Julian Simon appears in four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as an economist whose work on population, immigration and human potential recurs across the program’s libertarian arguments. He is invoked by David Boaz, by Michael Tanner, by David Henderson, and by Benjamin Powell, in each case as an authority for the claim that more people are a benefit rather than a burden.
The population argument
In the 2018 episode with David Boaz, Simon is described as “a great advocate of more immigration.” Boaz explains that Simon’s argument started “back in the 70s or 80s” when there was “all this talk about the population bomb and we were just going to have too many people.” Simon’s response, in Boaz’s rendering, was that people are a benefit to other people, that people make our sandwiches and may come up with drugs that cure cancer, and that all the things we want other people to do mean that more people means more shots at doing those things. When asked how much more, Simon would say let us double it, and if we are happy with the results, maybe we will talk about doubling it again. Boaz notes that Simon “didn’t say ‘open borders,’ he said ‘more immigration,’” and that this is “not philosophically satisfying” because if there is a principle, then why can’t everybody come. Boaz adds that he does not think as a practical matter there will be anything like that number of people, and that Indians who have come to this country have been great contributors to prosperity and society David Boaz on the Libertarian Ethos (2018).
Boaz also uses the recession of about a decade earlier as evidence that immigration is self-correcting. During that serious recession, the amount of immigration slowed down rapidly and there was net migration to Mexico for a while, because coming to the United States in the middle of a recession was not very attractive. If immigration causes the economy to falter, Boaz argues, the word will go out that the United States is not a place to go, and the flow will correct itself. He compares this to the 19th century, when huge numbers of immigrants flooded into the country, first from Northern Europe, then from Southern and Eastern Europe, and the percentage of the population they represented was much higher than it is now. Borowing a phrase, he says every immigrant brings two hands as well as one mouth, producing as well as consuming, and the resulting specialization and division of labor make the country more prosperous. Boaz concludes by saying he goes along with Julian Simon: let us double legal immigration, and if we are happy with the results, let us debate doubling it again David Boaz on the Libertarian Ethos (2018).
Generational wealth and the rectification principle
In the 2019 episode on libertarian anti-poverty policy, Bob Zadek asks Michael Tanner about his book, noting that he had initially dismissed the idea that blacks in America deserve special consideration because they descended from slavery. Zadek describes having told himself that slavery was hundreds of years ago, that other ethnic groups arriving as peasants had children going to Caltech or MIT within a generation, and that he had tended to dismiss the claim. Tanner responds that people are not born de novo, that our situations carry consequences from the past, and that in the case of many African Americans the wealth they would otherwise have today was stripped away over the years. He cites studies by Julian Simon and others suggesting that about $7 trillion in African American wealth was lost because of slavery, wealth that would exist today in the African American community but that was stolen through slavery Libertarian Anti-Poverty Policy (2019).
Tanner adds that this does not count the years of Jim Crow and the discrimination that continues today, and that lost wealth is money not available in the African American community. He notes the legacy of the Jim Crow South, where African Americans who got educated were killed and lynched for the crime of being educated, and the flip side in which white communities gained wealth from businesses that exploited African Americans through slavery or lower wages, building up inheritance that many white people have. Tanner concludes that we are not starting on an equal playing field, and that as Nozick pointed out with his rectification principle, if wealth was not gained justly in the first place, then you cannot necessarily say it is always theft to redistribute it Libertarian Anti-Poverty Policy (2019).
Henderson on Simon and “gush-down” economics
In the March 2019 episode hosted by Charlie Deist filling in for Bob Zadek, David Henderson gives what he calls “the thumbnail on Julian Simon.” According to Henderson, Simon was someone who believed early in his career that population growth would really be bad for an economy. But he was an empiricist, so he started actually looking at the data, and he is one of the rare people in economics who after the age of 30 changes his mind. Simon decided that population growth is great for the world, and he wrote a book and then a second book called The Ultimate Resource, whose thesis is that the ultimate resource is people — the more people you have, the more people you have solving the problems David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019).
Henderson illustrates the point with a reference to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, where the character Ted Baxter, “supposed to be the designated idiot,” says he wants to have six kids so one of them will solve the population explosion problem. Henderson says Simon pointed out that Ted Baxter had a really good insight there, because the more people there are, the more minds there are working on things. Henderson also mentions that Simon won the famous bet about what would happen to commodity prices with Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, and that according to Ehrlich we should all be starving by now David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019).
Henderson also ties Simon to Stephen Moore, noting that Moore, about 30 years earlier, was the research assistant for Julian Simon for Julian’s book on immigration. Because Simon wrote that book after he had changed his mind about population, Henderson says it is not a big leap from that to the idea that immigration is good for us. Henderson uses this to explain Moore’s pro-immigration view, which he describes as very different from that of Donald Trump. He notes that Moore wrote a column a year earlier saying we gain a lot from immigration, pointing out that immigrants tend to be younger and do not drain the welfare system the way a lot of people think, because the welfare system in the United States is aimed at the old rather than the poor David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019).
Henderson also discusses a book Moore co-authored with Simon, approximately 20 years earlier, about 100 ways in which the world has gotten better, and says he went to his downtown office yesterday to find his copy but it had burned in a 2007 fire, so he started from scratch. He mentions that Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and Johan Norberg’s work make similar points, and notes that worldwide poverty has fallen and income inequality across the world has fallen, not because the rich have gotten poorer but because the poor have gotten richer David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019).
Powell on the ultimate resource
In the 2022 episode on the economics of immigration, Bob Zadek asks Benjamin Powell whether the economic argument favors a far more liberal immigration policy, or whether sound economic arguments run the other way. Powell answers that it is not about jobs or the wages of the native-born, the things popular to talk about in the rest of society. The big thing is that economists estimate massive overall gains from immigration. A Haitian leaving Haiti moving to the United States sees their income go up by 1000% on average; the same for a Nigerian; for a Mexican it is about 150%. Powell explains that these gains come from moving from a low-productivity area to a high-productivity area, and that this is because humans, as Julian Simon said, are the ultimate resource. Their creativity, the value they can create for others, is limited when they are in countries that do not have a rule of law, a tolerable degree of economic freedom, or strong private property rights; when they move to a place with better institutions on those margins, they become much more productive The Economics of Immigration (2022).
Powell adds that the consensus of economists is that the global gains are massive — if the whole world went to open migration, we are talking about a doubling of global output — while the gains for the native-born population are relatively modest as a percent of the economy. He acknowledges that there are other problems with immigration, and mentions fiscal ones about tax. He argues that if the gains of a massive doubling of global GDP are anywhere near right, then you have to be thoroughly uncreative not to be able to think about how to use public policy to plug the other issues that come along with greater migration, which is why he and his co-author wrote the book Wretched Refuse, because the case for immigration restrictions argues that immigrants might undermine the rule of law, property rights and economic freedom — and if they did that, we would not get the big increase in output, making it harder to deal with any other problems The Economics of Immigration (2022).
Across episodes
The excerpts show Simon’s argument used consistently from 2018 to 2022: Boaz presents Simon’s case for doubling legal immigration and his self-correcting mechanism, Henderson supplies the biographical thumbnail and the Ehrlich bet, Powell restates the “ultimate resource” line as the foundation for estimates of massive global gains from migration, and Tanner invokes Simon’s figure on wealth lost to slavery in a different policy context. The earlier treatments emphasize Simon’s own statements and his debate with Ehrlich; the later treatments cite him as settled authority rather than argue his case anew. No episode presents a challenge to Simon’s position.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not give Simon’s birth or death dates, his institutional affiliation, or the titles and publication dates of the books discussed beyond The Ultimate Resource. The details of the Ehrlich bet — its terms, the commodities involved, the year it was settled — are not stated. Boaz refers to Simon’s proposal as “more immigration” rather than “open borders,” but the excerpts do not record Simon’s own framing of that distinction. Powell’s figures for income gains are given as averages without the underlying source.