The Consumer as Creator: A Criticism of Faith in Limitless Ingenuity

Abstract

Belief in the unlimited ingenuity of man to overcome increasing leanness and depth of ores, to create fertile lands from barren deserts, and to discover new and abundant sources of energy to replace wasting coal measures and faltering oil fields is vital to the logic and persistance of growth economics as a philosophy. Those who hold this belief regard man as a creator of resources who can continue indefinitely to improve his material condition. A contemporary evangelist for such economic creationism is Julian Simon, who goes so far as to maintain that natural resources are infinite and that the growth of human population, contrary to much popular opinion, is a social good. To anyone who believes, on the contrary, that physical law must prevail over economic precepts, who has in mind the geochemical facts of energy and mineral resource origins and distribution, and who believes that nature makes a greater contribution than man to the value of human goods and services, Simon's arguments ring false and his conclusions seem delusionary. A neomalthusian review of the relations between human population growth and resource depletion results in a quite different prognosis from Simon's: slow strangulation of freedom as the struggle for control of remaining low-entropy resources leads to the rich getting richer and relatively fewer while the poor grow poorer and more numerous. This view is not as attractive as is economic creationism. These two world views have been in conflict for two centuries. The conflict is one of belief and is so presented here, with the author's conviction that physical law and the geophysical constitution of our planet determine its carrying capacity for humans set against the creationist belief in the transcendence of the human mind over the niggardliness of nature.