Mankind is doing better than we ever did. We are richer than ever, we are healthier. We are able to do things mankind couldn’t do in the past. We are able to fly, to send rockets to the moon, we are capable of making a simple phone call from England to China or from Russia to South Africa. We know more about human beings, animals and the world than we ever knew. But it seems there is also a negative side about this progress. We face the problem of Global Warming, population growth, the distribution of water worldwide, the increase of major disasters like the tsunami of the 26th of December 2004 or major earthquakes like what happened in Haiti or Sichuan province (China), the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and according to Samuel Huntington, “the class of civilizations” will lead us into battle with each other.    

Are we able to solve the problems we face or are we not capable of dealing with all those difficulties? Is mankind going upwards or going downwards?

In 1990  the ecologists Paul and Anne Erhlich published their book ‘The Population Explosion’. They wrote about the major population growth worldwide and the consequences for the environment. A child in the West pollutes and consumes 220 times more than a child in a poor country. If the Third World is getting richer and the population keeps growing, we have a major problem. If we don’t act now, they wrote, it’s end of story.

Julian Simon, taxi driver, psychologist and economist has a totally different view. Mankind is doing better than ever. He looked at history and found out that for every problem mankind stood, it always found a solution. The lack of tin (needed for Bronze) at the end of the Bronze Age was not the end of the Greek civilization, but the rise of the Iron Age. The lack of trees in the 16th century led to the use of coal and the Industrial Revolution which followed. In Simon’s opinion: The more people there are, the more solutions we may think of. 

In the 1980’s, Simon was convinced that his position in the debate was the right one. According to his view, raw materials which are nearly exhausted will become much cheaper because this material will be replaced by other materials. He invited his opponents for a bet. Paul Ehrlich responded. He was convinced of the opposite. If some often used raw material gets scare, the price will rise dramatically.

The gentleman selected five metals together: Tin (Sn), Wolfram (W), Chromium (Cr), Nickel (Ni) and Copper (Cu). Their agreement was to wait for 10 years to see what will happen, to see which of them was right, and so they did…