The Bet

The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth's Future by Paul Sabin, Yale University Press, 2014. 

Summary 

Contrary to the predictions of Paul Ehrlich, the population bomb never exploded. Since the Earth’s natural resources are finite, there is naturally a fear that we will eventually run out of them. As they become more scarce, it would be expected that they would become more expensive. On the other hand, as the technology for locating and extracting natural resources improves over time, there will be a tendency for natural resources to become less expensive. 

Ehrlich and Simon

Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon made a bet regarding how the cost of a set of ten resources, mostly metals, would change over a ten-year span. Ehrlich bet that they would become more expensive. Simon bet that they would become less expensive.

Paul R. Ehrlich wrote the Popuplation Bomb, which was published I 1968. It warned of the dangers of overpopulation. Ehrlich helped found Zero Population Growth. He believed in persuasion not coercion, when it came to birth control. In 1972 the Club of Rome published a report called “The Limits of Growth". In 1977 Julian L. Simon published Economics of Population Growth, which argued that growth was a good thing. In 1981 he published The Ultimate Resource.

The Bet

The cost of chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten would increase / decrease from 1980 to 1990. Julian Simon bet that it would decrease; Paul Ehrlich bet that it would increase. Julian Simon won the bet. The book includes a graph that shows the metal prices go up and down a lot between 1900 and 2010. In many other 10-year spans, the cost went up. So luck played a major role in Simon winning the bet. 

Causes of Lowering of Prices of Commodities

• Technological innovation (for example, oil shale)

• Substitution (for example, aluminum for tin)

• Competition

• New sources of supply

Environmentalists

• Paul Ehrlich

• Garrett Hardin

• Edward O. Wilson

• Barry Commoner

• E. F. Schumacher

• John Holdren

• Naomi Oreskes

• Rachel Carson

Pro-Growth Individuals

• Julian L. Simon

• Aaron Wildavsky

• Edith Efron

• Peter Huber

• Ben Wattenberg

• Bjørn Lomborg

• Herman Kahn