Hayek against Malthus: Julian Simon’s Neoliberal Critique of Environmentalism

The transition to neoliberal hegemony during the last quarter of the twentieth century is generally portrayed as a contest between Hayekians and Keynesians. This portrayal overlooks the brief but potent effervescence of the neo-Malthusian movement. Biologists Garrett Hardin, Paul Ehrlich, and Donella Meadows led a social movement that pursued environmentalist governance wherein scarce resources and population growth were managed by command-and-control instruments, Pigouvian taxation, and coercion. The neoclassical mainstream of economics conceded to the neo-Malthusian upstarts that if a “backstop” energy source was not discovered, then there were indeed “limits to growth,” but neoliberals eventually devised alternative environmental frameworks, such as Elinor Ostrom’s “commons” and John Dales’s “cap-and-trade.” The first significant clash between neoliberals and neo-Malthusians came in the form of a bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich over commodity prices during the 1980s. This article reconstructs the broader context of their confrontation, as well as the theoretical influences on Simon’s cornucopian framework of “resourceship.”