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And it may also be among the least appreciated, judging from the persistent doom and gloom, going back centuries, over the supposed menace of overpopulation. Yet few wrong ideas have been more persistent than the fear of too many people.

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British cleric Thomas Robert Malthus promoted the terror of apocalyptic overpopulation in a memorable treatise. Memorable, that is, for being so wrongheaded. Malthus anticipated that the population would soon outstrip the food supply; instead, the rapidly growing human race set off on a long tear of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity.

This dismal book floated ideas such as mandatory sterilization and a tax on children to save the planet. Recent efforts by a more intellectually agile leadership to reverse the policy and undo the damage have seen underwhelming results. Like the boy who said the emperor was naked, Julian Simon, of the University of Maryland, persistently challenged the doomsday error.

Simon understood that more human brains would be at work finding new supplies, and inventing more efficient ways to grow and use them, and dreaming up alternatives to those that become scarce. Of course, he won the bet: In a little more than 10 years, the price of a representative set of commodities fell by more than half — a clear signal that supply was outstripping demand.

In a cheerful paper published last month by the libertarian Cato Institute, Gale Pooley and Marian Tupy extend the results of the bet a quarter-century to the latest data available, while offering a more sophisticated tool for measuring what they call the Simon Abundance Index.