Customer Reviews

The Ultimate Resource

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I was first introduced to the first edition of the book while in college many years ago. I always like to go back and read even now.

Simon pulls apart many radical environmentalist myths in one fell swoop, explaining that beyond oil, fiber, and chemicals, the ultimate resource is the human mind which has always had to adapt. And adapt it will again, not because of some Darwinian survival mechanism set on autopilot to find new ways of living, but rather the true thinking of things through via the human mind's creativity.

His examples are many, but primarily he shows that overpopulation is a Malthusain myth and that rather than a crunch of human flesh in the world, we are far more likely to find birthrates falling with rapid industrialization. That's the first point--see America and Europe on this one, as proof he's correct, in that being a one child producer per family or even no children for marrieds is the hottest trend in many nations, with even negative consequences for issues like societal stability and welfare and pension plans, social security, retirement benefits, labor force needs, etc.

Secondly, for those areas that the Mainstream Media and social science pundits are always pointing to as dire warnings about the dangers of overpopulation and still have cultures that value large families (as in many parts of the Mid East and Asia), it would seem the real problem is lack of liberty, horrid political arrangements, lack of industrialization, and lack of infrastructure and modern farming methods that seem the real culprit in human suffering.
This actually makes sense, unlike what we were probably taught in school (i.e. that "overpopulation" is a generic term that means distress regardless of context).

There is much more, but these are the basic highlights. The book also details several resources and the reality of how continued exploration and replacement of some items actually reduces the prices consumers must pay for the upkeep of industry and other life activities.

A wonderful "resource" to have on one's shelf in any case to counter the incessant propoganda of UN studies and Planned Parenthood and dozens of other groups who purport to care aobut humanity but think limiting it is the key to human happiness. Simon shows just the opposite, to wit, human fecundity and happiness are luckily tied together.

-W.T.

For a non-fiction, it was good reading. This was the first book to show me why "overpopulation " is not a problem.

Julian Simon in very cogent terms brings sanity to the debate over population control snd resource exhaustion It is puzzling that Paul Erhlich's The Population Bomb got so much attention and praise while Simon's The Ultimate Resource is almost ignored.

Mr. Simon was a writer with whom I was familiar primarily through editorials. Because he introduced the idea of airlines paying customers to address overbooking, his practicality caught my eye. This book should be mandatory reading for every young person caught up in the instinctive panic that accompanies "shortages" or apparently unsolvable problems like overpopulation. In this book he demonstrates that most shortages are not unavoidable, were generally complicated in large part by politically generated panic and virtually all of them will be resolved. Had I read this when it was published, the rise of India could easily have been foreseen while through the eye of the major books of that era such as Zero Population Growth, we were convinced the country was doomed to starvation and decline.

The most disarming characteristics of his approach is that he began by drawing the same irresistible conclusions but only after thorough investigation did he discover time and time again that these "certainties" were simply false. They were based upon "common sense" not truth.

Julian Simon is one of those great figures whose work is both extremely important and entertaining to read. Anyone interested in natural resources or population growth would do well to take a look at this book. Serious scholars will likely want to follow this with Harold Barnett and Chandler Morse's somewhat more rigorous 1963 classic, Scarcity and Growth: The Economics of Natural Resource Availability, and James Krier's and Clayton Gillette's excellent essay, "The Un-Easy Case for Technological Optimism." Keep in mind that Simon released an updated version of this book in 1998 (The Ultimate Resource 2 -- it's not a sequel!), which can be read online through Simon's preserved personal website or purchased here at Amazon. If you want to read the arguments contained in this book in their final form, then that might be the way to go.