Please join us for Cato Club Naples — a series of exclusive events for Cato Sponsors whose annual contribution is $1,000 or more. Our upcoming luncheon will feature presentations by Marian Tupy and Ilya Shapiro.

Resource depletion has been a hotly debated topic since the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968. The Stanford University biologist warned that population growth would result in the exhaustion of resources and a global catastrophe. “Since natural resources are finite,” he noted some years later, “consumption obviously must ‘inevitably lead to depletion and scarcity.’” The late University of Maryland economist Julian Simon disagreed. In his 1981 book The Ultimate Resource, Simon argued that humans were intelligent beings, capable of innovating their way out of shortages. Cato’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity revisited the debate between the two scholars by looking at prices of 50 foundational commodities covering energy, food, materials, and metals. In his presentation, Marian will explain how his findings in a recently published paper confirm Simon’s thesis.

The process to confirm Brett Kavanaugh showed that the Supreme Court is now part of the same toxic cloud that has enveloped all of the nation’s public discourse. Given the battle we saw there — and over Neil Gorsuch before that — too many people now think of the justices in partisan terms. That’s unfortunate, but it’s not a surprise when contrasting methods of constitutional interpretation now largely track identification with parties that are more ideologically sorted than ever. Is there anything we can do to fix this dynamic, to turn down the political heat on judicial vacancies? Please join Ilya to hear about the Supreme Court, judicial nominations, and broader issues. We hope to see you in March!

By invitation only. Registration fee is $35 per person.

For further information, please contact Jenna Huhn at jhuhn@​cato.​org.