PREFACE
     This book originated in my interest in the economics of 
population. When (starting about 1969) my studies showed that 
population growth does not hinder economic development or reduce 
the standard of living, critics asserted that adding more people 
to the planet causes natural resource scarcities and 
environmental decay.  Hence I was forced to broaden my inquiries.  
That's how the first edition of this book came to be written.
     Ironically, when I began to work on population studies, I 
assumed that the accepted view was sound. I aimed to help the 
world contain its "exploding" population, which I believed to be 
one of the two main threats to humankind (war being the other). 
But my reading and research led me into confusion. Though the 
then-standard economic theory of population (which had hardly 
changed since Malthus) asserted that a higher population growth 
implies a lower standard of living, the available empirical data 
did not support that theory. My technical 1977 book, which is the 
predecessor of this volume, is an attempt to reconcile that 
contradiction. It arrived at a theory implying that population 
growth has positive economic effects in the long run, though 
there are costs in the short run.
	The all-important point in this personal history:  It was 
the facts that changed my mind about population growth, after I 
started out with the accepted belief.  It was not some wider, 
pre-existing set of beliefs that brought me to this point.  
Indeed, the facts and my new conclusions about population 
economics altered my wider set of beliefs, rather than the 
converse.
About This Author and His Values
     One spring day about 1969 I visited the U.S. AID office on 
the outskirts of Washington, D.C., to discuss a project intended 
to lower fertility in less-developed countries. I arrived early 
for my appointment, so I strolled outside in the warm sunshine. 
Below the building's plaza I noticed a road sign that said "Iwo 
Jima Memorial."  There came to me the memory of reading a eulogy 
delivered by a Jewish chaplain over the dead on the battlefield 
at Iwo Jima, saying something like, "How many who would have been 
a Mozart or a Michelangelo or an Einstein have we buried here?" 
And then I thought, Have I gone crazy? What business do I have 
trying to help arrange it that fewer human beings will be born, 
each one of whom might be a Mozart or a Michelangelo or an 
Einstein - or simply a joy to his or her family and community, 
and a person who will enjoy life?
     I still believe that helping people fulfill their desires 
for the number of children they want is a wonderful human 
service. But to persuade them or coerce them to have fewer 
children than they would like to have - that is something 
entirely different.
     The longer I have read the literature about population, the 
more baffled and distressed I have become that one idea is 
omitted: Enabling a potential human being to come into life and 
to enjoy life is a good thing, just as protecting a living 
person's life from being ended is a good thing. Of course a death 
is not the same as an averted life, in large part because others 
feel differently about the two. Yet I find no logic implicit in 
the thinking of those who are horrified at the starvation of a 
comparatively few people in a faraway country (and apparently 
more horrified than at the deaths by political murder in that 
same faraway country, or at the deaths by accidents in their own 
country) but who are positively gleeful with the thought that 1 
million or 10 million times that many lives will never be lived 
that might be lived.
     Economics alone cannot explain this attitude, for though the 
economic consequences of death differ from those of non-life, 
they are not so different as to explain this difference in 
attitude. So what is it? Why does Kingsley Davis (one of the 
world's great demographers) respond to the U.S. population growth 
during the 1960s with, "I have never been able to get anyone to 
tell me why we needed those [additional] 23 million"? And Paul 
Ehrlich: "I can't think of any reason for having more than one 
hundred fifty million people [in the U.S.], and no one has ever 
raised one to me."  By 1991 he and Anne Ehrlich had even lowered 
the ceiling:  "No sensible reason has ever been given for having 
more than 135 million people." 
     I can suggest to Davis and Ehrlich more than one reason for 
having more children and taking in more immigrants. Least 
important is that the larger population will probably mean a 
higher standard of living for our grandchildren and great-
grandchildren. (My technical 1977 and 1992 books and a good many 
chapters in this book substantiate that assertion.) A more 
interesting reason is that we need another person for exactly the 
same reason we need Davis and Ehrlich. That is, just as the 
Davises and Ehrlichs of this world are of value to the rest of 
us, so will the average additional person be of value.
     The most interesting reason for having additional people, 
however, is this: If the Davises and Ehrlichs say that their 
lives are of value to themselves, and if the rest of us honor 
that claim and say that our lives are of value to us, then in the 
same manner the lives of additional people will be of value to 
those people themselves. Why should we not honor their claims, 
too?
     If Davis or Ehrlich were to ask those 23 million Americans 
born between 1960 and 1970 whether it was a good thing that they 
were born, many of them would be able to think of a good reason 
or two. Some of them might also be so unkind as to add, "Yes, 
it's true that you gentlemen do not personally need any of us for 
your own welfare. But then, do you think that we have greater 
need of you?"
     What is most astonishing is that these simple ideas, which 
would immediately spring to the minds of many who cannot read or 
write, have never come into the heads of famous scientists such 
as Davis and Ehrlich - by their own admission.  And by repeating 
the assertion in 1991, Ehrlich makes it clear that he does not 
consider the above ideas, which I suggested to him earlier, to be 
"sensible".  

    The absence of this basic value for human life also is at the 
bottom of Ehrlich's well-known restatement of Pascal's wager. "If 
I'm right, we will save the world [by curbing population growth]. 
If I'm wrong, people will still be better fed, better housed, and 
happier, thanks to our efforts. [All the evidence suggests that 
he is wrong.] Will anything be lost if it turns out later that we 
can support a much larger population than seems possible today?"
     Please note how different is Pascal's wager: Live as if 
there is God, because even if there is no God you have lost 
nothing. Pascal's wager applies entirely to one person. No one 
else loses if s/he is wrong. But Ehrlich bets what he thinks will 
be the economic gains that we and our descendants might enjoy 
against the unborn's very lives. Would he make the same sort of 
wager if his own life rather than others' lives were the stake?  
(Chapter 40 has more to say about the morality of betting other 
people's lives.)
     I do not say that society should never trade off human life 
for animals or even for non-living things.  Indeed, society 
explicitly makes exactly this tradeoff when a firefighter's life 
is lost protecting a building or a forest or a zoo, and neither I 
nor hardly anyone else says it should not be so.  And I have no 
objection in principle to the community taxing its members for 
the cost of parks or wilderness or wildlife protection (though a 
private arrangement may be better) any more than I object to 
taxes for the support of the poor.  But according to my values, 
we should 1) have a clear quantitative idea of the tradeoffs we 
seek to make, rather than make them on some unquantified 
principle such as "the loss of a single human being [or of a 
single non-human species or animal] is obscene", implying that 
the costs of saving that entity should not be reckoned; 2) 
recognize that economic science does not show that more human 
beings imply slower economic development or a lower standard of 
living in the long run; and 3) understand that foregoing the 
births of additional human beings is costly according to the 
value systems of some other human beings.      

Changes in the Intellectual Environment Since the First Edition
     Most of what you read above was in the preface to the first 
edition.  The climate of attitude toward the environment in the 
past decade impels me to add the following personal note. 
     People who call themselves environmentalists sometimes say 
to people like me:  "You don't appreciate nature".  Such remarks 
are made knowing little of the other person.  Given the personal 
nature of such attacks, perhaps a few words of information are in 
order for at least this one representative person.
     I'll bet I spend more hours of the year outdoors that any 
staff member of an environmental organization whose job is not 
specifically outdoors.  I'm outside about nine hours a day 
perhaps 140 days a year - every day that it is not too cold for 
me to work.  On average, only about one afternoon a year is too 
hot for me to be outside (none in 1993); shirtless and in shorts, 
with a fan blowing and a wet napkin on top of my head, I am 
comfortable outside if the temperature is less than 95 or even 
100 degrees.  Does this not show some appreciation of the out-of-
doors?  
     Two pairs of binoculars are within reach to watch the birds.  
I love to check which of the tens of species of birds who come to 
sup from the mulberry tree behind our house will arrive this 
year, and I never tire of watching the hummingbirds at our 
feeder.  I'll match my birdwatching time with just about any 
environmentalist, and I'll bet that I've seen more birds this 
spring than most of your environmental friends.  And I can tell 
you that Jeremy Rifkin is spectacularly wrong when he writes that 
a child grows up in the Northeast without hearing birds sing 
nowadays.  There are more different birds around now than there 
were 45 years ago, when I first started watching them.  (The 
mulberry tree is a great attraction, of course.)
     As to my concern for other species:  I don't like to kill 
even spiders and cockroaches, and I'd prefer to shoo flies 
outside of the house rather than swat them.  But if it's them 
versus me, I have no compunction about killing them even if it is 
with regret.  

     The best part of my years in the Navy were the sunsets and 
sunrises at sea, the flying fish in tropical waters, the driving 
rain and high waves, too, even at the cost of going without 
sitdown meals.  And being aboard a small ship near the eye of a 
killer typhoon - the same spot where thirteen U.S. ships 
foundered and sank in World War II - was one of the great 
experiences of my life.  There is no more compelling evidence of 
the awesome power of nature.
     When I was a Boy Scout I delighted in the nature-study 
merit-badge learning.  I loved building bridges over streams 
using only vines and tree limbs, and I was proud of my skill at 
making fires with flint and steel or Indian-style with bow-and-
drill and tinder. 
     The real issue is not whether one cares about nature, but 
whether one cares about people. Environmental sympathies are not 
in dispute;  because one puts the interests of one's children 
before the interests of the people down the street does not imply 
that one hates the neighbors, or even is disinterested in them. 
The central matters in dispute here are truth and liberty, versus 
the desire to impose one's aesthetic and moral tastes on others. 

What's New in the Second Edition?
     What's new in this second edition?  The most important and 
best addition are new data which enable us to measure and state 
quantitatively phenomena that earlier could only be described 
qualitatively or with only a few data.  For example, in the first 
edition I could only report that one can now see further in 
London than in years past; now there are excellent data on the 
number of hours of sunshine on winter days, and on the amount of 
smoke in the air.  You may find too many data for your taste, 
though I have tried to tranform as much of the data as possible 
to graphs, for comprehension and memorability.  In the end, the 
entire difference between the case presented here and the case of 
the doomsters is in the data, just as it was data that entirely 
changed my mind from agreeing with them at the start, to the 
position of this book.  So please bear with the heavy load of 
data, all of which make the case even stronger than it was in the 
first edition.  
	There are also new ways that others and I have developed to 
explain the topics treated here.  And there is a new offer of a 
wager which confronts the doomsters' predictions in a more 
complete and testable fashion than before.  And some new problems 
that have come to the fore since the first edition even though 
they had earlier been discussed by specialists - for example, 
acid rain, species extinction, household waste disposal, and a 
variety of chemical substances - all of which need attention but 
none of which turns out to be of a different nature than other 
issues discussed in the first edition. 
     This second edition has benefited enormously from the ease 
of writing with the computer and wordprocessor.  But this process 
has produced a new problem.  The old edition was scanned 
electronically to produce the files from which I worked.  The 
scanning did not reproduce quotation marks in most cases.  I 
trust that I have properly identified and marked most if not all 
of those old quotations.  But it is possible that one or more 
quotes now appears without quotation marks, an apparent 
plagiarism.  This worries me, and I hope that if it has happened, 
the interpretation will be kindly, considering this as honest 
error rather than intentional theft. 
	The scanning also did not always catch ellipses in 
quotations.  This was even tougher to check than quotation marks.  
I hope that where they were omitted and the error not caught, the 
meaning was not altered.
	This book may best be read in conjunction with the edited 
book The State of Humanity, which contains a great deal of 
additional data as well as discussions of the these trends by a 
wide variety of thoughtful writers. 
	Passages have been taken directly from various of my other 
books without the use of quotation marks or footnotes, because my 
work on these subjects is an integrated entity that has grown 
organically over the years, rather than a set of separate special 
topics.  I hope that no one is troubled by these repeated 
unattributed statements (some sentences surviving unchanged since 
1968);  in my view, noting the repetitions would simply distract 
the reader, would simply be a pretentious display of some 
peculiar purity of the pen.**
     You may notice that certain ideas in the book are repeated, 
even several times.  And you may find that even after I have 
defined something, I repeat the definition later on.  This 
redundancy is because I sympathetise with those people who, like 
me, forget certain things quickly, and don't like (or are often 
too lazy) to check back to see if or where the matter is 
mentioned earlier.  The redundancy also increases the chance that 
the basic ideas in the book will reach those people who may dip 
into the book here or there, rather than reading sequentially 
from beginning to end.  The redundancy makes the book a bit 
messy, and aesthetically unappealing to editors, but I hope that 
it makes the book more useful than it would otherwise be.  
	The course of the public's thinking on these matters over 
the past decade or so has caused in me alternate hope and 
despair.  On the one hand, it has gotten to the point where it 
seems that everything I pick up has the obligatory reference to 
"exploding" population or our "plundered" earth - from the 
American gazetter to writings by eminent Soviet scholars such as 
Sakharov.  And these ideas are simply taken for granted, 
unexamined, by journalists, which works them ever more deeply 
into the grain of the public's thinking, and therefore ever the 
harder to challenge successfully.  (Example of headline:  "More 
Commuters Traveling Alone:  Trend Bucks Environmental 
Imperatives" , Wash Post, May 29, 1992, A19).  On the other hand, 
there are more and more people who have come to recognize the 
unsound theoretical nature of Malthusian thinking, often because 
they have seen how the plain facts of history and our present 
state of living contradict those ideas. 
	The book is labeled Ultimate Resource II rather than as a 
revised edition because so much has been added to the content of 
the original.  (For example, there are now more than twice as 
many citations as in version I, I regret to say).  But with a 
single minor exception (labeled in the book) every one of the 
ideas contained in the original remains unchanged.  This is the 
opposite from Malthus's famous book, whose second and subsequent 
editions were utterly different in conclusions from the original, 
but were so labeled as not to indicate that there was a major 
change.
	The chapters on the politics and financing of the 
population-control movement have been deleted to save space, and 
because it was a very big job to bring them up to date.  The 
conclusions of those chapters are summarized in the current 
introduction, however.
     This book is friendly to the environment.  It has the 
welfare of poor people at heart.  And nothing that I write is 
inconsistent with, or antagonistic to, direct tax transfers from 
the rich to the poor of as large a proportion of the society's 
resources as a democracy deems appropriate.  Any critic 
contemplating an ad hominem attack on my knowledge and experience 
with the environment (see Epilog for examples) and with the poor 
might usefully check out my origins and my life's activities. 
     It's a shame to have to begin a book this way.  But there is 
an unfortunate tendency for purveyors of majority thinking and 
members of popular organizations to indict everyone who does not 
agree with them as callous to human suffering, lacking compassion 
for poorer persons, and indifferent to nature.  And this is a 
successful ploy, as shown by the fact that I feel forced to open 
the second edition of this book with these defensive remarks. 
     The saddest aspect of that ploy is that it damages the very 
people and causes that it purports to benefit.  Poor people, as 
well as property of high social value such as natural habitats 
and valuable species, stand to gain the most from the public 
being aware of the facts and concepts contained in this book, and 
from the policies of freedom and enterprise under the rule of 
wise laws that are the heart of the book's prescriptions.  
     The common assertions that resources are growing more 
scarce, environmental conditions are worsening, and that the poor 
suffer from economic freedom, are the gravest danger to the poor 
and the environment.  And many of the government interventions 
that are predicated on these false assertions constitute fraud 
because they benefit only the well-off and the vested interests 
that many constricting regulations protect from competition for a 
good life of cheap, high-quality housing and consumer goods, easy 
access to wilderness, and upward mobility in society. 

Message to Future Generations
     When I began my population studies in the 1960s, I was in 
the midst of a depression of unusual duration (whose origins had 
nothing to do with population growth or the world's predicament). 
As I studied the economics of population and worked my way to the 
views I now hold - that population growth, along with the 
lengthening of human life, is a moral and material triumph - my 
outlook for myself, for my family, and for the future of humanity 
became increasingly more optimistic. Eventually I was able to 
pull myself out of my depression, and it has never recurred. This 
is only part of the story, but there is at least some connection 
between the two sets of mental events - the happy outcomes of my 
population studies brightened my personal outlook.  Because my 
statement to this effect in the first edition has been 
misinterpreted by some - only by those who damned the book, 
though - I'd like this to be crystal-clear:  My mental outlook 
did not affect my studies; rather, my studies affected my mental 
outlook.  And I believe that if others fully recognize the 
extraordinarily positive trends that have continued until now, 
and that can reasonably be expected to continue into the future, 
it may brighten their outlooks, too.
     Consider this anecdote: 

     The local newspaper in the Indiana town where I 
was      teaching last year ran a contest for 
schoolchildren.       The students were to create a 
one-frame cartoon on any      topic...A sample of the 
winning entries revealed a      common theme.
     
     A girl in Grade 2 drew a sad-faced planet Earth, 
with      the caption, `I am weary.  I am tired.  
Please quit      wasting me!'...A girl in Grade 3 
depicted a number of      crying animals looking at a 
house under construction      with some smokestacks in 
the background; the caption      read, `We want our 
homes back!!!'...
     
     My college freshmen classes are regularly 
populated by      young adults who are convinced that 
no solutions are      possible and so it's useless to 
try.  

   My message to these young people - who are representative of 
many others, as the polls in chapter 00 show - certainly is not 
one of complacency.  In this I agree with the doomsayers--that 
our world needs the best efforts of all humanity to improve our 
lot.  I part company with the doomsayers in that they expect us 
to come to a bad end despite the efforts we make, whereas I 
expect a continuation of humanity's successful efforts.  And I 
believe that their message is self-fulfilling, because if you 
expect your efforts to fail because of inexorable natural limits, 
then you are likely to feel resigned, and therefore to literally 
resign.  But if you recognize the possibility--in fact the 
probability--of success, you can tap large reservoirs of energy 
and enthusiasm.  
     Adding more people to any community causes problems, but 
people are also the means to solve these problems.  The main fuel 
to speed the world's progress is our stock of knowledge, and the 
brake is our lack of imagination.  The ultimate resource is 
people--skilled, spirited, and hopeful people--who will exert 
their wills and imaginations for their own benefit as well as in 
a spirit of faith and social concern. Inevitably they will 
benefit not only themselves but the poor and the rest of us as 
well.  
     A last and very personal word.  Because of the fighting 
words in this preface and elsewhere, I may come through the print 
to you as feisty or even tough, and able to take care of myself 
in this argument. But I am not very feisty in person. I have been 
trying - mostly unsuccessfully - to get a hearing for these ideas 
since 1969, and though times have changed somewhat, the 
difficulties of espousing this unpopular point of view do get to 
me, until recently they were near the point of shutting me up and 
shutting me down. If there weren't a handful of editors like 
Sandy Thatcher of Princeton University Press, you wouldn't hear 
from me at all. Some others hold a point of view similar to mine. 
But there are far too few of us to provide mutual support and 
comfort. So this is a plea for love, printer's ink, and research 
grants for our side. All contributions gratefully accepted. 


ENDNOTES FOR PREFACE
page # ultres tpreface June 12, 1994