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

摘要

Humans are not butterflies. Paul Sabin explores a half-century of environmental policy and environmental-ism through the lens of two outsized personalities-biologist Paul Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon. Tired of the fawning attention given to Ehrlich and his unfulfilled gloom-and-doom predictions, Simon famously challenged him to put his money where his mouth was. In the pages of the Social Science Quarterly in 1980, Simon asked, "How often does a prophet have to be wrong before we no longer believe that he or she is a true prophet?" (qtd. on p. 134), and goaded Ehrlich into a wager on resource scarcity as demonstrated by the trend in raw material prices. They settled on a bet covering $1,000 worth of five metals (a $200 contract for each metal). If the inflation-adjusted price of the metals rose from 1980 to 1990, Simon would pay the difference; if the prices went down, Ehrlich would pay the difference to Simon. In monetary terms, Simon bore almost all the risk-at most he could win $1,000 (if the prices all fell to zero), but his potential losses were unbounded. And he gave Ehrlich a blank check by letting him pick the five commodities. As you've probably heard, Ehrlich lost the bet about as spectacularly as possible. The prices of all five of the commodities fell. Tointly. they fell a remarkable 57 percent.