fbpx

Human Progress Logo Human Progress

01 / 05
Update on the Five Metals from the Simon–Ehrlich Bet

Blog Post | Natural Resource Prices

Update on the Five Metals from the Simon–Ehrlich Bet

Since 1900, the average abundance of these five metals has increased 36.5 percent faster than the population.

Gale L. Pooley —

Summary: The Simon–Ehrlich wager famously demonstrated that population growth does not lead to resource scarcity but instead drives innovation and abundance. Since 1900, the production of five metals featured in the bet has risen dramatically. This bolsters Julian Simon’s argument that human ingenuity and technological progress enable us to produce more resources at lower costs, ensuring greater abundance even as populations grow.

Hannah Richie at OurWorldinData.org recently published an insightful article on the five metals featured in the Simon–Ehrlich wager. In 1990, Paul Ehrlich lost the 10-year bet and had to write a check to Julian Simon for $576.07. Simon had let Ehrlich pick the five metals in 1980 when the bet started. The payment reflected the inflation-adjusted decline of 36 percent in the average price of the five metals over the decade. This was despite an extraordinary global population increase during the 1980s of 850 million people (19 percent)—the largest growth in human history. Yet, even with this surge, resource prices dropped, reinforcing Simon’s argument that human population growth, coupled with ingenuity and the freedom to innovate, drives resource abundance rather than scarcity.

Libertarian economist Julian Simon made a famous wager with the renowned doomsayer Paul Ehrlich in 1980. Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose five metals that he believed would increase in price over the next decade. After the bet concluded, Ehrlich, humbled by the outcome, handed Simon a check, having lost the wager.

Richie highlights an important trend: The long-term abundance of these metals has increased significantly. Take a look at the staggering growth in their production since the early 1900s:

The five metals in the Simon-Ehrlich wager have actually become more abundant over time. The production of each of these metals has grown dramatically, defying Ehrlich's predictions of scarcity and rising prices.

Between 1900 and 2000, the global population grew by 400 percent, from 1.6 billion to 8 billion. During the same period, the production of the five metals soared: Chromium increased by an astounding 78,082 percent, copper by 4,062 percent, nickel by 26,918 percent, tin by 226 percent, and tungsten by 4,829 percent. On average, production of these metals rose by 22,823 percent.

The relationship between population growth and resource production is captured by the production elasticity of the population. It is the ratio of the percentage change in production divided by the percentage change in population. On average, every 1 percent increase in population corresponded to a 57.06 percent increase in the production of these five metals.

In our book Superabundance, we compared the time prices of these five metals for blue-collar workers from 1900 to 2018 and have since updated the data to 2022.

The prices of the five metals have also decreased over time, meaning fewer labor hours are required for a worker to afford them. This reflects both rising wages and falling commodity prices, which are indicators of growing progress and abundance.

The charts below detail the growth in abundance for each resource since 1900. Please note that vertical scales differ across the charts. The charts generally show the effects of 9/11, the financial crisis of 2008, and COVID-19 lockdown policies.

Since 1900, the metals have become much more abundant, even as the global population has grown. This demonstrates that humanity is not a burden on the earth's material resources; rather, through innovation and production, people have been able to expand resource availability.

This table summarizes our findings.

Between 1900 and 2022, the production, time price, and abundance of each of the metals have all increased. The chart also highlights the production elasticity of population, showing how the growth in population has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in metal production.

From 1900 to 2022, the global population increased by 400 percent. Over the same period, the abundance of these five metals increased by an average of 546 percent, demonstrating that abundance has grown 36.5 percent faster than the population.

Some have suggested that Simon was just lucky. This is why looking at a much longer time period reveals underlying trends behind temporary fluctuations.

These data reinforce Simon’s prediction: The more people, the more we produce, and the lower the prices.

Tip of the hat: Max More

This article was published at Gale Winds on 1/14/2025.

South China Morning Post | Energy Production

China Reaches Energy Milestone by “Breeding” Uranium from Thorium

“An experimental reactor developed in the Gobi Desert by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics has achieved thorium-to-uranium fuel conversion, paving the way for an almost endless supply of nuclear energy.

The achievement makes the 2 megawatt liquid-fuelled thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR) the only operating example of the technology in the world to have successfully loaded and used thorium fuel.

According to the academy, the experiment has provided initial proof of the technical feasibility of using thorium resources in molten salt reactor systems and represents a major leap forward for the technology.

It is the first time in the world that scientists have been able to acquire experimental data on thorium operations from inside a molten salt reactor, according to a report by Science and Technology Daily.”

From South China Morning Post.

MIT Technology Review | Mineral Production

The Company Planning a Lithium Empire at the Great Salt Lake

“Lilac Solutions is pioneering a new type of lithium extraction that could double US production in two years and shake up the industry…

The company uses proprietary beads to draw lithium ions from water and says its process can extract lithium using a tenth as much water as the alumina sorbent technology that dominates the DLE industry. Lilac also highlights its all-American supply chain. Technology originally developed by Koch Industries, for example, uses some Chinese-made components. Lilac’s beads are manufactured at the company’s plant in Nevada. 

Lilac says the beads are particularly well suited to extracting lithium where concentrations are low. That doesn’t mean they could be deployed just anywhere—there won’t be lithium extraction on the Hudson River anytime soon. But Lilac’s tech could offer significant advantages over what’s currently on the market. And forgoing plans to become a major producer itself could enable the company to seize a decent slice of global production by appealing to lithium miners companies looking for the best equipment.”

From MIT Technology Review.

IEEE Spectrum | Mineral Production

New Process Produces Critical Battery Metals with No Waste

“Christchurch-based Aspiring Materials has developed a patented chemical process that produces multiple valuable minerals from olivine, leaving no harmful waste behind. Perhaps most interesting to the energy sector is the rarest of its products—hard-to-source nickel-manganese-cobalt hydroxide that is increasingly required for lithium-ion battery production…

About 50 percent of what the process makes is silica that can be a partial replacement for Portland cement, the most common variety of cement in the world. About 40 percent is a magnesium product suitable for use in carbon sequestration, wastewater treatment, and alloy manufacturing, among other things. The final 10 percent is a mixed metal product—iron combined with small quantities of a nickel-manganese-cobalt hydroxide. The battery industry calls it NMC, and it is the go-to material for high-power applications.

Danczyk explains that at the end of the extraction process, they’re left only with a salty brine.”

From IEEE SPectrum.

Financial Times | Mineral Production

Fusion Energy Start-up Claims to Have Cracked Alchemy

“A fusion energy start-up claims to have solved the millennia-old challenge of how to turn other metals into gold.

Chrysopoeia, commonly known as alchemy, has been pursued by civilisations as far back as ancient Egypt. Now San Francisco-based Marathon Fusion, a start-up focused on using nuclear fusion to generate power, has said the same process could be used to produce gold from mercury.

In an academic paper published last week, Marathon proposes that neutrons released in fusion reactions could be used to produce gold through a process known as nuclear transmutation…

The most common experimental approach to fusion uses a device called a tokamak to heat two hydrogen isotopes — usually deuterium and tritium — to extreme temperatures so that they fuse to create helium and vast amounts of energy in the form of neutrons.

Most plans for potential fusion power plants aim to combine some of the neutrons with lithium isotopes in a ‘breeding blanket’ to create more tritium for future reactions.

Marathon’s proposal is to also introduce a mercury isotope, mercury-198, into the breeding blanket and use the high-energy neutrons to turn it into mercury-197.

Mercury-197 is an unstable isotope that then decays over about 64 hours into gold-197, the only stable isotope of the metal.

Rutkowski and Schiller say this means future fusion power plants that adopt this approach would be able to produce 5,000kg of gold a year, per gigawatt of electricity generation, without reducing the power output or tritium-breeding capacity of the system.”

From Financial Times.