Mother: Caring for 7 Billion Page #6

in which you have people

contributing every year,

which goes to the benefit

of few a people,

but it really means that the taxes

have to go up for everybody.

Look at GDP, gross domestic product,

gross national product, GNP.

These measurements would

actually be funny

if the consequences

weren't so serious.

They include...

as measures of economic health,

activities that actually

harm and even take life.

Selling cigarettes,

the

medical bills...

they are wonderful for GDP.

An old stand of trees...

has no value until it's

chopped down.

But the fact that we

can't breathe

without it...

has no value.

That's the economist's view

of the world,

but if you talk to natural scientist

whether ecologists or

meteorologists

or biologists more broadly

or agronomists

or hydrologists

and they see a very

different world.

They see a world where

we are overshooting

the earth's carrying capacity

in one area after another.

We have a market that's dishonest

it's only covering part of the cost

of the price of goods and services

and we need to fix that

otherwise...

we will eventually face

bankruptcy.

Biologists, chemists and

many other scientists

believe that we can develop

new sources of food

and new kinds of food.

They say that the sea

can give us more food.

That we can develop large

areas of new land

but many among these experts warn us

that there are limits

to the worlds resources.

There is only so much fresh water,

so much timber, coal, oil,

minerals of all kinds.

Julian Simon

had a PhD in economics

and business

and he was on the faculty at the

University of Illinois

in the department of economics.

Julian Simon says

that human beings are

the ultimate resource.

The more people you have,

the more Einsteins you'll have

to solve human problems.

You don't solve human problems

by raising Einsteins

in the slums of Lagos, Nigeria.

He wrote an article

and in this article he said

we have the

knowledge and the resources

so that we can continue to grow

for 7 million years.

Suppose the world population grew

just 1% per year,

which is roughly the present

rate of growth,

for 7 million years.

How large would the world

population be?

Now, that's a nice problem

in arithmetic because

you can't do on a hand

held calculator,

it will overflow.

He couldn't do the arithmetic

to know

that long before that, at any rate

he could imagine

there would be more people

than there are

elementary particles in

the universe,

but it didn't make any difference.

People loved him in Washington.

He was a high level advisor

in the White House.

He was a high level advisor

in the Congress

until the day he died.

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