Customer Reviews

Hoodwinking the Nation

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I was somewhat disappointed with this book because it turned out to be a heavily abridged version of The Ultimate Resource 2, which is a great book. Nevertheless, for someone who wants an introduction to Julian Simon's writings, Hoodwinking The Nation will admirably serve the purpose. If you like it, then I highly recommend The Ultimate Resource 2, which is about 4 times the length and contains lots of charts and graphs. But if you have already read The Ultimate Resource 2, you will not need this book.

For ten years I (a physicist) have been reading both scientific and political news about global warming. This has led to strong feelings of frustration in trying to answer the question: "Why is the global warming steamroller so overwhelming?" Julian Simon provides the answer - not a very encouraging one, but his explanation of the causes of the hoodwinking could form the basis for fixing what is wrong with the way we form opinions. I am not confident that we could ever develop his suggested "Truth Lobby," but the idea is intriguing. My reading of a library copy of this book has motivated me toward buying the book for presentation to the president of our local college. I would do so in the hope that reading it would help her understand the hoodwinking that is happening under her nose in the college's "Environmental Studies" program (part of the college's Department of Politics). Simon exhibits admirable restraint where I might have resorted to ridicule. I think that he didn't go far enough in identifying vested interests in people with impeccable motives (e.g., "Saving the Earth"). Now, if we can just convince Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, Dan Rather and Bill Clinton that they don't know jake about climate science ... . This is an important, scholarly book with importance outside the area of environmental activism.

In this fascinating book, American author and economist Julian L. Simon (1932-98) looks at a perplexing phenomenon - as things get demonstrably better, polls show that people perceive things to be getting markedly worse! Beginning with the "vanishing farmland" crisis, the Dr. Simon analyzes various environmental crises, and uses reliable statistics to show how the situations have been distorted by the press and various vested interests (usually environmental groups and U.S. governmental agencies). Indeed, all too often data which show improving situations are massaged so that they are actually presented as bad news. Along the way, the author spears many sacred cows, and shows how the public has been hoodwinked into fearing a future bright with potential.

I must admit that I tripped across the book quite by accident, and I am quite happy that I did. Dr. Simon is a welcome ray of light on a subject kept dark and murky. If you want to get a view on how the public can be (and often is) misled on environmental issues, then you would do well to read this book. I highly recommend it!

Simon does his usual thing in this book as he debunks the bunked-up balderdash of the blinkered. His "Ultimate Resource" book, his book on "the State of Humanity" and his posthumous offering, "It's Getting Better All the Time" with Stephan Moore, all converge with the theme of exposing the political agenda under which the progressive Left operates as they disguise their true motives while waving their banner of concern for the environment. The recent publication by Bjorn Lomborg, "the Skeptical Environmentalist", just adds more fuel to Simon's fire. Lomborg has impeccable Leftist credentials as a former member of Greenpeace who also works as a professor in the political science department of a Danish University. He's just that oddity of oddities, an honest Leftist intellectual.

Lomborg set out to prove Simon wrong, but found him to be...drumroll...., to in fact, be right. Lomborg's shock parallels Ron Radosh's experience in setting out to prove the Rosenbergs innocent, but in fact finding that they were guilty. Both men have received scorn at the hands of the Far Left. They are made to be an un-person in true Stalinist style as they suffer the dispersement of disinformation at the hands of their former comrades. The rabbit is out of the hat, as Simon has always known, it's a political agenda that fuels almost all the environmental scare tactics of the Left and in no way does their agenda resemble a search for the truth.

Simon and Lomborg both used statistics and science, freely available in the public domain, leading Lomborg to question why so many environmental myths are so truculently lodged in the minds of the public? Just as Simon talks about the need for a "Truth Lobby" Lomborg was amazed at the closed minded religiosity of his friends who refused to believe, nor had an interest in discussing, his research findings. It is this compartmentalized-brain-syndrome that has consigned Simon's works to the dustbins of bookstores who continue to extol the virtues of always wrong, but presumably well intentioned, environmentalists such as Paul Erhlich of Stanford.

If we are fortunate enough to have a collective national awakening it will probably be because Simon's work, like Bach's music, will have been discovered at some later date in a more rational time in some collectors trunk in an attic, deep in the heart of the land of the fruits and the nuts.

Tired of the psuedo-science and nonsense that surrounds environmental and population issues? This is just the cure - Simon eviscerates the notion that things are bad and getting worse - this book confirms that things are indeed getting better, there is no substantive eco distaster on any large scale, and demolishes the myth of over-population. He doesn't do this from a soapbox, though, he is a Ph.D. in economics and has a clear understanding of statistics, data, noise, and what the difference between the three are. Having said that, this book is very readable and not some arid intellectual treatise.

Along the way he thoughtfully explains why our culture, our media, our government, and indeed, our very own psyche prefer bogus bad news to the truth. A real breath of fresh air. Buy it, read it, you'll love it...

I took a course from Prof. Simon at the University of Illinois in 1978 titled "The Economics of Population, Resources and the Environment" and he literally changed the way I thought about everything. He was a gifted teacher and used vast amounts of data to support his arguments debunking the alarmists that always seem to be with us. I actually bought this book for my son because we discuss this stuff all the time and Prof. Simon does a better job explaining it than I ever could. Think of this as the Readers Digest version of Ultimate Resource 2: it is a quick read for the uninitiated and is a good introduction to the topic.

It should be quite obvious to anyone with any real background in natural science, math, or perhaps just good old, non-hysterical common sense, that the earth isn't coming to an end. This book completely refutes the reasoning of the 1990s trend of screaming at "big business" for "destroying the planet". Face it folks, just 'cause Al Gore claims it's true, doesn't make it so. Global warming...Am I the only one who remembers the mid-1970s panic over "global cooling"? Back then, we were all going to die in a new ice age. People need to be scared about something new every 25 years or so. It seems to give them an excuse for their righteous rage, when all they really need is a couple of Prozac.

I was fortunate to have known Julian Simon well in the last 10 years of a life cut far too short. He was an eternal optimist and scholar who cut through popular doom-and-gloom attitudes to prove conclusively that man's resourcefulness has always improved the human condition, often slowly and methodically, but consistently.

The "good old days" were not superior to the present, Simon noted. P.J. O'Rourke, a prominent political satirist, put it well: "Julian Simon had a brilliant insight into the economics of doomsaying. ... The business of environmentalism has fouled the marketplace of ideas to the point where truth is an endangered species."


Facts Contradict Scare Claims

Hoodwinking the Nation was the last book Simon wrote. It was published in 1999, a year after he died. Happily, it is now available again, thanks to the Cato Institute, which republished this 140-page must-read in 2007.

The opening chapter presents facts about population growth, natural resources, and the environment and provides survey evidence of the public's view of these topics. The discrepancy between the facts and the public's view sets up the puzzle the remaining chapters explain. Simon explores how and why misleading and indeed false bad news is produced, citing the poor credibility of government reports as the frequent catalyst for environmental news scams and doomsday analysis.

Simon examines the intellectual basis of concepts that lead to scares about resource depletion and population growth, and he explains why biologists in particular tend to become overly alarmed about mythical environmental scares. He follows with an explanation of how the false bad news is disseminated. Journalists, he notes, know little about statistics and science, and thus gather data in ways that lead to inaccurate conclusions.

Moreover, Simon observes, politicians misuse statistics in service of their own policies and political goals. Simon argues psychological and cultural mechanisms make people more receptive to bad news than good news and give most people an overly positive view of the past and an overly negative view of the future.


Antidote to Misinformation

If every misinformed but open-minded person on this planet read Simon's book, the terror wrought by environmental zealots would quickly come to an end. But environmental reporters are quick to believe reports about negative environmental trends issued by government agencies and environmentalist organizations and discount reports about positive trends.

When shown the facts, these journalists usually say cries of environmental dangers contain a germ of truth even when they're exaggerated. Meanwhile, most serious scientists recognize alarm as overblown in their own fields but don't easily recognize exaggeration outside their own fields.

Simon castigates Al Gore for his 1991 book, Earth in the Balance, which contained fallacies piled upon fallacies. Simon observes, "The book is as ignorant a collection of clichés as anything ever published on the subject, and there is much tough competition."

Simon must surely be rolling over in his grave now that Gore has received a Nobel Peace Prize for his alarmist fabrications, not to mention the enormous wealth he has accrued by cashing in on his false alarms.


Message Holds True

Simon's message that human well-being is constantly improving holds true even in our current economic recession. Over the past 25 years, by every measure of human welfare, all trends in standards of living, public health, and the environment have improved, yet every day we hear market capitalism has failed. The same positive trends and negative media coverage hold true regarding environmental issues.

Simon identifies a vicious cycle here. The media carry stories about environmental scares, people become frightened, polls show people are worried, the worry is cited as reason for policies to address the scares, and these policies raise the level of public concern further.

The media say, "We don't create the news; we merely deliver it." That is not true, and Simon does a masterful job of explaining it all.

If you want to believe that there are no serious environmental problems on this planet, this book is for you.

Even if publications like this are not written by millionaires, surely that's the audience they intend to reach. I can't blame the conservative public for wanting a rebuttal to assertions on issues such as environmentalism, civil liberties, racism, etc. that leftists might seem to have monopolized in the public consciousness. No position should go unchallenged as incontrovertible fact, especially not if the proof is so difficult to ascertain, as it is with global warming.

In reading books like this and Facts Not Fear: Teaching Children About the Environment, you get the feeling that conservative types see today's environmentalist establishment as some unpleasant amalgam of mamby-pamby peaceniks and humorless grown-up hall monitor killjoys who arbitrarily claimed authoritatively to know what is best for the planet. From the former's standpoint, all that was thought to be good and wholesome not so long ago (like red meat, driving, farming) has since been villified. What is a red-blooded American to do?

What makes books like these disappointing is the low road they seem to prefer. Not all environmentalists strive to kill the dreaded multinationals, spike trees and take away your driving privileges. Those that do tend to inflate figures and resort to scare tactics, but aren't likely to appeal to the better educated public. If it is necessary to inform the public that there is an alternate school of thought on ecology, the best way to present it is probably not to suggest that we are all living well, so let's just ignore the fact that 3 of the 10 most polluted locales in the world belong to the US. It seems that when the Right finally does get the microphone to present commentary on the state of the environment, instead of articulating, it chooses to play armpit noises. It might play to more of the audience, but only because it takes the seriousness out of an issue that the angry or insipid masses don't want to be bothered with. At least not until an environmental disaster hits them personally.

Academia probably won't have much use for Simon's work in this lifetime, but it doubtlessly has, and will have, an audience. If his purpose was just to preach to the choir, he succeeds, but it's not likely to reach beyond. It's disappointing, though, that this type of perspective represents so much money, yet all these resources cannot buy more informed, or at least persuasive authors.