Paul Ehrlich example

 

"Ehrlich’s life is a lesson that brilliant men can become captive to bad ideas that become intellectual fashion and do great harm." 

WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/paul-ehrlich-julian-simon-bet-population-930f3560?mod=hp_opin_pos_5

Paul Ehrlich, the Man Who Lost an Infamous Bet

The Stanford biologist bet against human ingenuity and lost to Julian Simon.

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The Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, who died Friday at age 93, made his most important contribution to the world by losing a bet. It helped educate millions that his ideas about scarcity and human ingenuity were wrong.

Readers of a certain age will recall that Ehrlich was one of the most celebrated public intellectuals of his time. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” made him famous in an era of economic and political turmoil that led to public pessimism.

The book’s opening lines capture his zero-sum Malthusian thinking: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” The idea that people having babies was impoverishing nations became an article of faith on the political left and most of the press. Untold horrors were committed by governments against their own citizens in the name of population control—most notably, China’s one-child policy.

The great economist Julian Simon decided to put Ehrlich’s theories to the test. In 1980 he offered to bet on whether the price of five commodities would go down or up over the next 10 years. Ehrlich chose the five metals—chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten—and took the bet.

It was really a wager over human beings and free markets. If Ehrlich was right, and people were devouring the Earth’s resources, then the price of those resources would go up. If Simon was right, human beings would respond to shortages with ingenuity, and prices would, in the long term, go down. In 1990 Simon won the bet and Ehrlich paid up.

Today the nations such as China that embraced population control most wholeheartedly are now worried about a birth dearth. Ehrlich’s life is a lesson that brilliant men can become captive to bad ideas that become intellectual fashion and do great harm. At least he honored his bet.