I was glad to see Bryan Caplan take up my invitation to join the Julian Simon Club. Other members now include Stephen Miller, Don Boudreaux, Eli Dourado, Matt Zwolinski, and a few people commenting under pseudonyms (if I’ve missed you, please forgive me!). Some of the comments on my original post and on Bryan’s post linked above raise a few issues. First, I can’t quote chapter and verse where Julian Simon explicitly says “people should have more children,” but one implication of his work is that more people means more brains and, therefore, more prosperity. Or, at the very least, Simon shows us that we shouldn’t be concerned with overpopulation per se. Creating the Club is one way of echoing Bryan’s statement. Second, the relevance of Simon’s work for any kind of economic or political analysis is hard to deny. He shows that population leads to division of labor, division of knowledge, and higher productivity. He also shows that policies aimed at limiting population growth (like forced sterilizations) have no justification whatsoever.
On Julian Simon and the Julian Simon Club
