I’m nearing the end of Thomas Sowell‘s Applied Economics (just in time for the publication of his new book about the housing boom and bust) and particularly enjoyed the following two passages from the last chapter.
It’s aimed at Malthusians and others who fret that we’re nearing the limits of our food, water, other natural resources, etc.
In some ultimate sense, there must of course be a limit to the earth’s capacity to sustain human life. But there are ultimate limits to many things ? perhaps all things ? and yet that provides little or no practical guidance as to how close we are to those limits or what the consequences are of various alternatives today. There are ultimate limits to how fast a given automobile will go, and yet we may drive it for years without ever reaching even half of that ultimate speed, because there are much narrower limits to how fast we can drive safely through city streets or even on highways. As a young man, John Stuart Mill [Mitch’s note: of his own free will] brooded over the fact that there was an ultimate limit to the amount of music that could be produced by using the eight notes of the musical scale. But, at that time, Brahms and Tchaikovsky had not yet been born nor jazz yet conceived, and rock music was more than a century away. Ultimate limits alone tell us virtually nothing useful about whether there is or is not a practical problem.
…
“Overpopulation” theories do not stand up well to empirical scrutiny. But they do not have to. They have in fact remained popular for more than two centuries, in the face of large and growing evidence of their falsity. Even with Malthus’ own lifetime, his prediction that growing numbers of people tended to cause their standard of living to be reduced was falsified by empirical evidence of rising population and rising living standards occuring simultaneously. This has continued to be the general pattern ever since.
