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Proponents of what is sometimes labeled “resourceship” observed that a population that engages in trade will deliver greater material abundance per capita than more self-sufficient individuals and communities. (In other words, one hundred people who specialize in what they do best and trade with each other will produce and consume far more than one hundred times more what one individual would on his own.) The more human brains, the greater the likelihood of new beneficial advances. So while the cream of mineral deposits would always be skimmed first, advancing technologies insured that profitable resources would be created out of previously valueless, perhaps even inaccessible deposits. Other things being equal, a smaller population would never achieve the standards of living delivered by a greater number of brains and producers. And in a functioning market economy, a rise in the price of a commodity will always spontaneously motivate economic actors to look for more of it, use it more efficiently and develop substitutes.

Simon was so confident in his beliefs he argued that “people in the future will live longer lives than they do now, with higher incomes and better standards of living, and the costs of natural resources will be lower than at present.” Because his message was falling on deaf ears, however, the economist, who was also a serious poker player with a background in marketing, cooked up in 1980 an offer Ehrlich couldn’t refuse by offering to bet $10,000 over a period of at least one year that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials would not rise in the long run. Ehrlich and his regular collaborators John P. Holdren and John Harte quickly agreed to [theoretically] buy $2,000 each of chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten on September 29, 1980 and to pay Simon the price difference (adjusted for inflation) on September 29, 1990 if the prices had gone down. Simon, on the other hand, would cover the difference if the prices had gone up.