Rating: 
Summary: Chicken Little and Al Gore Agree: Ignore this Book!
Review: The late, lamented Julian Simon offers a refreshing alternative to the dreary sludge of alarmist stories that lies thick on the newsprint and airwaves of the popular media. In this massive and well-argued tome, Simon gives reason for optimism backed by trends vastly more relevant and stable than those used to justify the scare tactics of environmental pessimists. He not only documents the facts that continue to confound successive generations of Malthusian doomsayers, but identifies the dynamics which allow their ideas to continually regenerate themselves after being debunked by the facts in each successive generation. Simon gives a philosophical framework for dealing with the broad realm of dreary predictions about the future of mankind. It is this framework which will keep this volume fresh long after the statistics in it have become dated. Simon's core view of humanity as beings that are bent on improving their situation rather than demolishing their surroundings provides a wonderful counterpoint to a wide variety of somber and gloomy scenarios from elitists and pessimists of all stripes. Simon's predictions have proven remarkably accurate over the last fifteen years- buy this book and marvel at how accurate he continues to be even after his untimely death.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderul celebration of the human mind.
Review: The title of this book refers to the human mind. When people are free, and when secure private property rights exist, and when consenting individuals are free to enter into voluntary contractual agreements, and when government activity is limited to proptecting these freedoms and property rights, then human existence will exist in its best possible state. Julian Simon uses huge amounts of facts, evidence, data, and empirical evidence to show that the overpopulation doomsayers have been wrong about all of their predictions. For example, throughout the 20th century, the average per-capita calorie consumption for the world has been going up. In addition, throughout the 20th century, the real prices of natural resources have been going down, which means that these things have become more abundant. The problems of hunger and poverty that exist in places such as Ethiopia and Bangladesh are not caused by overpopulation. Instead, these problems are caused by political factors. Thus, reducung the populations of these countries will do nothing to improve the quality of life for the inhabitants of these countries. Hong Kong is the most densely populated country in the world. And it is also one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Several decades ago, Hong Kong was a slum. But then it adopted a free market economy. As a reult, Hong Kong became wealthy. If countries such as Ethiopia and Bangladesh would adopt free market economies, then they would become wealthy, too. Julian Simon placed a very high value on the human mind. And it shows in this book. This book is a celebration of life. Julian Simon held a very deep love for the human race. He will be missed by many people.
Rating:
Summary: If you are concerned about the environment, read this book!
Review: This book dispels some of the myths propagated in the media about population growth, famine, resource depletion, loss of farmland, wetlands, and forests, and numerous other environmental scares. Julian Simon does an excellent job of presenting and documenting his case that most of these problems are not real, or have been exaggerated, and that there are many reasons to be optimistic about our future.
Rating:
Summary: Required reading for all students of environmentalism.
Review: This book explains why the world continues to get better and better with more people and more resource usage. The reader is able to understand why incentives and investment in a private property rights framework can result in utilitarian benefits despite "finite" supply of resources. In fact, Simon proves that the most scarce resource is human capital. All other resources increase over time as human capital is applied to them, answering the great paradox of why natural resources increase as consumption increases.
Rating:
Summary: An uplifting and splendid book by a true humanist
Review: This book is a bombshell. It remorselessly devastates the current ecology doom mongers' shibboleths: population density, resource depletion, pollution, deforestation and species loss. Julian Simon was vilified in his life by the vocal ecology campaigners (special and dishonourable mention should be made of the egregious Paul Erhlich, he of the 'Population Bomb' and other wholly fictitious disasters). Why did Simon attract this venom from people who dub themselves 'scientists'? Simply this: he dared to challenge the orthodoxy that human beings are an ecological cancer that is busy raping the planet and drowning in its own filth. How did he do it? Not with invective, selective quotation and flat-out lies, like the 'deep ecologists' or the Zero Population Growth fanatics, but with facts - cold, hard facts and lots of them. He pointed out that the only economic variable that can properly describe the scarcity of a resource in the absence of full knowledge of its true abundance is price. And he points out that the prices of all resources have been falling relentlessly. This observation led to the well-known $1000 bet with the aforementioned Paul Erhlich, effectively a futures contract, which saw the sadly unchastened Erhlich hand over nearly $600 to Simon. Simon's model for resource usage is that scarcity temporarily drives the price of a commodity up, at which point it is either used more efficiently, or a suitable substitute is discovered. After all, the sole economic value of a commodity is its utility. We value copper for its high conductance. But with the increasing substitution of fibre optics (made from sand - even the environmentalists would concede there is no imminent shortage of this) copper has declined in usefulness, and its price has dropped. Simon acknowledges that the notion that resources are not finite in any meaningful sense runs counter to intuition, and then shows with a host of examples that intuition is a poor guide to formulating economic and social policy. The book is packed with graphs, charts and tables, all bolstering his point. Perhaps it is this that explains the fury that his ideas received from the radical ecologists - facts are indisputable, and do not fit with the coercive political agenda of those who wish to circumscribe our reproductive capabilities. Throughout the whole book, a sense of Julian Simon's love of people can be felt. He asks who are we, beneficiaries of the greatest gift of all, life, to decide from our privileged position who shall have life in the future? Pervading the anti-growth movement is the miasma of racism, as evinced by this extract from The Population Bomb, quoted in The Ultimate Resource: "I came to understand the population explosion emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi...The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping, people visiting, arguing and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people." You can almost hear it: "my dear, the natives, they were everywhere. Beastly, smelly people, little better than rats". The fact that these "human pollutants" have just as much right to existence as any one of us seems to escape the population doomsayers. That they might have children, and love and cherish them just as we in the West love and cherish our children is acknowledged by Simon. The Ultimate Resource that Simon refers to is human beings, the only resource that appears to be becoming more scarce, as shown by the fact that we are having to pay more for people's services. Julian Simon's death has left us with a gaping hole in the line of defense against the ecological bunco artists. I hope that someone of similar eminence and eloquence will step up to fill that gap.
Rating:
Summary: Environmentalists dare not read this book!
Review: To all Earth Firsters, Sierra Club members, etc:
Reading this book is detrimental to your blissful
ignorance about the economic and scientific
realities of resource use by H. sapiens. If
you preserve your ignorance of Simon's analysis,
you will continue to have the warm fuzzy feeling
of moral superiority over anyone who disagrees with your agenda.
Rating: 
Summary: Much better Cornucopian perspective than Lomborg
Review: While I do not agree with the conclusions that Simon and colleagues reached after presenting their data, this book is a much more rigorous treatise than Lomborg's recent book "The Skeptical Environmentalist", that has been given undue publicity. Many of Lomborg's ideas are premised on this book. If you really want the Cornucopian perspective read this rather than Lomborg.
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