Julian Simon

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[A] violent outcry has been made against the book, exactly answering the expectation I always had of the justice, the wisdom, the charity, and fair dealing of those whose good will I despaired of. It has been presented by the Grand Jury and condemned by thousands who never saw a word of it. It has been preached against before my Lord Mayor; and an utter refutation of it is daily expected from a reverend divine, who has called me names in the advertisements and threatened to answer me in two months time for above five months together. ...[He] shows a fine talent for invectives and great sagacity in discovering atheism...(Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, 1705/1962, p. 25 It seemed like a useful and entertaining idea when Jack Repcheck, then editor at Princeton University Press, suggested that a reply to critics of the first edition be included in this second edition. It would be an opportunity to discuss the validity of criticisms of central issues, and thereby either strengthen the book's arguments or tell which arguments were validly criticized and hence abandoned in this edition. When I came to write this, however, I saw that the situation was not what we had envisioned. Despite the gratifyingly large amount of attention the book received, there has been little serious criticism by economists. A large proportion of the attacks have come from biologists, who for many decades and centuries - back to Benjamin Franklin, as discussed on page 000 - have voiced the strongest fears of population growth. <1> ) And much of what they write is outside the framework of economics (though the subject of the book is the economics of population), and even outside of ordinary scientific discourse, as will be seen below. I'll first address the substantive issues, then discuss the personal attacks. Lastly, I'll offer some observations on the nature of the criticism, and on its effects. One reason for the paucity of serious criticism of the book's theory and factual base is that much of the book's core argument is not at all novel or radical, though it seems so to non-economists. Indeed, much of what is written here had been settled wisdom before I came along. Food. The benign trends in food production and consumption have been known to respected agricultural economists - M. K. Bennett and Theodore Schultz perhaps preeminent among the consensus - since the 1950s or the 1960s. From them I learned the central ideas conveyed about agriculture here. Even those who were dubious about agriculture a decade or two ago have now come around to this consensus, perhaps mainly because of the continued accumulation of data which have ever more sharply contradicted the doomsayers. For example, we now read in the newspaper: The World Bank...on the eve of a two-day conference on 'Overcoming Global Hunger'...sought to refute the Malthusian thesis that the world will reach a point where it cannot produce enough food for an expanding population, In fact, said bank Vice president Ismail S[e]rageldin, agricultural prices are 'at their lowest levels in history' and world food production 'rises faster than the population'.

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