Simon was equally extreme in his rhetoric. lifestyles were unsustainable, calling developed countries “overdeveloped countries.” Limits to Growth claimed the credibility of computer modeling to justify its predictions of apocalypse. Ehrlich claimed to have science on his side in all of his predictions, including how many people the Earth can feed. Similarly, he does not acknowledge that the discipline of economics has anything of value to contribute to discussions of population or the environment.Įven though I had gone back in recent years to read Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968) and the Club of Rome’s intellectually aligned book Limits to Growth (1972), The Bet was a stark reminder to me of how apocalyptic a big part of the environmental movement has been. But to this day he still does not concede that his predictions of Mathusian horrors have been off the mark. Ehrlich begrudgingly made good on the bet. Even as the world population grew from 4.5 to 5.3 billion in the 1980s, the five minerals that were included in the bet-chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten-collectively dropped in price by almost half. “It seemed a small price to pay to silence Julian Simon for ten years,” in the words of Sabin. Nonetheless, Ehrlich rose to Simon’s bait. In public, Ehrlich didn’t even acknowledge Simon by name. He went so far as to claim that population growth should “thrill rather than frighten us.”Īt the time of the bet, Simon was a relatively unknown scholar who loved using the eminent Ehrlich as a foil. A disciple of conservative University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, Simon believed the doomsayers’ models gave little or no credit to the power of efficient markets and innovative minds for developing substitutes for scarce resources and managing out of crises. Simon, who passed away in 1998, was a population optimist. He argued in books, articles, lectures, and popular television programs that a worldwide population explosion threatened humanity with “the most colossal catastrophe in history” and would result in hundreds of millions of deaths from starvation and dire shortages not just of food but all types of raw materials. Ehrlich and Simon saw the price of metals as a proxy for whether the world was hurtling toward apocalyptic scarcity (Ehrlich’s position) or was on the verge of creating greater abundance (Simon’s).Įhrlich was the country’s, and perhaps the world’s, most prominent environmental Cassandra. So what was the bet? University of Illinois economist Julian Simon challenged Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was and wager up to $1,000 on whether the prices of five different metals would rise or fall over the next decade.
The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future provides surprising insights for anyone involved in addressing the world’s “wicked problems.” Most of all, it gave me new perspective on why so many big challenges get bogged down in political battles rather than being focused on problem-solving. This bet is the subject of Yale history professor Paul Sabin’s new book. Right when Paul and I were pulling all-nighters to get ready for the release of the MS-DOS operating system for the brand new IBM-PC, two rival professors with radically divergent perspectives were sealing a bet that the Chronicle of Higher Education called “the scholarly wager of the decade.” It was the year Paul Allen and I incorporated Microsoft in our home state of Washington.Īs it turns out, 1981 also had big implications for my current work in health, development, and the environment. The year 1981 was a big one in my business life.