Today is the 25 anniversary of the closure of the bet on human optimism and ingenuity between the late Julian Simon and the doom-sayer Paul Ehrlich. You can read more about the bet in my colleague Richard Morrison’s post at Openmarket – the Competitive Enterprise Institute continues to honor Julian Simon with its eponymous award every year.

Ehrlich never acknowledged Simon’s victory and it has become an article of faith on the environmental left that Simon got lucky – and it is true that some other ten year periods would have seen Simon lose. However, the point of the bet was not about five specific commodity prices. The point of the bet was that mankind is not just a mouth devouring resources, but a brain to find new resources and hands to make more of what we have. Pierre Desrochers of the University of Toronto and Vincent Geloso of the LSE explain this well in their article on the bet today:

[Simon] would ideally have bet on better indicators of material well-being such the relative weight of any commodity in one’s budget or the price of final goods in terms of real wages. For instance, an American worker earning the average wage in 1920 would have required approximately an hour of work each to pay for a pound of bacon, a pound of butter or a dozen oranges. His counterpart in 2015, however, only requires about a fifth of that time for each commodity. By these more sensible indicators, Ehrlich would have been soundly defeated on virtually every commodity over any time period, yet it is doubtful he would have taken Simon’s bait. Ehrlich and other green activists also remained oblivious to the fact that the correlation between standards of living and pollution level is overwhelmingly in the direction of “richer is cleaner.” Suffice it to say that in 1990 the much richer United States had become increasingly wealthier and cleaner over time while centrally planned economies like the Soviet Union had stagnated or even regressed while becoming increasingly polluted. This is because what ultimately matters in terms of “sustainability” is not so much the number of people or their wealth, but the kind of institutions they live in and the technologies they use and keep on developing.


Ehrlich’s influence remains substantial — his thought can be seen clearly in the U.N.’s new sustainable development goals (which development economist Bill Easterley calls “senseless, dreamy, garbled“) – so it us up to those of us who believe in genuine human progress to keep Simon’s memory alive.