\/06\/06\/energy\/record-gas-prices-causes\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fuel<\/a> prices being at a record highs), rather than \u201creal\u201d prices, which take into account inflation. \u00a0It was on the inflation-adjusted prices of five metals that the Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich and the University of Maryland economist Julian Simon bet $1,000 in 1980. \u00a0If the real prices went down over the next decade, they agreed, Ehrlich would pay Simon. \u00a0If they went up, Simon would pay Ehrlich. \u00a0Ehrlich lost.<\/p>\n<p>The problem with real prices is that they ignore changes in incomes. \u00a0Typically, though not always, individual incomes increase faster than inflation. \u00a0That\u2019s because people tend to grow more productive over their lifetimes and across time. \u00a0Contrast the productivity of workers equipped with shovels and those driving giant excavators. \u00a0While real prices are measured in dollars and cents, time prices are measured in hours and minutes. \u00a0To calculate a time price, all you need to do is to divide the nominal price of a good or service by the nominal hourly income. \u00a0That tells you how long you must work to afford something.<\/p>\n<p>Consider U.S. manufacturing workers. \u00a0Between 1900 and 2018, the time prices of pork, rice, cocoa, wheat, corn, coffee, lamb and beef fell by 98.4%, 97.6%, 97.1%, 96.7%, 96.1%, 93.8%, 78.6% and 75.5% respectively. \u00a0That means that the same length of time that bought 1 pound of each commodity, now buys 62.6, 41.1, 34.8, 30.5, 25.6, 16.2, 4.7 and 4 pounds. \u00a0While people cannot eat rubber, aluminum, potash or cotton, the prices of these commodities are valuable inputs in the production processes that impact the prices of goods and services, and hence the overall standard of living. \u00a0Their time prices fell by 99.4%, 98.9%, 98.2% and 95.8% respectively. \u00a0All the while, the population of the United States rose from 23 million to 328 million.<\/p>\n<p>What happened to global time prices of resources? \u00a0They fell by 84 percent between 1960 and 2018. \u00a0The personal resource abundance of the average inhabitant of the globe rose from 1 to 6.27 or 527 percent. \u00a0Put differently, for the same time of work that he or she could buy one item in the basket of resources we looked at, he or she can now get more than six. \u00a0Over that 58-year period, the world\u2019s population increased from 3 billion to 7.6 billion.<\/p>\n<p>Surprisingly, we also found that personal resource abundance increased faster than population in all 18 randomly chosen datasets that we analyzed. \u00a0We call that relationship \u201csuperabundance.\u201d \u00a0On average, every additional human being created more value than he or she consumed. \u00a0But how does all that superabundance happen?<\/p>\n<p>Musk offered a clue to the answer in the above-mentioned speech. \u00a0He noted that \u201cI don\u2019t know that we should really try to live for a super long time. \u00a0It is important for us to die because most of the times people don\u2019t change their mind, they just die.\u201d \u00a0Superabundance, in other words, is a product of the human mind. \u00a0It is ideas that lead to inventions, which, after they have been tested in the marketplace, lead to innovations that drive economic growth and increase the standard of living.<\/p>\n<p>But large populations are not enough to produce superabundance\u2014just think of the poverty in China and India before liberalization. \u00a0To innovate, people must be allowed to think and to act. \u00a0Such people can create tremendous value.<\/p>\n<p>In conclusion, the world is a closed system in the way that a piano is a closed system. \u00a0The instrument has only 88 keys, but those keys can be played in a nearly infinite variety of ways. \u00a0The same applies to our planet. \u00a0The Earth\u2019s atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite. \u00a0What matters is not the physical limits of our planet, but human ability to reimagine the use of resources that we already have.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u2014Marian L. Tupy is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, and co-author (with Gale L. Pooley) of the new book,\u00a0<\/em>Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet<em>\u00a0(Cato Institute, August 31, 2022). \u00a0To learn more, visit\u00a0<\/em><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.superabundance.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">www.Superabundance.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThere are not enough people. \u00a0I can\u2019t emphasize this enough &#8230; And I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birth rate and the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1646678,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1646676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1646676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1646676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1646676\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1646678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1646676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1646676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1646676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}