"The Bet" reviewed

Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, had plenty of company in predicting certain societal collapse due to the over-population of humankind.  He enjoyed an elevated notoriety during the environmental hysteria of the 1970's, appearing on the Johnny Carson tv show "at least twenty times."

He called for drastic population control by world governments, even suggesting that some nations (i.e., India) were not worth receiving U.S. foreign aid because their overpopulation had rendered them hopeless.

He wagered that five specific commodities would increase in price over ten years because of demand by runaway overpopulation.  He lost the bet.  

"The Bet" is filled chockablock with Mr. Ehrlich's outbursts—calling those who disagree with him "idiots," "fools," "morons," "clowns" and worse. His righteous zeal is matched by both his viciousness in disagreement and his utter imperviousness to contrary evidence."

This review was written by the author of What to Expect When No One's Expecting, the subject of my posts on demography in the "Less people" series May 2013.

The bet (3)

Ehrlich said in 1969, "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."  His view was that overpopulation would cause war, plague, or disastrous resource scarcity.

"Complaining that Ehrlich made wild statements without ever facing the "consequences of being wrong," Simon said, "I'll put my money where my mouth is" and asked Ehrlich to do the same.  Rather than betting on the future existence of England, Simon challenged Ehrlich to bet on raw material prices" to test his theory that the world was running out of  resources due to overpopulation.

Ehrlich chose the raw materials to be tracked.  If they went up in price over the next ten years, Simon would pay the difference to Ehrlich.  If the minerals went down in price, Ehrlich would pay Simon.

In October of 1990, Julian Simon received a list of metal prices in the mail from Paul Ehrlich plus a check in the amount of $576.07.

The bet (2)

If bad news "sells", and it does, then Ehrlich's news was a great example.  "End of society as we know it" is pretty bad news and it got the public's attention.

Individuals started asking if the alarmism was really justified.  Economist William Nordhaus said that the doom scenario "allowed for no technological progress, no new discovery of resources," no human inventiveness - in short, the model did not represent how human society really works.  He suggested that human beings have more options than butterflies. 

Julian Simon was another scholar who became convinced that people can think and imagine and adjust to changing conditions.  It became a conviction with him that, far from being a plague or a curse on the earth,  people are the ultimate resource to each other and to the planet; they're not just consumer units.

Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich were headed to a face-off.

The bet (1)

Making predictions is risky - if you predict something that can actually be measured so that it's obvious if it came true or not.  The Bet tells the story of this kind of prediction and who won that bet.

amazon.com

Paul Ehrlich, a biologist who primarily studied butterflies, became alarmed at world population growth and began to predict apocalyptic disaster (The Population Bomb, 1970).  His mental model seems to have been the insect world in which populations expand until their environment can't sustain life, resulting in massive famine.

Momentum carried environmentalists like Ehrlich to fame, tv shows, hundreds of personal appearances, even influence on White House policy making.  He told audiences to expect famine, race wars, nuclear winter.  He recommended government control of human reproduction and coercive regulations because "collapse was inevitable."

Resistance to the doom scenario formed - backlash was coming.

(Based on The Bet by Paul Sabin)

Price paid

Chuck Colson died a couple of years ago, but he had quite an influence in his years after the White House, after Watergate, and after prison.

Here is a message for Memorial Day by Chuck Colson from 2010.

Aquaponics update

Last June I highlighted the growth of aquaponics, a very cool way to create value/wealth out of existing resources while providing something so good for people:  fresh greens, veggies, and fish.

In St. Paul MN, an old beer factory has been repurposed for this.  Their goal is to put their produce in stores on the day that it is picked - a great goal, especially in Minnesota in January.

“This is an experiment. As far as we know, nobody has made money at this. But over time, I believe that we can prove that this model works. This has to work. We’re going to will it to work.” 

I so hope they can make their business profitable.

Maybe extinction

St. George's Church (where the priest of our last two posts ministers) in Baghdad still has busloads of people coming on Sunday (a work day in Iraq) about 5 p.m. - at their peril.  These are brave people.

Some see a future extinction of Christianity in the Middle East.  It would not be the first time, as vast numbers of regional Christians were wiped out in the middle ages.

 "In 2000 Christians made up 26 percent of the population in the Middle East. Today they form less than 10 percent of the region’s population. 

"Iraq had an estimated 1.2 million Christians before 2003, and by White’s and others’ estimates has possibly as few as 200,000 Christians now.

“It’s only a matter of time, 30 years, and no Christians will remain in the whole region,” Avak Asadourian, the archbishop of the Armenian Church in Iraq, told me [the author of this article]."

Wacky & courageous

Our wacky priest from yesterday's post ministers at St. George's Church in one of the most difficult places in the world, Baghdad, Iraq.  God called him there and he is courageous but "acquainted with grief".  

His church has lost over 1200 members to violence, some targeted as Christians but many just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  In his interview below with Eric Metaxas he mentions that one day he baptized thirteen believers and two days later eleven of them were killed.  A blast wall  "concrete about 6 inches thick and 12 feet high runs the perimeter of the church property."

"In 2005 five members of the church leadership disappeared—all presumed killed returning by car across the desert from a pastors’ meeting in Amman, Jordan. Bombings and rocket launches by terrorists multiplied—in 2005, 2007, and notably in 2009, when a bomb detonated near the church killed 100, injured hundreds more, and damaged every building on the property."

"Wacky charismatic"

Canon Andrew White is a British priest in Baghdad, Iraq.  He loves Iraq, his parishioners, and his Lord (not in that order), and calls himself a "wacky charismatic evangelical believing Anglican."   He was given the 2014 William Wilberforce Award a couple of weeks ago.

He's nothing like what you might expect.  He has MS, his father was Indian and Baptist, his mother English and Pentecostal, and he became Anglican.

Eric Metaxas interviews him here, and the interview is extraordinary.  It's funny.  It's odd.  If you watch it patiently, though, you will rejoice in the utterly unique way God may call individuals to their special life vocation.

iPad team leader

Following Christ infuses meaning into all of life - your daily work too.  He does not leave you while you see to your job responsibilities.

Joshua Banko is a guy who seems to have no sacred-secular divide regarding his work.  At a conference last winter, "Joshua talked about how God is the first and the Greatest Creator. How He has endowed mankind—made in His image—with the capacity to create and innovate. This powerful gift enables us to imagine and craft entirely new things, whether music, poetry, furniture, houses, cars, or iPads.

Photo:  apple.com

"God is glorified as we use our creativity to fashion things that reflect His beauty and are beneficial to others in obedience to Christ’s command to love our neighbor. . .

"What makes Joshua’s story even more compelling is that his former workplace, Apple Computers, Inc., is in the heart of the highly secularized Silicon Valley, where he worked for many years leading the team that developed the iPad."

Energy storage

There's another story linked to Tesla Motors, Inc., which goes off in a different but maybe significant direction.

Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, plans to build a "gigafactory" in California specifically to produce the lithium ion batteries for his electric cars.  The factory will double global production of those batteries and will cost $4-5 billion to build.  

Ever the big thinker, Musk sees greater significance in the gigafactory:  maybe it could revolutionize solar power with the battery's energy storage capacity.

"Advanced batteries could help power buildings by storing power from wind farms and solar-power plants. . . There's essentially quasi-infinite demand for energy storage, if the energy density and the price are good enough."

Innovative, entrepreneurial thinking solves problems.  Maybe he'll make wind & solar viable.

Unbelief

Philosopher Gary Habermas (Monday's post) makes another very good point at the end of his presentation on the resurrection of Christ.

Someone asked, if the evidence for the reliability of the Bible is so good then why do some people still not believe?

The answer is:  they may see that the evidence is good but do not want to believe.   As our pastor says, God created people to be free moral agents.  They are not coerced to choose faith.

We want to let people know the evidence that faith in God is rational, but they may still choose unbelief - even after they do know.  They have that freedom.

China/Euro RR

Oh, and in addition to the China-America railroad, China is thinking about a freight train to Europe.  It might be an homage to the ancient silk road, a trade route used long ago.

Washington Post reports that China has been laying tens of thousands of miles of RR track in recent years.  Between building whole new cities and laying down that much train track, and planning these huge new train projects, I have to wonder just where they are getting the money

One more railroad story - China will build a train in partnership with the African country of Kenya.

China/U.S. RR

The last big idea from China reported on this blog was to move massive numbers, hundreds of millions, of people out of the country and into brand new cities built for this purpose.  

The new big idea is to build a railroad from China to America.  Wait, there's a big ocean between them . . but the idea is to go from China north through Russia, under the Bering Strait and through Canada.

Velocity will be ~300 miles per hour, with over 8,000 miles of track including the longest undersea tunnel the world has seen.

As one commenter said, what could go wrong?

Resurrection (cont'd)

Mainstream university scholars and theologians during the last forty years have moved from thinking that Jesus's empty tomb is a "joke" to believing that the empty tomb is "highly reliable."

Dr. Gary Habermas, distinguished philosopher, assembled data sufficient to show that the Bible's claim is at least as reliable as any other historical data we have for the ancient world.  Actually, by mainstream historians' standards, it's more reliable.  See this video talk to hear about the data which passed inspection at Michigan State University and has been widely published.

"Legendary" atheist Antony Flew, a friend of Dr. Habermas, debated the resurrection of Christ with him.  In a move that got the attention of the world, influenced by a number of factors, Dr. Flew changed his mind about the existence of God in his last years, not to Christianity but to a sort of deism.

Bodily resurrection

For many, many years, scholars at the university level in America and Europe have claimed that the Bible is an unreliable source full of fairy-tale stories, especially regarding Jesus Christ's resurrection.

Gary Habermas got his doctorate at Michigan State University in history/philosophy of religion back in the 1970's.  During his grad studies there, he says, "if you talked about the empty tomb [Jesus Christ's tomb] there'd be a lot of snickering, and nobody but evangelicals who published in that area would accept it."

But that is not the case anymore, amazingly. 

"Today the majority of NT scholars, theologians, historians, and philosophers who publish in the area believe in the empty tomb. Today bodily resurrection is the predominant view in the academy!"

This requires some explanation, which is tomorrow's post.

Prudent nuclear con't

So if a prudent choice weighs all the important factors, those factors should be identified.  Here's an article by the Head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT in which he identifies and weighs them.

One of the factors that should be considered is economic growth.  U.S. carbon emissions have been going down, but more than half of that is because there has been a reduction in business activity (recession).

The author mentions nuclear power can be built up quickly compared to solar and wind:

"The ability to scale up low-carbon energy sources rapidly is absolutely crucial if we’re to have any chance of meeting the carbon reduction targets. There’s a popular view that we can build out wind and solar very quickly. But, historically, it’s nuclear energy that has scaled up the fastest."

Prudent nuclear

Prudent - you could say it means using practicality and carefulness, or really thinking things through in order to make a good decision.  After many years of opposition to nuclear power, some environmentalists have started saying that it would be prudent to reconsider its advantages.

After the Fukushima earthquake that damaged a nuclear plant, "Germany succumbed to panic . .  and began to phase out all nuclear power in favor of huge investments in renewable sources like wind and sun."

Disappointing results of German policy have included higher carbon emissions instead of lower emissions and sky-high energy costs for the German people (see post of 09.12.13).

The strongly environmentalist NY Times advises that "policy makers not be spooked into shutting down a vital source of clean energy in a warming world."

STEM denial

Conventional wisdom says that the U.S. is falling behind in educating for the science and engineering careers.  But there always seems to be a different point of view.

A Harvard senior research associate (good credentials) goes against the conventional wisdom in this case.  He's written a book about it from the viewpoint of a jobs expert, Falling Behind?  Boom, Bust and the Global Race for Scientific Talent.  He claims that America has no shortage of scientists and engineers.

It's gotten harder to discern whether any kind of conventional wisdom is true.  The question is which expert to listen to.

STEM coalition

STEM Coalition (science - technology - engineering - math) is a lobbying group representing STEM education to Washington D.C. policy makers, supported by industry and science teachers.  They have tons of information on their website such as:

• STEM jobs will grow more than 50% faster than non-STEM jobs from 2008-2018
• among undergrad majors, the ten highest-earning ones are all STEM
• elementary kids get less science than they did 20 years ago

A student pursuing this type of career has a future full of potential.

STEM

Science - Technology - Engineering - Math (STEM) is the segment of American education that offers the most potential in terms of jobs.  What that actually means is that there is a lot of demand for STEM-trained graduates and this demand is not being met.

A conference has been held three years running to highlight and stimulate STEM ed.

American Petroleum Institute president Jack Gerard explained why the booming petroleum industry is so interested in STEM education:  "[B]y 2030 there will be up to 1.3 million new job opportunities in the oil, natural gas and petrochemical industries"

From a global viewpoint, he said "[T]his nation has slipped relative to other developed nations when it comes to producing college graduates with degrees in science and engineering . . the United States ranks 27th in developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering."

# Chinese Christians

By 2030, Purdue  sociologist Fenggang Yang says there could be 247 million Christians in China.  That would be more than the U.S., Mexico, or Brazil - in fact, the biggest number in one country in the world.

photo imb.org

Officials in Beijing are not happy with that prediction and are trying to refute it.  Under Mao Zedong, religion was banned but Christian house churches flourished.   For an atheist state, there's a whole lot of believers there.

But CNN reported just yesterday that a church was bulldozed by government order in the city of Sanjiang: 

 "Christian rights group China Aid says the faithful are worried that the church demolition could be a sign that the government is tightening its grip over the spread of Christianity in China."

Their share

Someone did an informal survey of people on the street, asking how much of the whole pool of income taxes are paid by the rich.  Answers ranged from "no idea," to 20%, to 40%.  But almost no one seems to know.  It's just not in the nightly news sound bites.

But the Congressional Budget Office has answered that question (based on IRS and Census Bureau numbers), as CNBC reported last December:

"[W]hen it comes to individual income taxes, the top 40 percent of wage earners in America pay 106 percent of the taxes.

"The bottom 40 percent...pay negative 9 percent. You read that right. One group is paying more than 100 percent of individual income taxes, the other is paying less than zero."  That means that they get more from the government than they pay in.

Now you know.