NEO MALTHUSIAN PROFESSIONAL

Similarly, his presumption that metals prices would rise in the 1980s was based on his bias towards assuming that higher prices reflected resource depletion rather than cyclical price swings. For example, in describing the way continuous population growth would ‘fill up’ the solar system, he uses a growth rate of 2%, which occurred during only one decade of the past century. This bias is important, because it not only informs us as to why his work is often lauded, but the way his results became so flawed.

NEO MALTHUSIAN PROFESSIONAL

He is widely lauded, but most of his awards are from ‘fellow-travelers’ that is, those who share his views, rather than issue-neutral professional organizations. Of course, Ehrlich is very witty and charming, which no doubt contributes to his fame, but he has also been embraced primarily by those who approve of his message of scarcity. The ultimate insult is that, outside of the field of resource economics, Simon is not well known, while Paul Ehrlich is widely heralded as a visionary, sort of an inverse Cassandra, whose every warning is heeded, but whose vision invariability proves faulty.

Simon won easily, which continues to irritate the neo-Malthusians, who attempt various contortions to explain why lower prices are really higher prices, or that Ehrlich should have won, or that social costs were ignored, and so forth. Stories about the debate over resources between optimists (Cornucopians) and pessimists (neo-Malthusians) often start with the famous wager between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon over whether or not certain commodity prices would rise or fall over the long term.

Neo malthusian