In discussion of peak oil the other day, someone mentioned to me the story of four economists who made a bet that the price of a certain mineral or natural resource would spike due to its increasing scarcity. In the end, all of the economists dropped out because new technology always made it possible to find more of the mineral.
When I asked him the name of the study or who the economists were, he didn’t know, but several people said they had heard the story.
Anyone know what this is?
http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn372betsed
A lot of focuses on that panicker Ehrlich. Still, it’s funny in its way.
That looks right. Thank you.
Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb and other environmental warnings, couldn’t pass this offer up. With two colleagues he chose five minerals – chrome, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten – and figured out how much of each of them $200 would buy in 1980. Then he agreed that if their prices, corrected for inflation, were higher in 1990, Simon would pay him the difference. If the prices were lower, he would pay Simon.
By 1990 Ehrlich owed Simon $576.07. The prices of all five metals had gone down.
Who were the 2 colleagues that were also proven wrong?
…after consulting with many colleagues, Paul and Berkeley physicists John Harte and John Holdren accepted Simon’s challenge in late 1980…
That’s right ,John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar. He was a wacko then and remains a wacko today.
From wiki:
“forced sterilization for women after they gave birth to a designated number of children”
Wow. That one part of a sentence by Holden that you pulled from a wiki…blew my mind.
Here is the complete sentence (from here):
“In 1977, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and Holdren co-authored the textbook Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment; they discussed the possible role of a wide variety of solutions to overpopulation, from voluntary family planning to enforced population controls,including forced sterilization for women after they gave birth to a designated number of children, and recommended “the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences” such as access to birth control and abortion.”
Moderator question—
Mangosteen–you seem to have two different things going on here.
You have a “taken out of context” quote from Wikipedia
but you prefaced that with a strange diatribe about Holdren which has nothing to do with the original question in the OP. I’m curious. Did you write that yourself or cut and paste? Did you mean for it to be there? If so, then it’s out of place in a General Questions discussion.
I read about his a long time ago, and I’m curious – how have the prices on those metals performed in the nearly 20 years since the bet ended? Have they continued to decline, as Julian Simon predicted?
From historical mineral statistics: let’s look at copper.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/
Sound analysis would use inflation adjusted data, but the bet was in nominal prices, IIRC.
Ah what the heck, I’ll present both. Here’s a chart of copper prices:
http://wm54.inbox.com/thumbs/20_130b9e_a476a89c_oG.gif.thumb
Nominal prices have been on an upward trajectory. Inflation adjusted prices declined from 1970 to 2003 (though there were some ups and downs) and have shot up since then (blame China, I would guess).
Taking a longer view from 1950:
Here, there doesn’t seem to be a clear trend from 1950 to 1979, then inflation adjusted prices decline until 2003, then shoot up.
http://wm54.inbox.com/thumbs/21_130b9d_bc3291fc_oG.gif.thumb
Those wanting to see samples from that textbook can view the .pdfs on this page, entitled Ehrlich1.pdf and Ehrlich2.pdf. http://www.as.wvu.edu/biology/bio463/Course%20Readings.html There’s not even a whiff of crankery, though the material is unsurprisingly dated. I see that used copies cost $250 at Amazon: yikes!