Life must be melancholy at best the neo-Malthusian closed-minded pessimists at such anti-liberty/pro-state organizations as Sierra Club, NRDC, 350.org, and Center for American Progress. No Julian Simon or Bjorn Lomborg or Judith Curry or Alex Epstein or Matt Ridley allowed at these shops!

Thankfully, most people–and certainly voters through demonstrated preference–are pessimistic about government and optimistic about life in a free society. And so it must be hard for the chronically discontent to interact on a personal, family level, particularly during the holiday season.

Consider the following quotations of Messing With The Holidays.

Heed the Warnings: Why We’re on the Brink of Mass Extinction (The Daily Beast, November 30, 2014)

“Evolutionary biologist Sean B. Carroll, executive producer of the doc Mass Extinction: Life At the Brink, on why mankind’s days are numbered….”

 “Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the [twentieth] century.”

– John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich[1]

Doom and gloom—and falsity—hallmarks the long career of John P. Holdren, neo-Malthusian and President Obama’s initial and still science advisor. Halloween Holdren has been quiet with the outlandish in recent years–he does not want to embarrass his boss–but his many quotations beginning in the 1970s, never disowned, remain for the record.

Today is a good time to refresh memories of the man who just might be the scariest presidential advisor in U.S. history!

Read—but don’t be frightened. The sky-is-falling gloom of Holdren, his mentor Paul Ehrlich, and others is in intellectual and empirical trouble. From Julian Simon to Bjorn Lomborg to Indur Goklany to Matt Ridley to Marlo Lewis to Alex Epstein, the technological optimists have the upper hand in a debate that continues to rage.…

“It is ironic that many environmentalists who would herald similar growth in population of some of the endangered species as a very good indicator of the environmental health of the planet, see the success of man as a harbinger of environmental doom. Even many economists usually consider an increase in production of steel or birth of an additional calf, as positive addition to the national output or Gross Domestic Product, but view the birth of a human child to have a negative impact on GDP.“

The twentieth Century has witnessed unprecedented demographic changes. For the first time in history, the world population almost quadrupled from about one and a half billion in 1900 to six billion in the span of just hundred years.  Likewise, Indian population too crossed the one billion level in May 2000, from about 238 million at the beginning of the Twentieth century.…

“While we think that policies and institutions compatible with freedom and openness are important factors in promoting human progress, we let the evidence speak for itself. We hope that this website leads to a greater appreciation of the improving state of the world and stimulates an intelligent debate on the drivers of human progress.”

– HumanProgress.org (Cato Institute)

Kudos to Cato for their new website portal, HumanProgress.org, which brings into one place the statistics of human welfare with reference to the socio-economic conditions responsible for it. The mission and status of this new website is discussed below.

A Julian Simon Institute?

I often lamented the absence of a Julian Simon Institute to tackle the area of ‘sustainability’ or “sustainable development,’ which covers so many things relating to population and progress. …