ZadekpediaJulian Simon is invoked across four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as an economist of population and immigration. Guests cite him for the proposition that people are a benefit to other people, and that more people means more attempts at solving problems. The episodes treat him as an authority to be quoted rather than a subject to be examined; no episode recounts his career in sequence, and the biographical details they supply are fragmentary.
People as the ultimate resource
David Boaz, discussing immigration, calls Simon “a great advocate of more immigration” and dates one of his arguments to the 1970s or 1980s, when talk of a population bomb held that there would be too many people. Simon’s answer, in Boaz’s rendering, was that people make our sandwiches and may come up with drugs that cure cancer, so that more people means more shots at doing those things. Asked how much more, Simon would say to double it, be happy with the results, and then perhaps talk about doubling it again. Boaz notes that Simon did not say open borders but more immigration, subject to monitoring and adjustment, and that Boaz himself goes along with the doubling proposal David Boaz on the Libertarian Ethos (2018).
David Henderson supplies a thumbnail of Simon’s intellectual trajectory: Simon believed early in his career that population growth would be very bad for an economy, but as an empiricist he looked at the data and changed his mind after the age of thirty, concluding that population growth is great for the world. Henderson reports that Simon wrote a book and then a second book called The Ultimate Resource, and that the ultimate resource is people — the more people you have, the more people you have solving the problems. Henderson illustrates the point with Ted Baxter of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the designated idiot who wanted six children so one of them would solve the population explosion problem; Simon, Henderson says, thought Baxter had a really good insight David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019).
Benjamin Powell makes the same phrase do economic work. He argues that the big gains from immigration are not about jobs or native-born wages, and that a Haitian leaving Haiti for the United States sees income rise by 1000% on average, a Nigerian likewise, a Mexican by about 150%. The reason, he says, is that humans, as Julian Simon said, are the ultimate resource, but their creativity is limited in countries lacking the rule of law, a tolerable degree of economic freedom and strong private property rights. Powell reports a consensus among economists that global gains are massive — open migration worldwide would mean roughly a doubling of global output — while gains for the native-born are relatively modest as a share of the economy The Economics of Immigration (2022).
Simon in the anti-poverty argument
In an episode on libertarian anti-poverty policy, Michael Tanner cites Simon in a different connection. Responding to Bob Zadek’s account of having dismissed claims that descendants of slavery deserve special consideration, Tanner says the wealth many African Americans would otherwise have today was stripped away over the years, and that studies by Julian Simon and others suggest about $7 trillion in African American wealth was lost because of slavery. Tanner adds that this does not count the years of Jim Crow or continuing discrimination, and that in the Jim Crow South African Americans who got educated were killed, so the legacy of educational attainment differs across communities. He invokes Nozick’s rectification principle to argue that if wealth was not gained justly in the first place, one cannot necessarily say it is always theft to redistribute it Libertarian Anti-Poverty Policy (2019).
Across episodes: the optimistic economist
The episodes show Simon treated consistently as an optimist but put to different uses. Boaz, in 2018, presents him as an immigration advocate whose practical proposal was to double legal immigration and debate doubling again. Henderson, in 2019, presents him as the empiricist who reversed his own view on population and wrote The Ultimate Resource, and notes that Stephen Moore was Simon’s research assistant on Simon’s book on immigration roughly thirty years earlier; Henderson also reports that Simon won a famous bet about commodity prices with Paul Ehrlich of Stanford, who wrote The Population Bomb. Powell, in 2022, uses the ultimate-resource phrase to frame estimates of global output gains from migration. Tanner, in 2019, cites Simon for a figure on wealth lost to slavery. The episodes show no development in the treatment of Simon himself between the earlier and later episodes; each guest recruits him to a distinct argument.