What Unifies the Enemies of Civilization?

Socialism, environmentalism, scientism, relativism, dogmatism, and doomerism all have one thing in common.

Arjun Khemani, Logan Chipkin — Oct 11, 2024

This article was excerpted from an upcoming documentary.

Summary: Anti-merit, authoritarian, collectivist ideas like socialism, environmental extremism, and doomerism are enemies of human progress because they impede innovation, limit personal freedom, and prevent societal growth. Fostering decentralized creativity, by contrast, improves the continued ability of human civilization to advance.

We have enemies.

Our enemies are not bad people—but rather bad ideas.

Our enemy is stagnation.

Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.

Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.

Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.

Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels.

Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded . . . blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract dogmas . . . luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable—playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

Our enemy is speech control and thought control—the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual . . .

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation—the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death . . .

We will explain to people captured by these zombie ideas that their fears are unwarranted and the future is bright.

We believe we must help them find their way out of their self-imposed labyrinth of pain.

We invite everyone to join us . . .

The water is warm.

Become our allies in the pursuit of technology, abundance, and life.

—Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Although our society is becoming more dynamic over time, some creativity-suppressing memes that had dominated our static ancestors survive to this day, albeit under different guises. As we saw, those memes ensured that societies like Sparta made practically no progress at all. Thankfully, in our time, such memes don’t stop us from improving our lives and the world more broadly. But they do slow us down, and if left unchecked, they could come to dominate our dynamic society and revert it back to the static societies of old. We, therefore, have a duty not only to recognize them for the threat that they are but to do everything in our power to eradicate them entirely.

Socialism advocates for centralized institutions, like States, to take the means of production away from citizens against their will. Socialists falsely assume that States can better allocate wealth in the form of consumer goods and services better than the private sector. But in the absence of free markets, States cannot determine prices and so cannot discover how resources can be best allocated. Resources like wood and gold could go toward producing all sorts of consumer goods, and market prices signal to entrepreneurs which resources should go into producing which consumer goods. That is, entrepreneurs use prices to “calculate” whether or not a particular venture will improve consumers’ lives. For instance, entrepreneurs might want to buy wood to build houses that they wish to sell. But they can only determine whether such a venture is profitable—that is, if it makes people better off—if they know the prices of the wood they’d buy and the houses they’d sell. But centralizing all of society’s resources into the hands of a single institution obliterates the possibility of prices. As economist Ludwig von Mises wrote, “The paradox of ‘planning’ is that it cannot plan, because of the absence of economic calculation. What is called a planned economy is no economy at all. It is just a system of groping about in the dark. There is no question of a rational choice of means for the best possible attainment of the ultimate ends sought. What is called conscious planning is precisely the elimination of conscious purposive action.”

The impossibility of socialist-style central planning came to light in 1989, when Boris Yeltsin, then the president of the Soviet Union, visited a grocery store in the United States. Back in Russia, people waited in line for food and other goods, but in the capitalist United States, Yeltsin could buy as much of any of the countless items he wanted, and the lines were nothing like they were back home. In recognition of the stark contrast, Yeltsin told some Russians who were with him that if Russians saw what American supermarkets were like, “there would be a revolution.”

Many socialists think that wealth is a fixed pie. They see rich people and poor people and think that such inequality is unfair or unjust. Because they think wealth is fixed, they are sure that the moral thing to do is to forcibly transfer wealth from the rich people to the poor people. They think that the State ought to do such things—hence, they want the State to own the means of production, use them to create goods and services, and allocate them in a fair and just way to the people.

But wealth is not a fixed pie. Mankind was born into utter poverty, and now billions of people are wealthy enough to have the free time to read articles such as this one. So, yes, poverty is a tragedy. But with enough progress, we can all become as wealthy as today’s billionaires—indeed, most modern Westerners are wealthier than the kings of old, who died of diseases we’ve long since cured and who lacked basic comforts such as air conditioning.

The answer to poverty is not socialism, which only makes it more difficult to create more wealth. But trends indicate that young people in the West don’t know that—an Axios poll showed that 41 percent of American adults in 2021 held favorable views toward socialism.

Extreme environmentalism, or the so-called degrowth movement, aims to minimize humanity’s environmental impact by having fewer children, consuming less energy, and releasing less carbon into the atmosphere. As documented in a June 2024 New York Times article, anthropologist and prominent degrowth advocate Jason Hickel once wrote, “Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.”

The author of the New York Times piece, Jennifer Szalai, further writes, “The distinctive argument that Hickel and other degrowthers make is ultimately a moral one: ‘We have ceded our political agency to the lazy calculus of growth.’”

But there is nothing moral about slowing down growth for the planet’s sake or of rebalancing our relationship with nature. Growth is not some abstract thing that greedy capitalists have made a deity of. Growth means more wealth for people in the form of lifesaving and life-enhancing technologies, from shelter to protect us from the violent forces of the Earth to mass food production to bring starvation to an all-time low.

Some environmentalists are willing to sacrifice the well-being of humans for the sake of the Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants. But they fail to appreciate that it is only humans who stand a chance at saving the planet and every species in existence! After all, the sun will eventually engulf the Earth, and most species have gone extinct, never mind what humans have done. But only humans are capable of developing the technology to protect the Earth from the sun’s death and revive any species we so choose. This might sound like science fiction, but already we deflect asteroids from the Earth and create cells with synthetic genomes. The gap between those feats and the ones you think are science fiction is not insurmountable—but human civilization will need to grow to achieve them.

So, even by the environmentalists’ own standards, people are the primary moral agent in the world. Any side effect we cause can, in principle, be reversed in the long run. Incidentally, the primacy of people serves as a devastating criticism against those who advocate that we have fewer children—after all, more people means more creativity and more boundless potential to make progress.

And if something like climate change is judged by its effects on people, things have never been better thanks to growth. The Earth doesn’t care about us—but we care about each other. As philosopher Alex Epstein notes, “If you review the world’s leading source of climate disaster data, you will find that it totally contradicts the moral case for eliminating fossil fuels. Climate-related disaster deaths have plummeted by 98 percent over the last century, as CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm (parts per million) to 420 ppm (parts per million) and temperatures have risen by 1°C.”

Yes, fossil fuels have changed the Earth. But they’ve also given us enough energy to create solutions to an uncountable number of problems, including developing safe, manmade environments that shield us from Mother Earth’s dangers. Degrowth would rob us of such creations and leave us cold, dark, and vulnerable. “On a human flourishing standard,” Epstein writes, “we want to avoid not ‘climate change’ but ‘climate danger’—and we want to increase ‘climate livability’ by adapting to and mastering climate, not simply refrain from impacting climate.”

You may laugh at those environmentalists who throw paint at art, but they’ve been effective at halting the development of nuclear power, a potential source of abundant energy that we’ve known how to build for decades. We can’t calculate how much suffering could have been ameliorated had we been free to build nuclear power plants across the Earth.

Scientism is the false idea that scientific knowledge trumps all other kinds of knowledge—that science alone can answer all our questions. But moral, economic, political, and philosophical problems can’t be answered by science alone. This is why the phrase “follow the science,” as we heard so often during the 2020 pandemic, doesn’t make sense. Scientific knowledge can inform our choices, but it alone cannot tell us what to do next, either in our personal lives or in politics more widely. For instance, science might offer us an explanation for how and why COVID-19 spreads, the conditions under which masks reduce spread, and the effect of age and body fat percentage on the risk of infection. But science cannot tell us whether the trade-offs associated with government-mandated lockdowns are worth it, whether the government should invest public funds into drug companies for the development of a vaccine, whether all questions pertaining to a pandemic should be left to the most local level of government or to the most global level of government, whether a grandparent ought to risk infection to visit his grandchildren, or whether a businessman should run an underground (and illegal) speakeasy during lockdowns so that he can afford rent. The answers to such questions require more than just scientific knowledge—they require political, economic, and moral knowledge. Knowledge about what one ought to want in life, knowledge about the trade-offs involved in our decisions, knowledge about the intended and unintended consequences of governmental policy, knowledge about legal precedent, and knowledge about what our political institutions are capable of doing. None of this could possibly be found in a science textbook. Those who claim otherwise are guilty of the sins of scientism.

As the Nobel Prize–winning economist F. A. Hayek, inventor of the term “scientism,” wrote, “It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences—an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the ‘scientistic’ attitude—an attitude which . . . is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.”

But if we cannot acquire moral, economic, or political knowledge via the methods that work so well in physics, how do we get such knowledge? The same way we always do: by conjecture and criticism. We guess what the right policy is, how we ought to act in the world, and how the economy works. And we criticize all those guesses—maybe not with the rigorous experiments we conduct in the physics laboratory, but experimentation is just one way of criticizing ideas.

Ironically, with the staggering advances made in the hard sciences over the past century, scientism has been on the rise. Quite simply, people think that they can take science’s successes and carry them over into every other field of human endeavor. In political and cultural battles, it is often thought that he who knows the most science must be in the right. If only we put the most scientifically minded people in charge of the world, it is thought, then they could solve all our problems from on high. But science alone cannot tell us whether children have a right to take hormone blockers, whether circumcision should be legal, or how long patents should last. That is no reason to despair—with or without the microscope, we can continue to make progress with creative guessing and criticizing.

Relativism comes in many forms, but perhaps the most dangerous is moral relativism—the idea that there is no difference between right and wrong or good and evil. “Who’s to say who is in the wrong?” the relativist ponders high-mindedly. “What Hamas did to Israel on October 7th is barbaric, but we must end this cycle of violence,” a relativist would say, implicating both sides. “Russia may have invaded Ukraine, but Ukraine is conscripting its own citizens. Therefore, both sides have committed wrongdoing.” “If Hitler was a villain for his genocide, then so was Churchill.”

Relativism might seem open-minded and fair, but it is neither. For it is not open to the possibility that one party is in the right and the other in the wrong. It is not open to the idea that one society is open and dynamic and the other closed and static. It is not open to the notion that one country cherishes life while the other worships death. Nor is relativism fair—the relativist does static societies no favors by denying that they could become as prosperous as dynamic ones should they choose to do so. In their own way, relativists trap evil under the weight of their own suppressive culture when they could have cleansed it with the light of better ideas. And the relativist distorts the self-confidence of dynamic, progressive societies by muddying their understanding of why they’re so successful in the first place, mitigating their ability to make even further progress and spread the right ideas to static societies. The relativist is no highfalutin hero—he keeps evil on life support long past its expiration date.

Perhaps relativism is thriving in the West right now because people can afford to make such an egregious error. But not forever. For the enemies of the West are the enemies of civilization more broadly. They will not stop their anti-human ambitions, no matter how much relativists deny that that is what they are. Nor will it be relativists who ultimately stand up to them but rather those who distinguish between right and wrong, stasis and progress, victory and defeat.

Dogmatism refers to an idea that is considered, implicitly or explicitly, uncriticizable. The final truth. Known with certainty. Never to be changed. People tend to associate religious doctrines with dogmatism, but the connection is not a necessary one. After all, some religions have evolved to cohabitate with the rapid progress we’ve undergone since the Enlightenment (to be sure, other religions, tragically, have not yet done so—and whenever someone admits to “taking something on faith,” dogmatism is surely at work). But dogma is not confined to the cathedral. For instance, many political ideologies are thought to have perfect foundations by their adherents. And even in science, our best theories could, in principle, spread by dogmatic means. Karl Popper described Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis as dogmatic. As philosopher Bryan Magee described psychoanalysts, “We should not . . . systematically evade refutation by continually reformulating either our theory or our evidence in order to keep the two in accord. . . . Thus they are substituting dogmatism for science while claiming to be scientific.” Even in the hard sciences, we could imagine a world in which people are not persuaded that Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is true but rather are pressured to accept it as an uncriticizable foundation of our scientific worldview.

Because all our ideas contain errors, dogmatism always prevents us from improving on the ideas locked in dogma’s cage. Couple that with the fact that any error, no matter how small, could result in the eventual extinction of the human race, and we have good reason to rid our society of all dogmatic elements.

Doomerism is the idea that humanity has no shot at continuing to make progress, or that our extinction is just around the corner, or that we are uniquely vulnerable to being wiped out today, or that we are just one innovation away from guaranteeing our decline.

This attitude neutralizes the human spirit—after all, if humanity is sunk, why bother trying in the first place?

One of the primary examples of doomerism today is the debate over artificial intelligence. Some think that if we just keep innovating, we will eventually create an entity that is more intelligent and/or powerful than people could ever be and that we will fall to the status of slaves or animals beneath its feet. First, if the machine is not creative, it will be precisely as obedient as our microwaves are. And any unintentional side effects of AI can be accounted for with safety measures, as are currently being developed for self-driving cars. Second, if we do end up creating a machine that is as alive as we are—a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI—it is no more rational to assume that it will pursue our destruction as it is to assume that new humans will do so. New humans—namely children—are raised to adopt the values of the culture around them. Of course, sometimes they rebel, especially when adults force them to do things they don’t want to do. Therefore, the problem of how to integrate an AGI into our society is the same as the problem of how to raise children into happy, productive adults—and we’ve been improving at that for centuries.

Another dangerous effect of doomerism is tyranny, whether through cultural taboos, governmental regulations, or outright bans. They all amount to slowing the growth of knowledge and wealth, and of progress more generally. For if the next innovative step marks our doom, then surely a little—or a lot—of tyranny is justified! But innovation is the very panacea that doomers are worried about. It is stasis, not change, that will mark our end.

Moreover, we might choose to slow ourselves down, but the bad guys won’t. So there’s no world in which AI doesn’t continue to progress. But there is a world in which the bad guys get a hold of novel technologies before we do—and, with it, the end of our sustained Enlightenment.

So socialism, environmentalism, scientism, relativism, dogmatism, and doomerism have all earned their bona fides as enemies of civilization. In one way or another, they curb our ability to make progress, a stain on the project that is humanity. But is each stain a unique color, or do they come from the same poisonous ink jar?

Indeed, all memetic enemies of civilization have one thing in common: They slow the growth of knowledge.

This article was excerpted from an upcoming documentary.

Blog Post | Population Growth

Earth Day’s Bad Bet Against Humanity

The Malthusian mind does not see the human capacity to cooperate, trade, discover, invent, and adapt.

Marian L. Tupy — May 5, 2026

Summary: Fears of overpopulation and resource depletion have long shaped modern environmental thought, predicting that humanity will outstrip the planet’s capacity to sustain it. Yet those forecasts have repeatedly failed to materialize, largely because they overlook a central dynamic of human societies: the ability to innovate, adapt, and expand resource availability. As population has grown, so too has prosperity and access to resources, driven by knowledge creation and market responses to scarcity. Rather than confirming a trajectory of collapse, historical evidence suggests a pattern of increasing abundance and human development.

When Paul R. Ehrlich, the famed Stanford University biologist and author of the bestselling 1968 book The Population Bomb, died last month, he was 93 and unrepentant for a lifetime of doom-mongering. In the book he warned, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” In 1970, he predicted, “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come—and by the end, I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.” Over the succeeding decades, he maintained that less-than-cheerful disposition. In 2013, he wrote that “a global collapse appears likely.” In 2018, he stated that a “shattering collapse of civilization is a ‘near certainty.’” In 2024, he gave his last interview, reiterating his position that humans are destroying the planet and committing civilizational suicide.

Ehrlich’s confident and, to some, attractive demeanor made him a television star with more than 20 appearances on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show—a record unmatched by any other individual guest. Slowly but surely, the techno-optimistic 1960s (Star Trek 1966-1969, The Jetsons 1962-1963, Thunderbirds 1965-1966, etc.) gave way to the doom and gloom of the 1970s. Consider the 1973 film Soylent Green, set in an overcrowded and overheated New York City in 2022. Food is scarce, and most people survive on processed wafers made by the Soylent Corporation. A detective played by Charlton Heston investigates the murder of a wealthy businessman and uncovers a horrific secret: Soylent Green, marketed as a new food source, is made from human remains. Its final revelation made “Soylent Green is people!” one of cinema’s most famous lines.

The first Earth Day—April 22, 1970—came during the transition from optimism to doom and gloom, and Ehrlich played a role in that. He served on the steering committee put together by Earth Day founder Sen. Gaylord Nelson and spoke on campuses across the country. So it’s not surprising that, as the Columbia Climate School has noted, Earth Day was infused not only with the usual and more understandable environmental concerns over pollution and carcinogens, but “Malthusian” worries over overpopulation and overconsumption of resources.

The first Earth Day was a massive success. About 20 million Americans participated. Lectures and rallies took place at more than 2,000 college campuses, 10,000 elementary and high schools, and thousands of other locations around the country. Forty-two states adopted resolutions endorsing Earth Day, and Congress recessed so that legislators could take part in activities back home. In September 1970, Congress strengthened the 1963 Clean Air Act. That December, President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency.Long before Ehrlich warned we were stripping the planet of resources, the English preacher and economist Thomas Robert Malthus wrote in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population that human numbers, if left unchecked, grow geometrically, while food supply grows only arithmetically. From that simple and, as it turned out, badly mistaken idea, he concluded that humanity would always press against the limits of subsistence. If people multiplied too quickly, nature would restore balance through war, famine, and plague. Those were his “positive checks” on overpopulation and overconsumption. He regarded them as awful, but also as inevitable unless societies adopted “preventive checks,” such as celibacy, that limited reproduction. It is easy to see why Malthus’ argument seemed persuasive. For most of human history, harvest failures could ruin entire populations. Malthus looked at that long record and saw a pattern. The problem was that he took a pattern that had held for centuries and assumed it would hold forever. He mistook a long chapter of human experience for an eternal law of nature.

In fact, Malthus had already lost his main argument before his essay even appeared in print. Between 1700 and 1798, the population of England rose from 5.2 million to 8.44 million, an increase of 62.3 percent. Over the same period, nominal GDP per person rose from 12.37 British pounds to 23.97 pounds, an increase of 93.8 percent. The nominal price of a four-pound loaf of bread, a staple that fed much of the poor, rose from 5.2 pence to 7.4 pence, or 42.3 percent. Because incomes rose much faster than the price of bread, the latter became 36.2 percent more abundant, not less. Put plainly, as England added more people, the bread of the poor became easier to afford.

Why did Malthus miss what was happening? Partly because the Malthusian thinking, shared by Ehrlich, reduces human beings to their appetites. It sees more mouths and stomachs, but not more hands and minds. It assumes that each additional person means one more claimant on a fixed stock of food and other goods. What it does not see is the human capacity to cooperate, trade, discover, invent, and adapt. Human beings are not trapped in the same ecological logic as bacteria in a dish or buffalo on a plain. We exchange with one another. We build institutions. We create tools. We improve production methods. We substitute one material for another. We grow more from the same soil—sometimes much more. In other words, we create new knowledge. Atoms without knowledge are mostly useless. New knowledge organizes atoms into fertilizer, irrigation systems, container shipping, refrigeration, or high-yield seeds. That is the variable that Malthus ignored and that led to Ehrlich’s very public humiliation.

Unlike Malthus and Ehrlich, the University of Maryland economist and Cato Institute senior fellow Julian Simon understood that scarcity is not the end of the resource story. It is just the beginning of a human response. Higher prices signal a problem. Those higher prices then encourage knowledge creation, and new knowledge leads to greater abundance. And so it was that in 1980, Simon proposed a 10-year futures-style bet. Ehrlich, along with ecologist John Harte from the University of California-Berkeley and John P. Holdren, a Berkeley scientist who later became President Barack Obama’s science adviser, jumped at the opportunity. The bet ran from September 29, 1980, to September 29, 1990.

Ehrlich’s group chose five metals: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. They fixed the starting value of the chosen quantities at $1,000 in 1980 and agreed to compare the inflation-adjusted value of that same basket 10 years later. If the real price of the basket rose, Simon would pay Ehrlich’s group. If it fell, Ehrlich’s group would pay Simon. The wager, therefore, used prices as a proxy for scarcity. When the term ended in 1990, all five metals were cheaper. Ehrlich sent Simon a check for $576.07, reflecting a 36 percent decline in the inflation-adjusted price of the basket. The check was signed by Paul’s wife, Anne Ehrlich. There was no accompanying letter. Simon replied with a thank-you note and offered to raise the stakes to $20,000 for a future bet, but Ehrlich declined.

The Simon Abundance Index, which Dr. Gale L. Pooley and I publish every year on Earth Day, is named after Julian Simon. It is a deliberate continuation of the quantitative analysis of the relationship between population growth and resource abundance that Simon’s bet with Ehrlich began. Unlike Simon and Ehrlich, who measured the abundance of resources in inflation-adjusted dollars, we look at “time prices.” Money prices are distorted by inflation and disputed deflators. Time prices solve that problem by dividing a good’s money price by hourly income, showing how long a person must work to buy it. They capture both falling prices and rising wages, require no inflation adjustment, and allow comparisons across countries and centuries. Time is universal, cannot be printed, and reflects the real cost people pay: hours of life. Time prices provide a clearer, simpler, and more meaningful measure of resource abundance than money prices for ordinary people.

Data visualization by Amanda Swinghamer Henderson.

By this measure, the last 45 years have been a rout for the pessimists. The 2026 report says that the Simon Abundance Index stood at 636.4 in 2025, up from a base of 100 in 1980. That means Earth was 536.4 percent more abundant in 2025 than in 1980. All 50 commodities, including fuels, such as crude oil, coal, and natural gas, food, such as chicken, beef, and lamb, and metals, such as aluminum, copper, and gold (yes, even gold!), in the dataset were more abundant in 2025 than they were in 1980. The global abundance of resources increased at a compound annual rate of 4.2 percent, doubling about every 17 years. In the 42 countries tracked by the report—accounting for 85.9 percent of global gross domestic product and 66.3 percent of the world’s population—none saw lower resource abundance in 2025 than in 1980. That is not what a species trapped in Malthus’ arithmetic is supposed to produce.

The mechanics of that gain matter. Between 1980 and 2025, time prices for the 50 commodities fell by an average of 70.9 percent. What required an hour of work in 1980 required about 18 minutes in 2025. The same hour of work that bought one unit of a typical commodity in 1980 bought 3.44 units in 2025. That is a 244 percent increase in personal resource abundance. At the same time, the world population grew by 85 percent, from 4.44 billion to 8.21 billion. Put those two changes together and you get the index’s central finding: For every 1 percent increase in global population, population-level resource abundance grew by about 6.3 percent. Resources growing at a faster pace than the population is what Pooley and I call superabundance. It is the opposite of Malthus’ conjecture that each additional person leaves less for everyone else.

The critics sometimes retreat to complaining about the short-term noise, as though any temporary spike in prices confirms the Malthusian creed. Our report addresses that, too. In 2025, 27 commodities became more abundant, and 23 became less abundant. The abundance of oranges rose the most, by 65.6 percent, while coconut oil’s abundance fell the most, by 36.3 percent. But commodity markets always swing because weather changes, disease hits crops, wars disrupt transport, and investment arrives late or early. Simon never argued that every price falls every year in a straight line. He argued that scarcity signals provoke adjustment. A temporary setback is not a vindication of Malthus. It is often the first stage of a correction. That is why the long trend matters more than the annual changes.

Our findings do not show that pollution is imaginary or that every environmental question has been solved. It has not. But environmental problems should be addressed as side effects of human flourishing, not as evidence that human flourishing itself is a mistake. The Earth Day mentality blurred that distinction. It converted planetary stewardship into misanthropy. It taught millions to look at a growing population and see only a burden, never a contribution. It treated the human animal as uniquely destructive when, in fact, people are the only animals who can recognize ecological damage and fix it. It is new knowledge—human knowledge—that gives societies the capacity to clean rivers, regulate toxins, build sewage systems, improve fuel efficiency, and move from dirtier technologies to cleaner ones. A poor society burns what it can find and dumps what it cannot manage. A rich society can afford scrubbers, pipelines, wastewater treatment, research labs, and better rules.

The green extremists often speak as though abundance is the disease, when in fact abundance is usually what makes environmental improvement possible. And so, despite half a century of doomsaying, the Earth is not collapsing under the weight of humanity. It is supporting far more people who can command far more resources with far less labor than their predecessors could. That is not the picture of a planet in terminal decline. It is the picture of a planet made more habitable by the one species clever enough to improve it. The Earth is not a museum piece. It is a working planet inhabited by learning beings who desire and are entitled to flourish.

This article was originally published in The Dispatch on 4/23/2026.

Bloomberg | Population Growth

Paraguay’s Policies Are Enabling Lower Inflation and Higher Growth

Mar 23, 2026

“Wedged between South American heavyweights Argentina and Brazil, Paraguay has long been ignored by the international community. Small, landlocked and poor, it was often seen as just a fly-over country.

So it’s a little surprising — to both those in the capital and in the region — that the country of 6.1 million people is suddenly having a moment…

Though roughly the size of California, Paraguay’s $47 billion economy is about 1% of the Golden State’s. But rapid growth and economic reforms in recent years helped the country win investment-grade credit status from Moody’s Ratings in 2024 and from S&P Global last year…

Last century, it was run as a dictatorship for 35 years — one of the longest in the region, whose fall in 1989 was followed by a tumultuous transition to democracy. But Paraguay’s embrace of sound fiscal and monetary policies after its 2003 financial crisis is now paying off, with single-digit inflation and annual growth averaging around 4% over the past two decades.”

From Bloomberg.

Project Syndicate | Population Growth

The Baby Bump from Remote Work

Mar 6, 2026

“A new study across 38 countries found that among adults aged 20-45 who work from home at least one day per week, actual births since 2023 and planned family size are higher. This implies that an increase in remote work would boost fertility much more effectively than expensive pronatalist policies.”

From Project Syndicate.

Blog Post | Science & Technology

How Robot Housekeepers Could Spark a New Baby Boom

The potential of technology to free humanity from the burden of household labor deserves more attention.

Chelsea Follett — Jan 16, 2026

Summary: Early household robots like NEO may look unimpressive today, but they have great long-term potential. As birth rates fall and the burdens of parenting loom large, technologies that reduce everyday household labor could make family life far more manageable. Just as past innovations transformed domestic work and reshaped society, robotic housekeepers may one day help free time and ease parenthood.

The debut of the robot butler NEO has drawn widespread ridicule. Unable to perform many chores without a remote human operator, the machine has become a target of social media backlash. Videos circulating online show the robot struggling with basic tasks, such as closing a dishwasher.

But don’t underestimate the potential of robotic housekeepers just yet.

The technology is dawning at an opportune time. Consider the growing concerns about plummeting birth rates. Last year saw the lowest fertility rate ever recorded in the United States, below 1.6 children per woman.

Could robots help to reverse the trend by relieving the burden of household drudgery associated with child-rearing?

The question has broad implications because the United States’ low fertility is no anomaly. Global fertility decline is speeding up, doubling between the 2000s and 2010s and again this decade. This means the world’s population will almost certainly peak earlier than experts projected, and at a much lower level. Many countries are contemplating expensive taxpayer-funded efforts to spark a new baby boom, despite the poor track record of such policies.

There is much disagreement on what caused the 1950s baby boom, but one theory is that the rise of time-saving technologies played a key role. Between the 1920s and 1950s, domestic responsibilities were transformed as the number of households equipped with electric appliances, including refrigerators, stoves, vacuums and washing machines, rose dramatically. The new machines lessened the burden of household labor, freeing up time and making parenthood easier.

In the present era, technology is once again freeing up more time for many people, and not just by reducing commute times through remote or hybrid work. While reading about the latest breakthroughs, one might get the impression that machines are only learning to perform enjoyable and creative tasks, such as writing or drawing, rather than tending to the menial household chores that many would prefer to automate. One internet user expressed the sentiment this way: “I don’t want AI to do my art so I can do my laundry and dishes. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so I can do my art.” Many would gladly welcome Rosey the robot maid into their homes.

The potential of technology to free humanity from the burden of household labor deserves more attention. Perhaps no group would benefit more than parents. The more children one has, the more laundry piles up and dishes fill the sink.

Various companies are racing to offer the public affordable robots to do housework. Robotic housekeepers might be here sooner than you think — even if NEO is seemingly not yet able to live up to its creator’s vision of a robot butler able to effortlessly empty the dishwasher, water house plants and do other chores. Tesla’s Optimus robot can fold laundry and take out the garbage, among other tasks. There are even robots that can wash dishes as fast as a human can.

If such technologies become widely available, everyday life will be far easier, and so will parenthood.

There are already robotic lawn mowers. In fact, a 2025 survey found that 13% of U.S. homes own a robotic lawn mower. And robot vacuums have become so common as to be unremarkable. In the United States, 15% of households now own a robotic vacuum, according to a YouGov poll. In the United Kingdom, one in 10 households owns one, while one in seven households reportedly plans to buy one within the next 12 months.

I remember when my family purchased a robot vacuum. We watched, mesmerized, as it zigzagged across the nursery carpet. Our toddler oohed and followed it around. Our awe reminded me of a touching account of a grandmother who had painstakingly scrubbed clothes by hand her whole life and then watched with wonder as her new laundry machine completed the task for her. One of the reasons I have more children than most is that I’m a techno-optimist, and I believe that my children will inherit a world with less toil and more joy. (My husband and I are expecting our fourth child.)

Of course, outsourcing all household chores to robots wouldn’t guarantee higher fertility. One lesson from the history of demographic forecasting is the need for humility.

After all, birth rates have dropped faster than demographers anticipated. But one thing is clear: Technological advancements have the potential to raise the standard of living, free up time and allow people to pursue their dreams. For many, this means having children.

This article was originally published at Deseret News on 11/29/2025.