The Bet

"This had promise but fell flat for me. It had plot inconsistencies with regards to timeline and events that made up their histories together."

"Full review and highlights at <a href="https://books.max-nova.com/the-bet">https://books.max-nova.com/the-bet</a><br/><br/>"The Bet" gave me a new framework for interpreting science/policy debates: Neo-Malthusians vs. Cornucopians. Once you see it, you can't stop seeing it everywhere you look. Sabin elegantly traces the intellectual lineage of this debate through the lens of the Ehrlich/Simon wager and does an excellent job of showing how their academic arguments influenced specific policymakers.<br/><br/>In one corner, we have Paul Ehrlich (of "The Population Bomb" notoriety) as our resident neo-malthusian. A Stanford population ecologist, he very passionately and very publicly proclaimed that hundreds of millions of people were going to starve to death in the 80's and 90's. As Sabin says, "Ehrlich embraced environmentalism as a secular religion."<br/><br/>In the other, we have the all-but-forgotten Julian Simon. A conservative economist of the Chicago school, he serves as our cornucopian by arguing that markets will allocate scarce resources and stimulate innovation to solve any population pressures.<br/><br/>After sniping at each other in academic papers for years, Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. Ehrlich thought resources were getting scarcer? Great - he should choose any 5 resources (he chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) and in a decade, they'd see if the prices had gone up (reflecting scarcity) or down (reflecting plenty). They formalized the bet in 1980, and by 1990, every single one of the metals had gone down in (inflation-adjusted) price!<br/><br/>Sabin fleshes out the story with lots of historical details and sketches of the personalities involved. His treatment is even-handed and he points out issues with both Ehrlich's and Simon's approach. Sabin humanizes both of the opponents so that we can understand where they are coming from. Indeed, one of the key realizations is that a big part of the difference in perspectives was driven by values rather than by evidence. While Simon "placed human welfare at the center of his moral universe", Ehrlich thought that "humanity could not serve as the measure of all things."<br/><br/>Simon's victory would likely disturb many of today's environmentalists, doubly so because of his affiliation with conservative thinktanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute (originally the Charles Koch Foundation). Sabin explores the roots of Republican anti-environmental sentiment - after all, this was the party of Theodore Roosevelt and the national parks! He does an excellent job of tracing the policy debate and identifying key players.<br/><br/>Many of those players are still on the scene today. Yale professors Dean Speth and William Nordhaus make appearances in the book, as do Anne Gorsuch (head of EPA, mother of now Supreme Court Justice Neil) and John Holdren (Ehrlich BFF and Obama's science advisor). Carl Sagan (ironically, author of "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark") gets dragged a bit for his collaboration with Ehrlich on the ill-advised "nuclear winter" schtick. And everyone's favorite inconvenient politician Al Gore gets absolutely rocked by a frustrated Simon:<blockquote>“After 25 years of the doomsayers being proven entirely wrong, their credibility and influence waxes ever greater.”</blockquote>This was a tough book to swallow, although it crystalized many of my thoughts from other books in my 2017 reading theme on the "Integrity of Western Science". After "Higher Superstition", I was primed to recognize Ehrlich's attempt to turn environmentalism into a "secular religion" and his constant push for revolutionary change as archetypal of postmodern academic pseudo-science. Ehrlich gets explicitly called out in "Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes" for venturing outside his area of expertise (which, remember, was butterflies). Typical of neo-malthusians, he relied on oversimplified models and didn't account for human flexibility or the adaptability of markets. Now the trillion dollar question is... do these lessons apply to climate change as well?"

"<strong>This book sponsored by Benadryl </strong><br/><br/>I'm sorry but I didn't expect the allergy medication to feature so heavily. Everyone was drugging everyone else with Benadryl. <br/><br/>The characters in this book were fun, though everyone paled compared with Grandma Nadine. What a kook."

"It’s one of the few rom coms that actually make me laugh, it’s hilarious and a quick read"