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

• Author: Michaels, Patrick J.
• Position: Book review

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

Paul Sabin

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013, 304 pp.

Yale historian Paul Sabin's The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth's Future is worth a read because of its detailed tour through the world of environmental doomsaying. Yet, in the end, I was profoundly disappointed, consigning this book to my very large Cassandra File because Sabin endorses that doomsaying as expressed by dreaded global warming.

The Bet is about a very public wager between economist Julian Simon and the serial apocalypse predictor Paul Ehrlich (cosigned with John Holdren, President Obama's science advisor). Ehrlich bet that the price of five key metals would rise between 1981 and 1990, and Simon bet they would decline (in constant dollars). Ehrlich was spectacularly wrong, but nonetheless continued, and continues, to enjoy a substantial public presence despite virtually none of his predictions coming true.

Simon, who died in 1998, was very poorly compensated and couldn't even get the University of Maryland to give him a secretary. He found it increasingly hard to publish in the academic literature, and he was confounded by the durability of the environmental apocalypse meme. In 1995, he wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle: "After 25 years of the doomsayers being proven entirely wrong, their credibility and influence waxes ever greater." Indeed. Ehrlich has been showered with goody-goody prizes around the planet. He's still a staple on the dinosaur media. Being fundamentally wrong has been very, very good to him, and being right bought Simon virtually nothing.

Sabin is far too kind to Ehrlich. One of the few criticisms comes at the end: "Most fundamentally, human history over the past forty years has not conformed to Paul Ehrlich's predictions." Sabin cannot bring himself to say what can be said with more economy of words, namely, "Ehrlich's predictions were wrong."

Further, he comes perilously close to blaming Simon for another end of the world--that is, the mother of "all environmental scares, global warming. Sabin contends that "the most pernicious current reflection of Ehrlich and Simon's clash is the ongoing political impasse over climate change." That's the kind of fatuous academic blather we've grown to expect from the global warming crowd. Blame Julian Simon's bet. Heck, why not trot out the Koch Brothers while you're at it? Blame anyone but the dons of...