Saturday, February 21, 2009

CARPE DIEM: Julian Simon vs. President Obama's Science Man




In 1980 Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and environmental Cassandra who predicted calamitous food shortages by 1990, accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon.
When Ehrlich predicted the imminent exhaustion of many nonrenewable natural resources,
Simon challenged him: Pick a "basket" of any five such commodities, and I will wager that in a decade the price of the basket will decline, indicating decreased scarcity.
Ehrlich picked five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- that he predicted would become more expensive.
Not only did the price of the basket decline, the price of all five declined (see chart above, all prices are in 2000 dollars, data from Global Financial Data).
An expert Ehrlich consulted in picking the five was John Holdren, who today is President Obama's science adviser.

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