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136 revisiting “the bet that ruined the world” i n 1980, Science magazine published an essay by an economist named Julian Simon titled “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of False Bad News.” Its first line struck squarely at what its author saw as the prevailing but mistaken idea that the world faces an increasingly serious population problem: “False bad news about population growth, natural resources and the environment is published widely in the face of contrary evidence.” “For example,” Simon went on to say, “the world supply of arable land has actually been increasing, the scarcity of natural resources including food and energy has been decreasing , and basic measures of Us environmental quality show positive trends.” Concern about overpopulation and resource scarcity, Simon said, was generated by mistaken assumptions and analysis. In contrast, “models that embody forces omitted in the past, especially the influence of population size upon productivity increase, suggest a long-run positive effect of additional people.” “A long-run positive effect of additional people”: literally, the more of us, the wealthier we can be. As Simon understood the matter, there are no limits to growth, because (as he put it in the title of his book published the same year), humans are “the ultimate resource,” capable of technological innovation and invention , which will forever let them do more with less and find substitutes for anything that might run low. Simon’s target wasn’t simply those who were concerned about the problem of increasing population, but something broader: environmental awareness, which had grown considerably during the 1970s, had led to the passage of landmark environmental protection legislation in the United States, and was developing into a growing realization—Simon thought a consensus—that economic growth could not go on forever. That had been the point of 1972’s seminal Limits to Growth, which Simon the bet that ruined the world 137 saw as tragically mistaken: if we believed the Club of Rome Report, we would forgo economic growth that could (indeed, was the only thing that could) bring about greater human welfare. Whether or not the idea that there are ecological limits to growth was anything like a consensus view in 1980 is open to debate, but certainly there was at that time a broad consensus among academic economists in the West that the foundation of Simon’s argument was demonstrably incorrect. The idea that all value stems from human effort, that neither nature nor capital are distinct and different factors of production—also known as the labor theory of value—was no longer accepted by any serious Western economist. It had been fundamental to the work of John Locke, the democratic theorist whose Second Treatise on Civil Government , published in 1690, swept aside the divine right of kings as a foundation of political legitimacy and advanced in its place the notion of popular sovereignty—that legitimacy in government comes from the just consent of the governed. He did this by arguing that in the state of nature, before the formation of civil society (roughly, what I have been suggesting we call, anachronistically, Wilderness Planet), humans had the right to appropriate whatever they needed or wanted from an Earth held equally by all as a God-given commons; each person gained title to their appropriation by dint of having invested their labor power in it. A little less than a century later, Adam Smith noticed that the quantity of labor invested in an object was not a good register of its value: as we might put it today, after the invention of automobiles, carriages and buggy whips declined in value, even though they continued to embody the same amount of human labor power. Classical economic theory, as developed by Smith and those who followed, articulated a distinction between use value and exchange value and rejected “embodied labor” as a sufficiently explanatory source of either. But the labor theory of value had a reprise in the work of Karl Marx: for him, wealth was “labour as such”; all wealth was “past, objectified labour .” (Marx credits Adam Smith with inventing this revolutionary insight , but then notes, “How difficult and great this transition was may be seen from how Adam Smith himself from time to time still falls [away from it].”) The labor theory of value was the foundation of Marx’s theory of alienated labor and thus was central to his call for revolution (as it had been for Locke): since capital was nothing but labor objectified and [3...

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