Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Betting on the Future

I was intrigued by an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times on Sunday, which turns out to be a brief synthesis of a new book by historian Paul Sabin about a wager between doomsday biologist Paul Ehrlich and conservative economist Julian Simon regarding the world's environmental future. Ehrlich, whose 1968 blockbuster "The Population Bomb," had predicted dire consequences for many parts of the world if population growth and environmental degradation went unimpeded, predicted that the price of five precious metals - chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten - would rise precipitously. Julian Simon predicted that the cost of these metals would stabilize or even decline owing to technological innovations and the inducements of the free market. In 1990, Ehrlich conceded and sent Simon a check for $567.07, which presumably was the difference between a $1000 bundle of the five metals when they first arranged their bet and their actual value in 1990. Simon was right. The price of the metals was considerably lower despite an increase in the world's population of almost a billion people.

Simon was also right that human ingenuity should never be underestimated, especially when it comes to making big bucks from the fluctuations in the price of commodities like these metals as influenced by new technologies and complex but trackable market factors. Simon, in other words, was siding with human cleverness and creativity and found that this faith was not unfounded.

However, as Paul Sabin points out, Paul Ehrlich may have lost the bet in the short term, but his early warnings about overpopulation and the limits of environmental sustainability were far ahead of his time, and his questions about the trade-offs associated with unlimited growth - the barrier reefs that are eroded, the bird populations that are decimated, the public parks that are encroached upon - make one wonder whether such sacrifices for the sake of unchecked economic expansion are worth the price. Just taking into account the unprecedented levels of carbon dioxide that now contaminate the atmosphere and the bizarre and dangerous climate patterns that are increasingly part of our everyday lives, one can't help concluding that Simon's obsession with a short-term gain is exactly the dynamic that has gotten us into so much trouble in the long run. Ehrlich's prediction that India was a lost continent may have been rash, but it was made in the context of environmental policies that showed no respect at all for ecological balance and that now may be leading to the very apocalypse Simon was so quick to malign.

For all of our sakes, let's hope that the truth is somewhere in between what Simon expected and Ehrlich predicted. But the conservative adulation for Simon and his championing of unfettered capitalist markets is not just premature, it is downright dangerous.

1 comment:

  1. Some of Ehrlich's projections were reasonable at the time. One thing we did not properly anticipate was the "green revolution", which boosted agricultural production worldwide, and was just starting to pick up speed in the 1960s. And it is still appropriate today to worry about the future supply of rare materials, including ones Ehrlich didn't know much about --- Tellurium, for example, which is used in solar cells, or Erbium, which is used in optical fibers.

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