Forces Driving More
daily supply of calories increased by one-quarter. For his role in
launching “the Green Revolution,” Borlaug was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize.
By January 97 , the world’s population had reached 3.7 billion
people. A Stanford biology professor named Paul Ehrlich appeared on
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Channeling Malthus’s earlier
outlook, Ehrlich was promoting his blockbuster book, The Population
Bomb, and talking about the impending doom awaiting hundreds of
millions of people who “are going to starve to death.”
In Urbana, Illinois, a business professor and economist at the Uni-
versity of Illinois named Julian Simon watched Ehrlich and stewed.
He believed that science and technology would overcome any global
shortages from population growth, but he lacked the acclaim to pro-
mote his views.
So Simon baited Ehrlich with a thousand-dollar wager on whether
the future prices of any five industrial metals over ten years would rise or
fall. For Ehrlich, higher prices would affirm resource scarcity brought
on by population growth. For Simon, lower prices would validate how
science and technology remediates population growth. When the bet
was settled, the world’s population had increased another eight hun-
dred million people, while the prices of all five metals had fallen.
Simon, it appeared, had shown that science would save humanity. But
by then, fewer people were paying attention to how science worked,
or the fact that the wager had more to do with vanity than with actual
science.
Since then not much has changed. If anything, we have become
even more accustomed to the miracles of science, no longer caring
about the technology as long as the results work in our favor. When
the latest one billion people were added to the planet in just thirteen
years, modern societies rolled on uninterested and unfazed.
America’s embrace of science did not happen spontaneously. For
science and technology to succeed, a supporting platform was necessary.
Enter Justin Morrill. A successful self-educated merchant, legislator,
and gentleman farmer from Vermont, Morrill was more motivated by
advancing experimental horticulture than actual farming.