The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth's Future

Abstract

THE BET: PAUL EHRLICH, JULIAN SIMON, AND OUR GAMBLE OVER EARTH'S FUTUREBy Paul Sabin, Yale University Press 2013It seems a matter of common sense that infinite resources do not exist, and we should, therefore, use our resources carefully. But it is a mistake to understate the impact of human ingenuity and market economics on the demand for resources we are inclined to think of as essential. This more complex truth was well understood by the Saudi Arabian oil minister, Sheikh Zaki Yamani, who famously stated that "[the] Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil."1 The story of this more complex truth about resource scarcity and its relationship to the modern environmental movement is well told by Paul Sabin in The Bet.2 The Bet has lessons for today's debate over climate change and should serve as a cautionary tale for activists on either side.The Bet recounts the rivalry between Paul Ehrlich, the biologist who wrote The Population Bomb 3 in 1968, and Julian Simon, an economist who wrote The Ultimate Resource4 in 1981. Ehrlich warned of the dangers of overpopulation and the destruction of the planet while Simon celebrated population growth and the ingenuity that enables humans to adapt to changing circumstances. Ehrlich relied on the simple logic that resources are finite, claiming that increased population would lead to mass starvation. Notwithstanding his doomsday message, he was immensely popular and appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson more than twenty times during the 1970s.5 Tempering that image, Sabin points out that early in his career Ehrlich and his allies called for the United States to refuse to send food to certain famine stricken countries because they had failed to adopt population control policies.6 Further, Ehrlich struggled to completely disassociate his group, Zero Population Growth, from the groups that promoted eugenics.7 Nonetheless, while Ehrlich's popularity soared, Simon liked to joke he would be lucky if five people showed up to hear his ideas about how human beings and their innovative abilities are our ultimate resource.8But Simon persisted, and in 1981 wrote an article in Social Science Quarterly that, referring to Ehrlich, began with the question: "How often does a prophet have to be wrong before we no longer believe that he or she is a true prophet?"9 He then challenged Ehrlich to a bet: Ehrlich could choose any five metals and Simon would bet him that those metals would be less expensive in ten years then they were at that time.10 "Ehrlich took the bait," saying that he would accept Simon's "'astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in.'"11 Ehrlich consulted with two of his scientist friends and chose five: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten.12 They seemed like good choices as each had a critical role and its price had increased significantly during the 1970s.13Ten years later the world's population had increased by 800 million people, and the price of each of the metals had decreased.14 Simon had won the bet.15 Ehrlich sent a check to Simon with no accompanying letter but continued to be dismissive toward Simon.16 Simon, he went on to say, "is like the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and says how great things are going so far as he passes the 10th floor."17 As Sabin explains, Ehrlich had good reason for believing himself the unlucky victim of bad timing. Recessions during the 1980s had depressed commodity prices and when economists "ran simulations for every ten-year period between 1900 and 2008, they found that Ehrlich would have won the bet 63[%] of the time." 18But having said that, Sabin argues that Ehrlich missed a fundamental point regarding "how economic systems could work to manage scarcity, drive investment and innovation, and avert shortages."19 Taking just one metal as an example, there was a "copper fever" in the 1970s as copper prices surged as a consequence of political and labor strife in the primary producing countries at that time-Chile, Zaire, and Zambia. …