He was a very close friend and was instrumental in helping us establish the Liberty Institute as an independent public policy research and educational organisation. On his sudden demise in February 1998, we decided to name the Institute’s research activities after him - Julian L. Simon Centre for Public Policy Research, to keep alive in us Prof. Simon's untiring spirit of inquiry, courage and perseverance that he instilled in all those who came in contact with him.

Today we are very happy to institute the Julian L. Simon Memorial Lecture to discuss the relevance of various aspects of his ideas in our contemporary world. We hope this will become a regular feature of our calendar. We are very happy to have Professor Deepak Lal, of University of California at Los Angeles, deliver this inaugural lecture. Professor Lal is a friend of Professor Simon..

Prof. Simon appreciated the enormous cost mankind has paid throughout history when the population is estimated to have stayed stable at a few million, and life expectancy hovered in the twenties. This made Simon aware of the true potential of man that has made him overcome such great odds.

Simon successfully challenged and helped turn on its head the centuries old Malthusian fear that a growing population will simply devour the planet, and lead to famine, disease and death of civilisation as we know it. Human population that barely crawled for millennia, suddenly tripled in the 20th century, but the world per capita output quadrupled during the same period, improving the quality of life for everyone. The best proof of this comes from the doubling or in many cases even tripling of life expectancy at birth in step with population increase.

Simon was to write later "It is your mind that matters economically, as much or more than your mouth or hands.  In the long run, the most important economic effect of population size and growth is the contribution of additional people to our stock of useful knowledge.  And this contribution is large enough in the long run to overcome all the costs of population growth."

Julian Simon was an economist and demographer who taught at the University of Maryland at College Park, just outside of Washington, D.C. In the 1960s he became concerned at the state of affairs and the growth of population on the planet, and wanted to do something meaningful in order to prevent the seemingly inevitable doom that awaited man. He began looking at data to see the kind of impact man has had on the planet. And he was in for a surprise.

Virtually every data he looked at, from life expectancy and infant mortality rates to health indicators, to prices of natural resources and consumption good like food items, to environmental quality, things seemed to have improved, and have been doing so for as long as one could see. Only, in the last few centuries, the improvements have accelerated even as population began to grow. Simon was convinced, "The standard of living has risen along with the size of the world's population since the beginning of recorded time. There is no convincing economic reason why these trends toward a better life should not continue indefinitely."

Simon first came in to public prominence in 1980. He took a very unusual step for an academic. He decided to place his money on the validity of his position that there is no scarcity of natural resources. He challenged any one to bet with him on prices of any natural resources. He said that if the resources were becoming scarcer, then their prices ought to rise, and he was prepared to bet that the prices would actually fall. Paul Ehrlich, a biologist and one of the foremost critics of population growth, along with a couple of colleagues, decided to take up the bet. Simon and Ehrlich agreed on five metals - copper, chrome, nickel, tin and tungsten. The bet was to be settled a decade later.

In the meantime, Simon published his masterpiece, The Ultimate Resource (1980). He marshalled all the evidence and data and compiled the long term trends. "Our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense. Nor does past experience give reason to expect natural resources to become any more scarce. Rather, if history is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less costly, hence less scarce, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years," he wrote. The book was completely revised and expanded in its second edition in 1996. It has now been published in over half a dozen languages. It is even available in Chinese. We hope we will have an Indian edition in the not too distant future.

The bet was finally settled in 1990. As Prof. Simon had predicted, the prices of all the metals had fallen. The fall in some cases had been so dramatic that Prof. Simon would have won even if the prices were not adjusted for inflation. Ehrlich paid up, although he continued to claim that the drama was not of any significance. However, no one ever took up Prof. Simon's standing offer to put his money on the fact that virtually every measurable indices of quality of life would continue to improve.

Prof. Simon continued teach that, "The ultimate resource is people - especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty - who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so inevitably benefit not only themselves but the rest of us as well."

Prof. Simon always sought to solve problems that most people did not even recognise as such. In early1970s, he had proposed that airlines could solve the problem of overbooking, without earning the wrath of the passengers who were to off loaded, by auctioning the required number of seats. This, he argued, would help identify passengers who could afford a delay and take the next available flight to their destination by giving up their seats to others who had more pressing reasons to take the immediate flight. The passengers who volunteered to accept the bid, felt compensated for giving up his seat. The scheme was immensely simple, and has become today the most standard practice in some for or the other. Yet, at the time, Simon proposed it virtually all airlines ruled it out as being too cumbersome. But with the deregulation of the airline industry in the US in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the consequent increase in competition auctioning of seats have been accepted as the most convenient way of solving the unpleasant problem of overbooking. Of course, economists today consider auction as an important tool for allocating many scarce resources efficiently.

Julian L. Simon's Home Page has a wide collection of his writings, and comments, and is accessible to any one interested in pursuing these further.

I had first read Prof. Simon's The Ultimate Resource in the mid-1980s. It was an eye-opener. His sense of optimism was infectious. He taught me to really appreciate the true potential of man, particularly free and independent man not chained by social customs or bureaucratic regulations. I wrote to him in 1990 after I read about the outcome of his bet. I wrote that I had not believed that any one would be foolish enough to accept such an obvious loser. That it was Ehrlich, only showed the intellectual hollowness of our opponents. We corresponded off and on, and then I had the honour of being associated with some of his work. He was instrumental in introducing me to a lot of people around the world, and helped in establishing the Liberty Institute in 1995, and was a member of its board of advisors. He along with his wife, Rita, very generously travelled to India in 1997 and participated in our Freedom Workshop in Devlali (near Nasik).

Simon viewed people to be the ultimate resource. He held that for their talents to flower and come to fruition, people require conducive economic and political framework that provide the incentive for working hard and taking risks. "The key elements of such a framework are respect for property, fair and sensible rules of the market that are enforced equally for all, and the personal liberty that accompanies economic freedom.  In the absence of such a framework, the short-run costs of population growth are greater, and the long-run benefits fewer, than in free societies." Likewise, the primary objective of Liberty Institute is to promote appreciation of the institutional framework of a free society - individual rights, rule of law, limited government and free market.

People don't come with just a mouth, but also a mind. They are not just consumers, but also producers. This explains the apparent paradox that more we consume, more we have left to consume. Simon showed that while our number have multiplied, far from depleting the resources these have become more abundant as measured by the falling prices of almost every resources over time. The only resource whose price has been increasing consistently is that of human labour. This is the only resource which has become progressively scarce even as their numbers have grown. Because, increasing ability to consume, in a free economy, induces producers to innovate and develop newer, cheaper and better products to attract the attention of consumers. Clearly, a society that considers her people as the ultimate resource, and recognises the value of freedom will discover the key to unlimited resources.

Simon genuinely rejoiced at the potential that every new life brought. He wondered how many Michaelangelo or Einsteins would be lost to the world because of misguided preference for birth control policies. For him life was always full of promise and possibilities, and he was full of optimism that as people struggled with problem, they would make the world a better place than ever before.

Simon did not say that there were no problems. He only said that the trends were that life was getting better than before. He admired man's willingness to strive to improve further. As we enter the next millennium, and think of all myriad problems confronting mankind, we would do well to remember Simon's predictions for the coming century, "humanity's condition will improve in just about every material way." The issue will clearly continue to be debated in future just as even the ancient Greeks had worried about the possible Malthusian doom much before the arrival of Thomas Malthus himself two thousand years later. But another prediction of Simon unlikely to generate any debate is: "humans will continue to sit around complaining about everything getting worse."

Earlier in the year, Liberty Institute released a new book titled Population: The ultimate resource, dedicated to the memory of Julian L. Simon. In it, an international panel of scholars including Simon, Peter T. Bauer, Deepak Lal, Nicholas Eberstadt, and Sauvik Chakraverti all argue that the problem lies not with the growing numbers, but with poor economic policies that have condemned so many to perpetual poverty, and led to wastage of the most precious of all resources - the people. The book was released by Prof. Rita Simon, wife of Julian Simon, at a seminar in July 2000, in Delhi.

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