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 (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)

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" 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.

Predictions

It's really risky to make future predictions. Still, apocalyptic predictions are sometimes made, especially if it's far enough in the future that there will be no price to pay for being wrong.

Earth Day began back in 1970, 46 years ago. There were some spectacular predictions made around that time:

* George Wald, biologist at Harvard, said "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind"

*Paul Ehrlich said that it was too late to save humanity (in 1970) from massive starvation events killing hundreds of millions of people (The Population Bomb)

*Ehrlich again: "between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, [will] perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

*In January 1970, Life magazine reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution . . "

Advancing to 2016, people are better fed, better housed, breathe cleaner air.

Apocalyptic

 You've probably heard the claim that "The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change!" Politicians don't necessarily limit themselves to being accurate, certainly not any more than other people. 

 Apocalyptic climate predictions have always swirled around Earth Day (started in 1970). Author Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb, 1968) made one of the most famously inaccurate of them all:

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

His claims seemed plausible at the time. He was considered a "qualified scientist," often quoted and interviewed on television.

But that was 51 years ago. 

(cont'd tomorrow)

Not scarcity

(cont'd from last Thursday's post)

Does it make sense that the world's population is better off now with 8 billion people than it was in 1970 with about 4 billion? Not according to Paul Ehrlich's confident prediction. Back then, he said it was already too late to stop hundreds of millions from starving, that humanity was doomed for sure.

But food has been available all this time, and is way more abundant now. New technology improved food production, made communication between people almost effortless, radically reduced the time and effort necessary to take care of human needs, and gave us near-miraculous health care.

Over all, humans gradually raised global standards of living by applying their problem-solving intelligence to new knowledge and discovery. The speed of that process far exceeded the rate of population growth.

In some cases, a person of genius in a society free enough to try his/her ideas had a positive effect on a phenomenal scale.

from Mind Matters

(cont'd tomorrow)

End is not near

Does good news sell? If you were in charge of social media for your company and you had to  get clicks on your website, would you feature good news, or fear and bad news?

Fear and bad news has been driving Paul Ehrlich for decades with a message of inevitable disaster. It started with his book Population Bomb about fifty years ago, when he said there were already way too many people for earth to support. But he was so wrong: the people of earth have more food and resources than ever -- and today global population is about double what it was then.

He's still treated like an expert for some reason. But the average material well-being of people on earth is so much better today. If you're not convinced yet, watch this.

Scarcity?

Last week I posted a comparison of food prices a hundred years ago in America compared to food prices today - not in terms of the dollars they paid then, but in terms of how long an average worker of that time had to work to earn them. Food today costs us much less in time and work than food did then. I wonder if you were surprised.

Since the world has a fixed amount of resources and a rising number of people consuming them, those resources are running out, right? Back in the 1970-80's that was a hot topic. 

Paul Ehrlich published his book, The Population Bomb, in 1970 saying on the first page that hundreds of millions of people were going to starve to death in the '70's because the earth could not support so many people, and that population growth was a cancer. Today the earth supports almost 8 billion people, twice as many as at that time, and food is more (not less) available. Why was he so wrong?

image

(cont'd tomorrow)

Too many?

Many people have the impression that we urgently need to reduce the number of people making their home on this planet. They may argue that it would be best for human beings now living and for those on Earth in the future. Or, they may argue that nature deserves to have Earth to itself with no human population.

Why would declining numbers be better for people? Mostly because they believe that our human population is unsustainably using the planet's resources; that is, consuming too much with the result that there won't be enough for future generations.

Some call it "overshoot." In other words, they foresee coming deforestation, biodiversity loss, soil erosion yielding insufficient food, pollution and reduction of fresh water--all coming because our global population uses natural resources at a faster rate than Earth can keep generating.

A very short summary of this view that there are too many human beings was made by David Attenborough, saying that humans have "overrun the planet." 

Author of The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich, persuaded much of America that we had to quit producing so many people:

from The Stream

Too many? 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Re-post from 2013

Thomas Malthus in 1798 predicted that humans would multiply on the earth until the earth could no longer sustain them.  Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1970 published The Population Bomb which predicted, on the basis of Malthus, a future of massive global starvations.  What did happen was the opposite of that (yesterday's post).

What did they miss, since this does happen among animals? The vole population (a sort of mouse) can multiply to the point of outpacing their food supply.  

But people are "More Than Voles," as Eric Metaxas put it.  Created by their own Creator to create, humans can create their own niche to support themselves.  Homo sapiens are not utterly dependent on the natural environment like animals but rather can create wealth.  

According to the materialist (there is no supernatural) worldview, humans are just animals. According to the Christian worldview, humans bear the likeness of their Creator.  

God gave humans "the intelligence to complete the work of creation . . for their own good and that of their neighbors."

Humans = niche creators

Thomas Malthus in 1798 predicted that humans would multiply on the earth until the earth could no longer sustain them.  Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1970 published The Population Bomb which predicted, on the basis of Malthus, global starvation during the 1970's and 80's.  The book has been quite discredited (check customer reviews).

What did they miss?  Because this does happen among animals, like the vole population (a sort of mouse) which can outpace their food supply.  

As Eric Metaxas puts it, people are "More Than Voles."  Created by their own Creator to create, humans can create their own niche to support themselves.  Homo sapiens are not utterly dependent on the natural environment, but can create wealth.  

According to the materialist (there is no supernatural) worldview, humans are only animals. According to the Christian worldview, humans bear the likeness of their Creator.  God gave humans "the intelligence to complete the work of creation . . for their own good and that of their neighbors."

(cont'd tomorrow)