Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource

Simon's argument on state is built around a refutation of Malthusian theory, which concludes that the ability of community is far greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for humanity. Malthus expressly insists on a fearsomect radio link between population and nourishment supply; Bongaarts makes the point that Malthus predicted a increasing deprivation and starvation as growing populations outstripped the provender supply" (Bongaarts 37). Simon makes the case that history has never borne out this dire prediction and that all previous predictions that population would overtake food have been wrong. In a modern, technology-driven society, it would be impossible for the human to contain too many wad.

Controversy surrounds Simon's view of this issue. Chesnais cites figures musical accompaniment the theory of "'demographic transition'--that as sight be conform to more prosperous, they compulsion more comfort and have fewer children" (32). This theory contradicts Malthus's linking change magnitude prosperity with increased fertility. Simon cites this as sufficient refutation of Malthusian theory in general, but he passes over demographic-transition data per se. He repeatedly declares that those who do not share his population views or who criticize them fail to use data and the scientific method to make their argument (e.g., 9-10). Instead, he focuses on what he takes to be the need fo

This line of thought also allows Simon to criticize those who deplore population ingathering in developing countries as racist and to criticize China's one-child-only constitution of birth control.

Reisner's general argument about the 20th-century development of congenital resources in the Ameri roll in the hay West is almost directly antithetical to Simon's, and indeed Simon characterizes Reisner's book as an illustration of "prophetic debate" (542) that is specious because its logic has not yet come to pass.

Reisner argues that the area, which is by and large arid and uninhabitable desert, was explored, populated, settled, and developed by people who embraced the frontier experience with a baseline supply-side perception that the territory, contempt natural attributes hostile to human habitation, was something to be inhabited and do livable on one hand and manipulated and tamed on the other, to suit the needs and ambitions of human preference, intelligence, and capital. A key resultant of this perception was twofold: that those with sufficient financial or political resources and frequently with self-serving ambition would control the means by which water resources would be exploited. Reisner takes the view that the exploitation itself would result in degradation of the environment and indeed the prospect that the water itself cleverness be altogether depleted.

Simon makes the case that "unintended aspects of humans' use of defeat and other raw materials tend to be profitable for those who come afterward" (280). By that logic, if the environment becomes unlivable for some people at some time because of the depletion of a natural resource, they can take comfort in the fact that in a couple of generations somebody will be smart decent to make money on what the depletion left behind. That is because "pressure of vernal problems leads to the search for new solutions. The solutions constitute the knowledge that fuels the progress of refinement" (280). It is difficult t
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