Cornucopian

A cornucopian is a futurist who believes that continued progress and provision of material items for mankind can be met by similarly continued advances in technology. Fundamentally they believe that there is enough matter and energy on the Earth to provide for the population of the world.

Looking further into the future, they posit that the abundance of matter and energy in space would appear to give humanity almost unlimited room for growth.

The term comes from the cornucopia, the "horn of plenty" of Greek mythology, which magically supplied its owners with endless food and drink. Cornucopians are sometimes known as "boomsters", and their philosophic opponents—Malthus and his school—are called "doomsters" or "doomers."

Theory

"When civilization [population] increases, the available labor again increases. In turn, luxury again increases in correspondence with the increasing profit, and the customs and needs of luxury increase. Crafts are created to obtain luxury products. The value realized from them increases, and, as a result, profits are again multiplied in the town. Production there is thriving even more than before. And so it goes with the second and third increase. All the additional labor serves luxury and wealth, in contrast to the original labor that served the necessity of life."-Ibn Khaldun(1332–1406), from Muqaddimah

As a society becomes more wealthy, it also creates a well-developed set of legal rules to produce the conditions of freedom and security that progress requires.

In Progress and Poverty written in 1879, after describing the powerful reproductive forces of nature, the political economist Henry George wrote, "That the earth could maintain a thousand billions of people as easily as a thousand millions is a necessary deduction from the manifest truths that, at least so far as our agency is concerned, matter is eternal and force must forever continue to act."

Description by an opposing view

Stereotypically, a cornucopian is someone who posits that there are few intractable natural limits to growth and believes the world can provide a practically limitless abundance of natural resources. The label 'cornucopian' is rarely self-applied, and is most commonly used derogatorily by those who believe that the target is overly optimistic about the resources that will be available in the future.

One common example of this labeling is by those who are skeptical of the view that technology can solve, or overcome, the problem of an exponentially-increasing human population living off a finite base of natural resources. Cornucopians might counter that human population growth has slowed dramatically, and not only is currently growing at a linear rate, but is projected to peak and start declining in the second half of the 21st century. Furthermore, it always has in the past, even when population was increasing at a far faster rate of growth.

See also

• Ibn Khaldun
• Candide
• Food security
• Jacque Fresco
• Thomas Robert Malthus
• John McCarthy
• Julian Simon and Simon–Ehrlich wager
• Matt Simmons
• Post-scarcity economy

Further reading

• William R. Catton, Jr, "The Problem of Denial" Environment & Society, 1994.
• Ernest Partridge, "Perilous Optimism" February 2001