Poverty and pollution

International: Remembering the economist who showed Westerners can be friends of the poor and the environment

Julian Simon, University of Maryland professor and author of The Ultimate Resource and Population Matters, died last month. He was known as an iconoclastic scholar whose research and writing on the economics of population growth flew in the face of conventional, Malthusian population-control wisdom.

Once a proponent of population control, Mr. Simon turned against it when his research in the late 1960s and early 1970s-begun with the intent of providing scholarly support for population-control programs-led him to conclude that dense population and rapid population growth lead to economic growth and environmental improvement, not poverty and environmental destruction. His first major assault on the conventional wisdom came in The Economics of Population Growth (1977). In the ensuing two decades he continued to criticize popular fears of overpopulation and resource depletion; he assaulted with scholarly research and popular writing the theories on which those fears were built.