Jennifer D. Sciubba
In 1980, the economist Julian Simon took to the pages of Social Science Quarterly to place a bet against his intellectual rival, the biologist Paul Ehrlich. The Population Bomb, Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, had argued that the staggering growth of the human species threatened to jeopardize life on Earth. Simon insisted that, contrary to Ehrlich’s predictions, humanity would not self-destruct by overusing the planet’s resources. Instead, Simon believed that humans would innovate their way out of scarcity. Human ingenuity, Simon wrote, was “the ultimate resource.”
Their wager was specifically about the changes in the prices of a suite of commodities over a ten-year period, but it represented much more. The infamous bet was a battle between two larger camps: the catastrophists, who thought that humans were breeding themselves into extinction, and the cornucopians, who believed markets and new technologies would work together to lower prices no matter how big the population became. Ehrlich ultimately lost that bet at a time when global economic conditions favored Simon’s optimistic view of the functioning of markets. Countries also avoided catastrophe as the soaring growth of the world’s population in the twentieth century did not lead to mass famine but to growing prosperity and rising standards of living.
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