The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth's Future

by Paul Sabin

Are we headed for a world of scarce resources and environmental catastrophe, or will innovation and markets yield greater prosperity

In 1980, the iconoclastic economist Julian Simon challenged celebrity biologist Paul Ehrlich to a bet. Their wager on the future prices of five metals captured the public’s imagination as a test of coming prosperity or doom. Ehrlich, author of the landmark book The Population Bomb, predicted that rising populations would cause overconsumption, resource scarcity, and famine—with apocalyptic consequences for humanity. Simon optimistically countered that human welfare would flourish thanks to flexible markets, technological change, and our collective ingenuity. Simon and Ehrlich’s debate reflected a deepening national conflict over the future of the planet. The Bet weaves the two men’s lives and ideas together with the era’s partisan political clashes over the environment and the role of government. In a lively narrative leading from the dawning environmentalism of the 1960s through the pivotal presidential contest between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and on into the 1990s, Paul Sabin shows how the fight between Ehrlich and Simon—between environmental fears and free-market confidence—helped create the gulf separating environmentalists and their critics today. Drawing insights from both sides, Sabin argues for using social values, rather than economic or biological absolutes, to guide society’s crucial choices relating to climate change, the planet’s health, and our own.

Genres: Nonfiction, Economics, History, Science, Environment, Politics, Biography

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Paul Sabin teaches American history at Yale University. He is the author of THE BET: PAUL EHRLICH, JULIAN SIMON AND OUR GAMBLE OVER EARTH'S FUTURE (2013), and CRUDE POLITICS: THE CALIFORNIA OIL MARKET, 1900-1940 (2005). Before joining the Yale faculty, Paul served as founding executive director of the non-profit Environmental Leadership Program. He is a graduate of Yale College and the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Closer to a 3.5.

The Bet is a long-form book about one of my favorite economic bets in history. Paul Ehrlich, doomsday economist and author of The Population Bomb, spent a significant amount of time talking about overpopulation and its impact on resources. Simon, a little-known economist who disagreed, ended up challenging Ehrlich to a bet regarding the price of five metals a decade down the line. This quickly became one of the most famous bets in history.

The book works in that it's a solid history of the men and the era. It provides solid starting points for the beliefs and mindsets of both men, and a good deal of context for the eras themselves. It's an extremely informative take on the economic and political environments of the era, which was a welcome detail. It is also even-handed in many regards - while it's deferential to Simon (and for good reason), it doesn't act as a hagiography and gives Ehrlich a much fairer shake than a more partisan take on the story might.

The book is a miss in some regards as well, though, in that it's really overly padded with a lot of biographical information about both men that took away from the overall narrative. With as much detail thrown in, it becomes less about the bet and more about the personalities, which isn't what I was looking for as a reader. With so much extra, the book ended up being longer than it needed to be.

Overall, a solid, if not unspectacular, read. Definitely worth it for a number of the historical points, in any regard.

[Bradplumer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's my best shot at whittling down modern-day environmentalism to just six sentences:

"People ought to respect certain natural limits if we want to maintain a happy, healthy, and productive society. We can't just pollute the air endlessly or plunder the oceans freely. The good news, though, is that it's totally possible to make our modern way of life sustainable. No need to give us capitalism or economic growth. It's just that the free market alone won't get us there. We'll need regulations and other policy changes."

This might sound banal today. But that whole outlook is actually a delicate compromise between two opposing positions on resource constraints that slugged it out in the 1970s and 1980s. Paul Sabin's The Bet is all about that fight, and it's a worthwhile story to rehash.

One side, epitomized by biologist Paul Ehrlich, believed that humanity was breaking the carrying capacity of the Earth. The way to avoid mass starvation, energy shortages, and other apocalyptic meltdowns was to drastically reduce the world's population and radically constrain capitalism. This idea of "natural limits" was so influential it shaped Jimmy Carter's thinking.

The other side, led by an initially obscure economist named Julian Simon, believed that human ingenuity would always allow us to overcome those natural limits. The more people, the better. If food became scarce we'd figure out how to grow more. If oil prices surged we'd develop alternatives. Trust the markets! Simon's work helped the guiding ethos of the early years of the Reagan administration.

There's a good case to be made that Simon's side prevailed--and not because he won his famous bet with Ehrlich over the future price of commodities like copper and tin (that was more luck and good timing than anything). More to the point: The world's population soared from 3.7 billion in 1970 to 7 billion today and humanity didn't starve to death, as Ehrlich predicted. We adapted to energy constraints. Humans figured stuff out.

But Simon wasn't always right, either. The free market couldn't solve every last problem on its own. The world would have been fried had the world's governments not banded together in the 1980s to ban CFCs and avert the shredding of the ozone layer. And the tragedy of the commons isn't something to shrug at. Ask Newfoundland what happened in the 1990s after the Atlantic cod population collapsed from overfishing.

Even so, environmentalists have clearly altered their thinking and tone since Ehrlich's day--and Simon can claim some credit here. The main green groups nowadays don't tend to argue that capitalism is doomed. They don't imply that humans are a cancer on the verge of killing off the host. Environmentalists can be gloomy--particularly on climate change--but their warnings are often cast in terms of scientific probabilities and talk of "risk management." And market-based solutions like cap-and-trade or catch shares have become a key environmental tool.

So where does that all leave us today? Sadly, Sabin doesn't even try to answer big questions like, "How much should we worry about modern-day environmental concerns, like global warming?" (After all, just because Ehrlich was wrong about doomsday doesn't mean climate scientists are wrong.) There's actually a ton of fascinating research currently being done on whether there are "planetary boundaries" that humans need to respect, but Sabin doesn't even touch on this work.

Even so, The Bet's historical perspective is invaluable. It's good to remember that the modern-day environmental outlook didn't just grow out of a dispassionate reading of the evidence on our relationship with nature. It was shaped roughly over time and, for better or worse, still bears the scars of old fights and predictions gone awry.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid political and intellectual environmental history about Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and the context of the bet they made. It focuses extensively on things like their biographies and presidential rhetoric around energy and conservation, with comparatively little interest in the substantive questions underlying their ideas. It's sometimes a bit boring and I'm not sure it would be of much general interest, but I found it quite useful. It provides a lot of context for things that I'd only heard of in fairly shallow ways otherwise.

The take overall is fairly agnostic, but in that "objective" tone Ehrlich universally comes off worse than Simon. He repeatedly makes the same oversimplistic arguments from broad, poorly parameterized ecological first principles, drawn from sources with dubious values (Malthus, eugenicists), and never updates his ideas to account for new evidence or explain why the ideas his critics offer (supported by that new evidence) don't in fact apply. It's embarassing. Simon, on the other hand, changes his views, develops a startling new perspective that is both evidence-based and humanistic, and it just feels like he's got some insight here that Ehrlich ought to have incorporated. Instead, they just yelled at each other for decades until Simon died, and now we keep yelling their arguments at each other. No progress.

The interesting part throughout for me was that Simon's arguments were slotted into the Republican side, while Ehrlich is allied with some (though far from all) Democrats. It was new for me to see any kind of intellectual validity to Republican positions even in the past, and while this certainly doesn't make me feel any more positively toward them on the whole, after hearing what Ehrlich and Carter were actually saying, and knowing how wrong they were, how poorly they represented the values at the heart of environmentalism, it's easy to sympathize with Reagan's exasperation toward them. On the other hand, the things Republicans argued for didn't really line up with Simon's positions all that well either--rabid anti-immigration, opposed to market-based environmental solutions that would unleash exactly the kind of innovation Simon made such a big deal of, clearly more interested in preserving the interests of their lobbyists than making any principled adherence to free-market environmentalism.

The conclusion, though, is interesting because Sabin finally weighs in. And he comes down against them both! He says they were both too hard-headed and extreme, Simon as utopian as Ehrlich was dystopian (which is fair I suppose), and that they actively impeded progress on pragmatic mixed solutions by drawing people to the poles of this discussion. What stuck out most to me, given the pursuit that drew me to read this book in the first place, is that Sabin never calls for a uniting theoretical framework or mentions any work anyone has done to create one. He just kind of shrugs and says these generic bromides about "figuring out how we want to live on the world, not how many ppl we can support" or looking at real data instead of big narratives. The real problem is never directly stated: how can the axioms of economics and ecology both be true and result in the world we live in? That's a problem that can only be solved by Simon and Ehrlich's successors workign together, not at odds.

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book felt like a New Yorker article, which would be a good thing, except it’s a book. Interesting, but heavy on the historical facts, people, etc. Read like a history text book. Dunno why it didn’t totally click as I love history and Econ. Needed to skim the second half to make it through.

[Riley Haas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting book ostensibly about a bet between a biologist and an economist over the earth's future, but really about the problems of extremism and the folly of prediction.
I just learned about Ehrlich and Simon's best recently, as I was not yet born when it happened and child when it was over. I decided to read about the book more because I had read the bet was a mistake to begin with, rather than for any particular stake in this type of bet. The fact that the bet couldn't actually prove either person right is one of the fascinating things about this story, which is mostly just a story of two smart people being overconfident and arrogant and how those behaviours in experts cause sociopolitical problems.
The book makes an interesting, somewhat compelling case that the positions and attitudes of Ehrlich and Simon and others like them were both wrong and right but that what is most important is how their views became more extreme as they grew older (despite the evidence, especially in Ehrlich's case), and that these extreme positions have helped shape environmental discourse in the Unite States, to the detriment of US government policy. For example, I had not realized how many prominent conservatives think that "Global Warming" is just the same thing as the Malthus thing, i.e. fear-mongering out of stupidity or for political gain. That is an illuminating insight, even if Sabin never establishes a really strong connection between the Malthusian fear-mongering and, say, all climate change skepticism. (I cannot be the only one who thinks that most climate change skeptics in the 21st century are completely unaware of the "population bomb" alarmists, though they may indeed read too much stuff from skeptics who are, in part, basing that skepticism on the earlier behaviour of the "population bomb" alarmists.) Sabin walks a reasonable middle ground between these two extremes and provides a valuable reminder both that predictions are just predictions/projections based on current knowledge (and can easily be wrong) and that, just because some people are alarmists, doesn't mean there isn't a problem.
My biggest issue with the book is Sabin's style, which is extremely dry and a little academic. The book is extremely well-sourced but often reads as a litany of facts, rather than a narrative. Another issue with the readability of it is that most of the analysis is left for the final chapter, meaning that most of the book reads like a light biography of the protagonists mixed in with a history of US environmental policy between Nixon and Bush Jr. So it's a big of a slog, even if the material is interesting.
Still, if you're interested in the environment, or the "debate" over climate change, this is a worthy reminder that things aren't black and white, and that the worst and best projections/predictions are likely the least valuable. We should not use extreme positions as are guide. We should ignore them, if we can. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an important contribution to the intellectual history of the late 20th century. In the bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich, we see the seeds of the battle between the Neo-Malthusians and the Utopians - one side fighting for the power to avoid an inevitable apocalypse with the other unconvincingly arguing that we'll muddle through, that human ingenuity guided by the invisible hand of the market will come up with inconceivable solutions. How much risk will we tolerate, and which authority will we trust with the calculations?

Ultimately, the critical contribution of Sabin is to reframe these debates away from truth towards faith - not questions of science, but questions of values. In doing so, he reminds us that many critical policy debates are as theological as they are scientific - AI risk, climate change, nuclear war - these are all topics of morality as much as they are questions of math and statistics. The social sciences may have math envy, but that doesn't make them math - we are not butterflies or rabbits, existing in an static environment - we are more akin to gods remaking the environment in our own image.

In this framing, Sabin's book is an essential story about the late 1960s and early 1970s, the time period that set the stage for the people and debates we're now having in 2025. Ironically, in an era dominated by a reaction against systems thinkers - Vietnam, famine in India, environmental disasters in Cleveland and Three Mile Island - the neo-Malthusians latched onto computer models and mathematical precision to fight back against the original modelers. And yet...the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house...The Population Bomb accepted the frame that human society was a system that could be modeled, rather than an infinite expanse of ever-increasing knowledge.

How much do we trust the scientific models which split the atom and put a man on the moon? Perhaps more importantly - how much do we believe that they are applicable to re-ordering the world of men...do we believe that the successful implementation of the One Child Policy was a moral good, or a moral evil? This is the irony at the core of the environmental movement - it advocated both "small is beautiful" and "one world government" to impose top-down restrictions on growth. It created both the localism of environmental law and public interest legal theory, as well as the globalism of a total fertility ban.

Science is value-laden; there cannot be truth without faith. Paradigms precede normal science, and it is the very incommensurability of these two paradigms - that of the environmentalist and economist - which rejects the idea of compromise.

As a final point - it is clear that apocalypse has high memetic fitness, and that the fitness of nuance is nearly non-existent. In a globalized information landscape where the line between entertainment and information has blurred, we need to find a way back from the singularity towards a respectful pluralism. And yet at the same time, we need to do so in full acknowledgement of the reality that Quaker culture gave way to Puritan culture in the battle for the soul of America.

[Akseli Koskela · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good overview yet I was waiting for more science and less drama.

[Robert Gerlach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some say "history is the subject that teaches us that we do not learn from history". "The Bet" is a book that shows why it is important to know the history of the environmental movement in order to understand and avoid the mistakes that have led to the current assault on environmental institutions.

Sabin describes quite entertainingly the lives of to academics on the opposite side of the spectrum, and how their well-meaning but ultimately uncompromising and flawed approaches to advocacy have hurt the environmental movement substantially.

It shows why scaremongering and doomsday-scenario painting may result in short-term gains, but ultimately may prove counterproductive for the cause of environmentalism.

Out of scope of this book, but certainly of great interest, would have been a description of more positive approaches to environmentalism, and how they contrast with the approaches takes so far ("sustainability-fatigue").

All in all a great and entertaining book, which should be required reading for every sustainability professional.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

The debate over environmental responsibility replays again & again, seemingly on a 40 year loop.
More later.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found it irritating that Ehrlich (an environmentalist misanthrope) and Simon (a free-market capitalist) were presented as the only two options available. Frankly, there is no space in the future for capitalism because capitalism is what's causing all of our environmental problems, and we will at some point have to choose between it and the biosphere. Simon just isn't interesting -- the idea that human ingenuity and free markets are one and the same is silly, creativity existed long before capitalism did, and will exist long after. He was only elevated to any status because he provided a quasi-intellectual excuse for the Reaganites to plunder natural resources at the expense of future generations.

Ehrlich is more interesting, but would probably today fall under the category of "ecofascist" because he seems to think that it's only coercion from the elites that can whip the world into fixing its population problem, even though the elites are the cause of our current problems. The Limits to Growth did not just talk about population, it talked about economic growth. Economic growth is a core driver of population growth, and is a result of the current economic system. Ehrlich and his ilk came up with neutering the poor before they even considered overthrowing the current economic system -- that, they seemed to think, could be slowly reformed.

This is ass-backwards thinking, and putting the burden for environmental change on the poor is not only putting an ahistoric fix on a historic problem, it's also morally repugnant. It's also strange lumping Ehrlich in with someone like Schumacher, the anarchist economist who wrote Small is Beautiful. The two have conflicting ideologies. Ehrlich is right about a lot of things, but like a lot of STEM guys turned politicos, is clueless about history and politics, and this is what's so dangerous about his misanthropic, elitist wing of the environmental movement.

Sabin tells an interesting story around these two characters, but of the two, it's only Ehrlich that interesting, and it's his disputes with people to his left that would be far more worth recounting.

[NCHS Library]

Publisher's Description: "The Bet uses a legendary wager between the Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and the conservative University of Illinois economist Julian Simon to examine the roots of modern environmentalism and its relationship to broader political conflicts in the nation. Ehrlich, author of the landmark 1968 book The Population Bomb, believed that rising populations would cause overconsumption, scarcity, and disastrous famines. Simon countered that flexible markets, technological change, and human ingenuity would allow societies to adapt to changing circumstances and continue to improve human welfare. In 1980, they made a much-ballyhooed bet about the future prices of five metals that served as a proxy for their arguments about the future. The Bet weaves intellectual biographies of Ehrlich and Simon into the history of late twentieth-century environmental politics and other struggles of the era between liberals and conservatives. Humanity's larger gamble on the future still remains unresolved. By wrestling with the different sides of these arguments, The Bet encourages a more nuanced approach to environmental problems, one that acknowledges the limitations of both ecology and economics in guiding policy, and that instead emphasizes the conflicting values that underlie political choices. The Bet is structured around three bets: first, the $1000 bet that Ehrlich (and two colleagues) made with Simon over the prices of chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten; second, the bet that the United States faced in the 1980 presidential election in choosing between Carter and Reagan; and third, the larger gamble that we as a society continue to make as we make choices"

[Cade · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author makes several good, and to me almost obvious, points that are not heard enough in public debates about environmental policy. Liberal elements falsely invoke the popular cache of science to support their positions even though their conclusions are based on value systems utterly independent of science. Conservatives too often refuse to admit in public that nature has intrinsic value for human appreciation and enjoyment. Both abuse the complexity of natural systems with liberals making unjustifiably confident and specific predictions and conservatives ignoring the potential of unintended consequences.

However, this book had too few insights and too much rote reporting of the two men's biographies. It just went on too long for the material he had. I care about how their ideas shaped public policy. I don't care how they felt or where they lived or who they were when not appearing in public.

[Tim Snyder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Ehrlich, a biologist, envisioned extreme overpopulation, famine, and economic collapse. Meanwhile, Julian Simon, an economist, predicted pretty much the exact opposite. Their ideologies clashed starting in the late 1960s and culminated in a bet between the two in 1980 over the price of select metal prices over the next decade. Ehrlich's side predicted scarcity and higher prices while Simon's predicted abundance and lower prices.

It's a pretty interesting book about the environmental politics of the 1960s forward and the unintended consequences of extreme predictions. If you're interested in environmental history and economics, you'll most likely enjoy this book. It spends a little too much time on the biographies of Ehrlich and Simon though and can drag in parts because of that. You won't really miss much if you skip through those parts of the book.

[Sebastian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a perfectly good book if the subject interests you. Julian Simon crushes Paul Ehrlich in a bet that pits capitalism and innovation against Malthusian doomerism - reflected in the price of metals going down or up respectively over a 5 year period. Ie, the metals get cheaper due to innovation and discovery despite population growth.

I wondered why the Ehrlich meme was so fit. Why did so many people get convinced about a population myth? On the one hand, Paul Ehrlich was extremely entertaining and quickwitted. On the other hand, he cloaked his arguments in a sort of academic authority – Julian Simon is unscientific, Julian Simon is an unqualified charlatan, etc. etc. That made the message simple and powerful but it also made it impossible to reform because you’d end up discrediting the entire learned class.

Only sith speak in absolutes.

[Chris Bernard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reread this and was broadened by the second-time around insight. In the late 60s, my husband and I altered our own life trajectory based on Ehrlich’s population/preservation frugality with dwindling natural resources based on human greed. Sparer living amidst too much waste, too much corrupt money-handling, too little regard for living things, for love and cooperation. In the meantime, here’s Julian Simon, an implacable and equally large personality, representing the far right capitalism, screaming “..resources are endless!”
A 50-year debate, this is, from the bipartisan past with 60s, 70s and on political and environmental issues and their progression through today. So educational, and somehow entertaining as well!

[YHC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy to read through as a book that how Ehrlich and Simon shaped the concept of the environmental future in US.
Today, obviously we admit that the overpopulation has played the biggest role of the shortage of nature resource.
Simon's thought we need to count the natural resource of the whole universe as a whole, the problem is we can barely get out of our planet, let alone survive beyond.
No doubt that we need to leave something to our next generations before it's too late. I don't think the majority of mediocre population could really push the technology like what Simon said.

[CL Chu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Focusing largely on personalities. Why population became - and continue to be - the main focus of scientists preocuppied with 'development/growth' (and their limits/discontents) needs to be further examined in the context of 20th century intellectual histories. And probably some social studies of science approaches would be beneficial too.

[Allan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A history, but not the kind that I'm interested in writing myself. That is, it does not take a question, explain why things were one way at a certain point in the past and then explain why a major change occurred. Rather it is a narrative whose point is to teach environmentalists how to make better arguments.

[Caleb Warren · Rating 4 out of 5]

For anyone looking to understand the public influences on US environmental policy over the last 50 years, this book offers a succinct recap. It also helped me better understand the rationale behind opponents of modern day climate change reforms. (I used to just write them off as idiots)

[Jon Wlasiuk · Rating 3 out of 5]

The political debate about the future of the planet rests upon assumptions inherited from the last quarter of the twentieth century championed by Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. This is a tidy history of that debate and the damage it has wrought on conforming the economy to ecology.

[Andrei Barbu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Explains why both extreme environmentalists and free-market extremists sound crazy, how we got here, and why it's so hard to make any meaningful progress.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine read if you're interested in Environmental History, particularly the conversation around population growth and responses to it that gained national attention in the 60's and 70's.

[Ron Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even-handed treatment of the famous bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. Sabin bemoans the political divide that The Bet represents but, in the end, concedes that Simon was right.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

3+

[Paolo Benvenutto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesante, pero me llama la atención que personas tan ilustradas pierdan la capacidad de ver su posición y la posición de su opositor en perspectiva y altura de miras...

[W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this if:
1. You think climate change will kill us all by 2100
2. You think climate change is not a real issue

This book shows why the middle ground matters.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A most excellent telling of the origins of the ongoing climate debate......five stars only because six were not available.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read! The debate described in the book mirrors the debates we see today.

[Kemp]

Started but couldn’t get interested. A bet, all of us make some, few of us consider it book worth. Why is this one worthy? I don’t know.

DNF

[leo wang! · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a splendid book.
it’s a great way to look at the environmentalist movement through the lens of two quarreling figures.
fun and interesting read. would recommend