Abstract
Europe still treats tonnes and cubic metres of natural resources as fixed facts in a zero-sum geopolitical game. This article revives an almost forgotten episode of economic history to challenge this view. The face-off between neo-Malthusian and Cornucopian thinkers shows that scarcity is cognitive, not geological; the human mind is the Ultimate Resource that turns physical stuff into resources that are of value to human beings. The paper argues that (1) our very language of talking about resources locks policymakers in a scarcity mindset; (2) revisiting the Simon/Ehrlich wager will conceptually and empirically break that frame; (3) fears of demographic decline ignore AI’s ability to amplify each human ingenuity; and (4) Europe should track ingenuity, attract global talent, and build an AI-first education. Because Strategic autonomy flows from creativity, not stockpiles.
Introduction
Europe’s resource conversation is stuck using the wrong vocabulary. We count lithium in tonnes and gas in cubic metres, but we often lack a sufficient conceptual understanding of what actually determines which of those raw materials will become strategic levers. This article aims to change the tone. By revisiting a largely forgotten twentieth-century debate between neo-Malthusians and liberal Cornucopians, I argue that scarcity is fundamentally cognitive, not geological, and that European decision-makers should resist the instinct to frame every resource problem as a shortage or dependency. The return of geopolitics must not entail a comeback of outdated economic theory.
The argument proceeds in four steps. First, I explain how language steers and shapes policy, and why European policymakers should adopt an ‘ultimate resource’ vocabulary. Second, I revisit the Simon–Ehrlich wager to contrast Cornucopian and Malthusian ideas in the history of economic thought. Third, I defend the ultimate resource hypothesis against objections rooted in Europe’s demographic contraction and the apparent slowdown in knowledge discovery, arguing that this is nothing but Malthusian miscalculation. Finally, I translate these insights from intellectual history into three modest recommendations that point towards further topics for research and discussion.
Why Europe cannot afford misleading terminology … again!
‘In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue.’— Thomas L. Friedman
While this quote may sound like a throwaway aphorism, recent European policy debates demonstrate its power. For years, European decision-makers tiptoed around the historically loaded term ‘geopolitics’, stubbornly clinging to their own vocabulary of ‘rules-based multilateralism’. But reality moved on – and so did the weaponisation of supply chains, energy dependencies, and export relations – all before Brussels had even opened a serious conversation about strategic autonomy. In other words, language had delayed strategy.
This shows that words matter. They do more than merely describe reality; they are able to channel political attention and even create budget lines. We are seeing this all across Europe: ministries are setting up geoeconomic desks, great-power politics is back on the menu, and Ursula von der Leyen speaks of the first ‘Geopolitical Commission’ (European Commission, 2019). The Brussels dictionary is finally catching up.
Unfortunately, the next semantic slip is already underway. Draft regulations and policy papers still employ the terms ‘resource’ and ‘scarcity’ as if they were clearly defined and self-explanatory. But they are not. And intellectual history shows why.
A barrel of oil is merely ‘black, sticky stuff’ until a combustion engine makes it useful, and a block of code is idle syntax until it is transformed into software. Each so-called resource is just matter until human ingenuity turns it into value. Ideas and minds unlock the potential of the physical world, not the other way around. And if we lose sight of that relationship, public policy will head in the wrong direction, hoarding stockpiles of ‘stuff’ while the real constraint – creative capacity – continues to intensify. In other words, the right vocabulary is a matter of strategy.
This confusion is hardly new; it has shadowed resource debates since Malthus (Malthus, 1798). What is new is Europe’s shrinking margin for error: geopolitical competition has returned at full force just as technological cycles have accelerated. Here, Julian Simon’s neglected insight – that the human mind, organised by open and competitive institutions, is the ‘ultimate resource’ – offers a sharper vocabulary. It shifts scarcity from geology to cognition and reframes the strategic question from ‘how can Europe ensure access to raw material X?’ to ‘how can Europe lead in turning mere stuff into value?’. That, in fact, is the strategic autonomy everyone tries to conceptualise.
The pages that follow trace this idea through its intellectual lineage and explain why it matters for today’s European debate on the geoeconomics of resources.
A public bet at the heart of intellectual history
There are those rare moments when academic debates transcend the seminar room and reshape public discourse. One occurred in the early 1980s, when biologist Paul Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon agreed to a public bet that sharply divided two schools of thought: Malthusian pessimism and Cornucopian optimism.
The backdrop of this story feels uncannily similar to twenty-first-century Europe: energy shocks, stagflation, and growing doubts about the ‘limits to growth’. Ehrlich’s bestseller The Population Bomb (1968) distilled that mood into a stark forecast: an exponentially growing number of hungry mouths would collide with a planet of fixed resources – ending not only in shortages but also in existential conflict. In other words, Ehrlich re-popularised the Malthusian script.
On the other side of the debate, Simon argued that this apocalyptic diagnosis was not merely wrong; it inverted causality. Scarcity, he argued, was being misunderstood conceptually (Simon, 1981). Population growth does add consumers, yes, but it also multiplies problem-solvers. More people generate more ideas, and the only truly scarce resource is the human mind, not the materials it eventually substitutes.
At first, this argument did not find many supporters. Simon was more of an academic outcast than anything else. Unable to settle the matter in print, Simon challenged Ehrlich to a straight bet: pick any raw materials, choose any horizon longer than a year, and let market prices decide who is right about scarcity. Ehrlich accepted and selected five industrial metals (chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten), confident they would be seriously depleted through the 1980s. Simon bet they would not. (for a more detailed account of the Simon-Ehrlich Wager, see Sabin, 2013 or Simon, 1996)
When the decade closed, the price of every one of the five metals had fallen in inflation-adjusted terms – a sign of abundance rather than scarcity. Ehrlich conceded and mailed Simon a cheque. The intellectual battle, however, marched on. Nearly 50 years later, although Cornucopians won the wager, Malthusians still dominate the political sphere. And so it comes as no surprise that EU briefings still quote Ehrlich while Cornucopian ideas are largely absent. The result is that current geopolitical discussions about raw materials instinctively frame the problem in terms of looming shortages rather than exploring how to expand possibilities. Europe focuses on counting tonnes rather than generating ideas.
Rediscovering Simon’s insights and adopting a Cornucopian lens would do more than rectify intellectual history; it would give the EU a strategic edge. If human ingenuity is the ultimate resource, Europe’s real challenge is to cultivate, attract, and mobilise inventive minds – and to let that ingenuity bend physical scarcity in its favour.
The new Malthusian trap: are we running out of ideas?
Objections to an ultimate resource lens usually take two forms. The first is dismissive, arguing that ‘Europe already gets this’ because on paper, European policymakers pledge allegiance to innovation, tech acceleration, research funding, and economic growth. Yet the Cornucopian vocabulary vanishes the moment resource policy is discussed. For example, when it comes to the Critical Raw Materials and Chips Acts, the mental default remains scarcity (European Parliament, 2023 & 2024).
The second objection carries more weight as it challenges the very framework itself: what if human ingenuity itself is drying up? Simon’s optimism may have made sense when overpopulation was the primary concern, but Europe now faces a structural demographic decline and diminishing productivity. Some observers even claim that the ‘ultimate resource has already peaked’ (Kenny, 2023)
Several indicators seem to back that view:
- According to the European Commission (2023), the EU’s working-age population is projected to shrink by 35 million by 2050.
- UNESCO (2024) data show average years of schooling flattening; each additional year now contributes far less to global human-capital stock than it did in the post-war decades.
The median inventor on European patents is edging towards 50 years old (Kaltenberg et al., 2023), and novelty scores in EU and US filings have drifted downward since the late 1990s (Park et al., 2023).
If populations decline, schooling plateaus, and labour productivity falls, idea generation should stall – at least that is what we would expect in terms of conceptual relationships. According to such reasoning, the engine of abundance is running out of fuel just when Europe needs it most.
Yet I would argue that this linear thinking is simply another Malthusian trap. With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), sheer brain count matters less because AI will amplify human ingenuity – and we are already seeing the early signs of this. Early studies of AI-enabled workplaces show double-digit productivity gains (for example Bertrand et al., 2024) and we have barely scratched the surface.
Fixating on demographic slowdown repeats Malthus’s original error: assuming a fixed ratio between input and output – while the production function keeps evolving. The task is not to lament fewer births but to enhance the ingenuity of every resident mind and to attract additional ones where possible.
How best to do that lies beyond the scope and expertise of a philosopher, yet I shall conclude with a few modest recommendations for putting a Cornucopian policy lens into practice.
Recommendations
Drawing lessons from intellectual history is tricky (and risky), but I would nevertheless argue that a Cornucopian lens could be highly useful for entering today’s geopolitical debates. Decision-makers should shift their main priority from stockpiling physical stuff to multiplying minds – and in doing so strengthen Europe’s position in the global power politics of the day.
- Adopt a Cornucopian mindset. This may sound esoteric, but once European decision-makers shift from a scarcity mindset to a Cornucopian lens, their assessments of real-world innovation will change. Take the watershed moment of the launch of the Chinese large language model (LLM) DeepSeek. For many commentators, it was inconceivable that a model of such capabilities could be developed at a fraction of the cost of its Western counterparts (Gibney, 2025). What was often overlooked, however, is that this cost-effectiveness and efficiency were driven by the very scarcity that semiconductor export controls aimed to impose. Human ingenuity, therefore, challenged one of the central assumptions of AI development: that there is a linear relationship between computing power and model capabilities. Only a Cornucopian lens can accommodate that insight conceptually.
- Double down on the race for talent.Europe cannot erase or even alleviate its structural demographic challenges overnight. But it can become the brain capital of the twenty-first century. With the Trump administration waging a war on its own universities and research institutions, this could be an incredibly opportune moment for the EU to solidify its geopolitical positioning as a global hub for knowledge and innovation. How exactly this should be implemented is, of course, a matter of public policy (and is also discussed in this issue) but it requires a new kind of dashboard: one that tracks ingenuity itself. Similar to and Tupy’s Simon Abundance Index (Pooley & Tupy, 2018), the EU would do well to develop a Simon Ingenuity Tracker to monitor and promote the dynamism of the continent’s human capital – and show its commitment to Simon’s ideas.
- Adopt AI accelerationism. The EU takes pride in having passed the first comprehensive AI regulation. But if it adopted a Cornucopian mindset, it would see AI for what it is: an amplifier of the ultimate resource. While certain forms of tech and social media scepticism may be warranted, AI offers a strategic edge for Europe’s future. Viewed through a Cornucopian lens, the locus of competition would shift – not towards semiconductors, hardware, or brute computing power (i.e. physical stuff), but towards making the European population AI-ready and unlocking its creative potential. In concrete terms, this would entail integrating AI literacy into primary education, offering free premium AI subscriptions to every citizen, and adopting an AI-first approach to policymaking. Pre-emptive over-regulation is exactly the wrong move in the context of geopolitical competition – and once again reflects the wrong scarcity paradigm.
Of course, these are broad-brush, strategic, and somewhat abstract recommendations. But they aim to distil the essence of the historic wager between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich into timely lessons for current European debates: secure minds, amplify them, and let ingenuity bend material scarcity to Europe’s advantage.
Conclusion
The latest public policy trend is an old one: overemphasising the scarcity of the physical world. And indeed, a serious conversation must be had about critical raw materials in a geopolitical context where Europe can no longer rely on favourable trade conditions. However, this renewed focus on resources should not bring with it a return to thinking in terms of mere matter. Instead, it should prompt European decision-makers to recognise their true strategic advantage – namely, the human capital capable of turning ‘stuff’ into value. I have traced this genealogy of the concept of a ‘resource’ back to a long-standing dispute in the history of economic thought between Malthusians and Cornucopians. One can only hope that European decision-makers revisit the Simon–Ehrlich wager – and place their bets on the winning side this time: human creativity, unleashed and amplified by AI.
References
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European Commission (2023): Harnessing talent in Europe’s regions (COM(2023) 32 final); Publications Office of the European Union. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52023DC0032
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