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Wealth & Poverty Review The Abundance of the Five Metals in the Simon-Ehrlich Bet

Originally published at Gale Pooley's Substack

Hannah Richie at OurWorldinData.org recently published an insightful article on the five metals featured in the Simon-Ehrlich bet. In 1990 Paul Ehrlich lost the 10-year wager and had to write a check to Simon for $576.07. Simon let Ehrlich pick the five metals back 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 36 percent drop in real prices occurred 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 in population, resource prices dropped. This reinforces Simon’s argument that human population growth, coupled with ingenuity and the freedom to innovate, increases resource abundance, not scarcity.

Richie highlights an important trend: the long-term abundance of these metals has continued to increase significantly. Take a look at the staggering growth in the production of these five metals since the early 1990s:

Between 1900 and 2000, 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 an extraordinary 22,823 percent.

The relationship between population growth and resource production is captured by the production elasticity of population, computed as the ratio of the percentage change in production divided by the percentage change in population. On average, every one 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 charts below detail the growth in abundance for each resource since 1900. Please note that vertical scales differ across the charts. You can see the effects of 9/11, the financial crisis of 2008, and COVID-19 lockdown policies in the charts.

This table summarizes our findings.

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

Gale Pooley

Senior Fellow, Center on Wealth & Poverty
Gale L. Pooley teaches U.S. economic history at Utah Tech University. He has taught economics and statistics at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Alfaisal University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Brigham Young University-Idaho, Boise State University, and the College of Idaho. Dr. Pooley serves on the board of HumanProgress.org.