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It’s Getting Better All the Time:100 Greatest trends of the Last 100 Years by Julian Simon

Review by Mark Webster

Bad news sells. Good news does not become news until it becomes bad. Take, for example, the late Julian Simon, the author of the two books under review, and Paul Ehrlich, the author of several best-selling books which incorrectly predicted gloom and doom for the future. In 1980, Ehrlich bet Simon that scarcity would drive up the prices of several precious resources form 1980 to 1990. Simon bet that abundance would drive the prices down. Simon won. Ehrlich later won a Mac Arthur “genius” award. Simon labored on in relative obscurity until his death. After reading any book by Simon, it’s impossible to peruse Albert Gore’s “Ehrlichian” Earth in the Balance with a straight face.

Simon’s thesis in his books is simple and best illustrated by an example from Henry George: What’s the difference between a jayhawk and a human? Both eat chickens, but with jayhawks you get fewer chickens while with humans you get more chickens. As Ben Wattenberg, the author of The Good News The Bad News Is Wrong, says in his forward to Simon’s Hoodwinking The Nation, Simon’s uniqueness is that he shows natural resources are not finite because they are infinitely renewable through the infinitely renewable resources of the human intellect. As Wattenberg says, “Coal, oil, and uranium were not resources until mixed well with intellect.”

Both books under review were published after Simon’s death in 1998. Both books can be read as supplements to each other. The newer book, It’s Getting Better All The Time, contains 100 graphical demonstrations of 100 great human achievements in the last 100 years. From Trend No. 1, which shows that life expectancy in the United Sates has increased at every age level, to Trend No. 100, which shows 270 million in the United States in the year 2000 living in greater affluence than the 70 million people who inhabited this country in 1900, Simon proves that the things have gotten much better. In between are charts that show poverty has declined (Trend No. 22), private home ownership has risen (#40), more people are educated than ever before (#57 to #61), air and water in the U.S. are cleaner than ever before (#67, 68, 69), and blacks have made huge economic gains (#92).

The other book, Hoodwinking The Nation, tries to answer the following question: Since the data show air and water are becoming clearer, natural resources are becoming less scarce, increased population is not a detriment to growth in either poor or rich countries, how did we become “hoodwinked” to believe the opposite? Simon gives several reasons, but fundamentally it’s our own fault.

We err in tending to rely on a small sampling of “data” from one television show or a single year’s statistics to jump to fallacious generalizations. As we age, we believe everything in our youth was better because we were physically better. We misjudge the importance of a point of view based on the amount of play it is given by the media. The media can cover natural disasters and sex scandals well but can not cover well matters that require something more than first-hand observation. Besides, the audience has a short attention span and is ready to jump to the next bit of “news.”

Of course, the media always presents bad news in such a dramatic way that it invokes in the audience a simultaneous demand for a quick fix. The government, politicians, and “thinkers” are always ready to rush in with a legislative “solution.”

The ultimate good news is that liberty promotes progress. People who refuse to accept this good news are doomed to live stunted lives full of bad news.

Simon is the author of several books. In the next few months, I plan to read The State of Humanity (1995) and The Ultimate Resource (1991 and 1996). Libertarians who seek to support arguments with data need to study the works of Julian Simon.