| The Center for Creating the Future |
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| The Center is located on the Internet Coast of Southeast Florida |
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| The Julian Simon Memorial Web Page for Accuracy in Forecasting In the furor that emerged after Paul Erlich published The Population Bomb, Julian Simon challenged the noted population biologist of Stanford University to a simple test: Which theory about population growth would carry the day. Erlich had predicted that, as the population of the planet approached six or seven billion, the added demand for resources would force the price of some commodities to rise. At the time of the bet, the early 1980s, the country had recently endured two oil crunches and was in the midst of a run on silver. Simon, an economist, challenged Erlich to pick ten commodities and predict which of them would be higher at the end of the decade. Every commodity, when adjusted for inflation, actually cost less at the end of the experiment in 1990. Hundreds of other experts have been proven wrong on this point with commodities, including noted futurist Alvin Toffler. The secret to Simon�s success in prediction was his conviction that markets will keep prices down if given enough time. Markets will work, sometimes violently and harshly, to deal with perceived high pricing. People find substitutes when prices rise. New supplies are uncovered and become available, driving down prices (assuming a marketplace that is not distorted by a monopoly).. This web site is erected to honor the oft-forgotten man who understood better than most that prices don�t rise forever. The Center for Creating the Future wants to remind the public of this famous prediction of the prices of commodities to highlight the sometimes hidden processes that work to keep prices low. In the short term, prices can indeed appear to go higher, such as the cost of housing. However, when adjusted for inflation, especially if one looks outside a congested area, the cost of housing has been remarkable stable or even lower. The Center for Creating the Future invites nominations for the Simon Award, which consists primarily of recognition by the Center for an individual�s work that promotes the type of thinking that Julian Simon was famous for: He selected a topic related to the future, he went against conventional wisdom and, in the end, he was proved right. |
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Short Biography Julian L. Simon taught Business Administration at the University of Maryland and was a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. His main interest was the economic effects of population changes. The Ultimate Resource (now The Ultimate Resource 2) and Population Matters discuss trends in the United States and the world with respect to resources, environment, and population and the interactions between them. Simon concluded that there is no reason why material life on earth should not continue to improve, and that increasing population contributes to that improvement in the long run. Those popularly-written books develop ideas introduced in the l977 technical book, The Economics of Population Growth and supported by the 1984 The Resourceful Earth (edited with Herman Kahn), the 1986 Population and Economic Growth Theory, and the 1992 Population and Development in Poor Countries. He was the author of almost two hundred professional studies in technical journals, and he wrote dozens of articles in such mass media as Atlantic Monthly, Readers Digest, New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He was the inventor of the airline overbooking plan, in use since 1978 on all U.S. airlines, which solves the overbooking problem by calling for volunteers instead of bumping people involuntarily. He passed away in 1998 For more about Julian Simon, click below: http://www.bmgt.umd.edu/~jsimon/ This is the web ring for Simon http://www.bomis.com/rings/simon/ |
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| In population circles, Ben Wattenburg is the heir-apparent of the "let's look at the facts" style of analysis championed by Julian Simon |
Also: See our letter to the editor of the Economist regarding an interview in their Aug 4 issue. about the Skeptical Environmentalist www.economist.com The text of the letter follows below. To the Editor: The Center for Creating the Future thanks you for publishing the interview with Bjorn Lomborg. It has been difficult to find such information in mainstream sources. Unfortunately, most liberals (in your sense) have left these facts to the right wing to misuse. The Center has a Julian Simon Award and we will be pleased to award it to Lomborg for this year. It is a sad commentary on academia and the media that Simon's death went largely unnoticed while Paul Erlich and his ilk remain "experts". The Center believes that the doomsayers have always been wrong: Malthus, The Club of Rome, today's anti-globalists, etc. That's not to say that the issues they raise are not of concern, they are, and that's where we differ from the Right. The point is that we have successfully dealt with all these threats thus far and there is no reason to believe we will not continue to do so. In fact, giving in to the Luddites, the solution usually put forth by these scaremongers, is the only way we might end up fulfilling their dour prophecies. Jack Latona Principal The Center for Creating the Future, Inc. Fort Lauderdale, Florida [email protected] www.creatingthefuture.org |