“Between 2008 and 2023, multidimensional poverty in Latin America fell significantly—from 45.8% to 25.4%. This steady decline, averaging 1.4% per year, was only interrupted in 2020 due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic…

The MPI-LA complements traditional income-based measures by incorporating four key dimensions of well-being: housing, health, education, and employment. It goes further by including indicators like job quality, access to social protection, exclusion from the workforce due to unpaid domestic work, and internet connectivity.”

From United Nations Development Programme.

“Overall, the estimates reveal a remarkable decline in poverty across India in the last 12 years. In rural areas, poverty declined from 30.4 per cent to 3.9 per cent, while in urban areas, it declined from 26.4 per cent to 3.9 per cent. A similar magnitude of decline has been documented by Surjit Bhalla and Karan Bhasin.”

From Indian Express.

Summary: The belief that economic growth is unsustainable has long been challenged by the history of human ingenuity. From Malthus’s failed predictions of famine to Julian Simon’s wager demonstrating resource abundance, evidence consistently shows that technological progress allows us to produce more with less. While climate change presents a genuine challenge, continued growth remains the most effective means of addressing environmental concerns while improving global prosperity.

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“We have a finite environment—the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.” Or so claims Sir David Attenborough, a non-economist (or, as one of my friend’s economics professors refers to them, a muggle).

The madmen and economists, however, have economic history on their side—along with a litany of failed predictions of eco-catastrophe and a better understanding of what economic growth actually entails. 

The continued progress of humanity depends on these optimists winning the debate in the public square.

The Malthusian Fallacy

The idea that we live on a finite planet on the brink of collapse dates back to at least 1798. Thomas Malthus, an English preacher and economist, famously predicted an impending famine. The population was growing at an exponential or compounding rate; the food supply had historically grown at a linear or constant rate. One plus one equals starvation. The only solution, he argued, was moral restraint—people needed to suppress their natural urges and refrain from having children to save the planet. Sound familiar?

Malthus’s theory had two shortcomings: he failed to anticipate the sudden rise in health and material living standards enabled by factors such as the Agricultural Revolution, the mechanization and energy efficiencies of the Industrial Revolution, and major public health investments during the 19th century. He also didn’t foresee the advent of effective birth control in the latter half of the 20th century. While we can hardly blame Malthus for these oversights, his intellectual descendants would make similarly catastrophic predictions despite witnessing these very developments.

Perhaps the most striking example is Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb.” Its opening declaration was apocalyptic: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” This prediction proved dramatically wrong as agricultural productivity soared and population growth began to slow. In fact, the average population weighted food supply per person has increased from 2,196 in 1961 to 2,962 in 2017.

Ehrlich’s predictions faced an even more direct challenge in 1980 when economist Julian Simon wagered that any five metals of Ehrlich’s choosing would be cheaper in real terms a decade later. Simon won decisively as the average inflation-adjusted price of the metals fell 36 percent despite a nearly twenty percent increase in the global population.

The Simon Solution

In honor of the great economist, the Human Progress team at the Cato Institute has created the Simon Abundance Index, which measures the abundance of fifty commodities across food, energy, natural resources, and other categories. Their research reveals these commodities have become 509.4 percent more abundant. Meanwhile, their “time prices”—work hours needed for an average worker to afford them—have fallen by 70.4 percent.

This seeming paradox is explained by human ingenuity: each new person brings not just another mouth to feed but another mind to solve problems. Thus, attempts to limit population growth to save the planet are self-defeating—they reduce humanity’s capacity to innovate and develop solutions to environmental challenges.

No one better demonstrates this principle than Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution. His development of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties saved over a billion people from starvation. These innovations also limited the need for ever-increasing farmland, leaving more room for nature. Had Borlaug never been born, the world’s food and land supplies would have been less, not more, abundant.

Borlaug’s legacy points to a broader truth: geniuses like him are rare yet play an outsized role in humanity’s progress across a variety of domains, from health and science to freedom and prosperity. More people equals more geniuses and more progress. Fewer people mean the opposite. Increasing fertility rates is thus one of the defining issues of our time. A world with fewer people is one with fewer Borlaugs, fewer Einsteins, and fewer minds to tackle humanity’s most pressing challenges.

The Case for Growth

And economic growth isn’t a sign of reckless decadence—it’s a measure of our progress. Growth enlarges the pie and enables humanity to produce more with less.

The historical record powerfully vindicates this view. As economic historian Deirdre McCloskey documents, average living standards remained stagnant for most of human history until increasing sixteenfold over the past two hundred years. The rise of liberal institutions and ideas allowed humanity to become far more productive with the same natural resources and constraints faced by past generations.

Even more remarkably, as MIT economist Andrew McAfee highlights in “More From Less,” we’re now experiencing widespread “dematerialization”—achieving greater material prosperity while reducing resource consumption. Of the 72 resources tracked by the U.S. Geological Survey, 66 have peaked and are declining in use. We’re creating more wealth while leaving a lighter footprint on the planet.

Climate Change

Unlike fears of overpopulation and resource depletion, climate change presents a genuine threat that demands serious attention. The Industrial Revolution and the economic rise of developing nations have increased carbon emissions and global temperatures. This warming will lead to more frequent and severe natural disasters, rising sea levels, and disrupted ecosystems in the medium to long term.

Yet this same industrialization has achieved something remarkable: lifting billions out of grinding poverty. This historic triumph deserves celebration, even as we grapple with its environmental costs.

While the environmental movement rightly acknowledges the threats posed by climate change (though their predictions of imminent human extinction echo the discredited catastrophism of Malthus and Ehrlich), they often forget a crucial truth: growth is good.

Growth is also Green

Growth elevates humanity. Growth creates problems that need solving. Growth also provides the means to solve these problems through technology and innovation.

Green energy, adaptation, and potentially even bioengineering will all play roles in addressing climate change, but these solutions depend on growing wealth. As Maslow teaches, people have a hierarchy of needs. If people’s basic needs aren’t met, they can’t progress to addressing higher-level challenges.

We’ve already seen economic growth decouple from carbon emissions in 33 developed economies. This process validates economist Simon Kuznets’s insight about how countries initially increase pollution as they develop but then reduce emissions as they adopt greener technologies and take action to protect the environment. Our task now is to accelerate this environmental decoupling in wealthy nations while helping developing nations catch up economically.

Innovation Without Limits

Rather than viewing human progress and environmental stewardship as opposing forces, we should recognize them as complementary goals achievable through continued innovation and economic development.

The evidence is clear: human ingenuity, when coupled with economic freedom and technological advancement, has consistently overcome environmental constraints while improving living standards. Our challenge isn’t to limit growth or population but to foster conditions that allow human creativity and enterprise to flourish. 

Far from being madmen, those who believe in humanity’s capacity for infinite growth understand a fundamental truth: our greatest resource isn’t the finite materials beneath our feet, but the infinite potential of the human mind.

“The most recent survey, which covers the year to July, shows that only 1% of India’s households fell below the international poverty line in 2024, according to an analysis of the data by Surjit Bhalla, a former executive director of the IMF, and Karan Bhasin of the State University of New York, Albany. Heir to the famous “dollar a day” poverty line, the international poverty line now stands at $2.15 a day at purchasing-power parity. India has, therefore, all but eliminated the most extreme forms of poverty.

This is wonderful news in its own right. But India’s success also calls into question a common assumption about development: that the eradication of poverty requires a manufacturing miracle, drawing masses of peasants out of the farms and into the factories. More than 40% of India’s workers are still employed in agriculture. Perhaps people can leave poverty without leaving the land. That is also one conclusion of a new paper by Vincent Armentano, Paul Niehaus and Tom Vogl, all of the University of California, San Diego, which examines some of the paths out of poverty taken by five big emerging economies—China, Indonesia, Mexico and South Africa, as well as India—from 1984 to 2017.”

From The Economist.