There are now eight billion people living on the planet. Is there enough room for all of us? Are we going to run out of food and other resources? Marian Tupy, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and co-author of Superabundance, examines whether or not these fears are valid. His answer may surprise you.
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There are now eight billion people living on the planet.
Is there enough room for all of us? Aren’t we going to run out of natural resources? How are we going to feed everybody?
These are not new questions. Doomsayers have been asking them for at least 200 years.
In 1798, an English economist named Thomas Malthus, wrote his famous Essay on the Principle of Population. In it, Malthus claimed that population grew exponentially, while resources needed to feed that population grew at a linear rate.
The difference between the two growth rates, he argued, must lead to starvation.
Malthus was wrong. And not by a little; by a lot. As the population grew, food production improved … and so did almost everything else.
Consider the life of a typical American blue-collar worker over the span of a century. Using a unit of measurement known as time prices, we can estimate the amount of time someone would have to work to buy a given item.
Between 1900 and 2018, the length of time our blue-collar worker had to work to earn enough money to buy a pound of pork fell by 98%, to buy a pound of rice by 97%, to buy a pound of coffee, 94%.
While people can’t eat rubber, aluminum, or cotton, these commodities are valuable inputs in the production processes that impact the prices of goods and services, and hence the overall standard of living. Their prices fell by 99%, 98% and 96% respectively — while the population of the United States rose from 76 million to 328 million.
Famines, which were once common, have disappeared outside of war zones. In much of the world today, it’s obesity not starvation, that’s a problem.
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