He challenged doomsayers to take his bet that "any trend pertaining to material human welfare will improve rather than get worse," saying the doomsayers could pick the trends. [Climatologist] Stephen Schneider and I took up his challenge, and offered to bet $1,000 per trend on 15 trends, including global warming, sulphur dioxide emissions, fertile cropland per person, rice and wheat production per capita, fuel-wood availabili- ty, species diversity, per capita fisheries harvests, AIDS deaths, and sperm counts. Simon quite naturally refused to bet, claiming our trends were not what he was thinking of. Amusingly, his editorial supporters at The New Scientist (3 June 1995) said that the bet "is not too fair" because "All of the indicators that Ehrlich and Schneider want to lay their money on will obviously go on getting worse over the next decade." No kidding - we're unfair because when challenged to pick trends that will get worse, we've been so crass as to do so! One should not make the mistake of thinking that this is a scholarly controversy. The brownlash is simply dirty politics with the agenda of promoting looting and polluting for profit. The short-term gains of the few will be paid for by long-term losses for everyone. HERE'S AN OFFER YOU OUGHT TO REFUSE Take my money. Please. I'm as itchy to get a stake down as a horse-player with a lock. But unlike the races -- where, as they say, the only way to make money following the horses is with a shovel -- I really have almost a sure thing. And two dignitaries have said publicly that they are hot to trot. So let's get it on. I'm ready to bet, not just that natural resource prices will be lower in the future than now, but that just about every environmental and economic trend pertaining to human welfare will show improvement in the long run. [Offering to wager is the last recourse of the frustrated. When you are convinced that you have hold of an important idea, and you can't get the other party to listen, offering to bet is all that is left. If they refuse to bet, they must acknowledge that they are less sure than they claim to be.] [But this device is unpleasant. My offer is not for excitement but as a desperate resort. Nor is it for pleasure that I write so crudely, but to attract your attention.] [There is precedent, though, of respected figures finding themselves so frustrated that they offer to bet. Johann Sebastian Bach challenged the greatest French organist of his day to a musical duel to draw attention to his work. What Bach did should not be below the dignity of lesser mortals.] Here is the background for the bet. In 1970 Paul Ehrlich wrote, "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." In an exchange with him in 1980 I offered to take that bet, or more realistically, wager that natural resources would become cheaper rather than more expensive. "This is a public offer to stake $10,000, in separate transactions of $1,000 or $100 each, on my belief that the cost of non-governmentally-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run", and I offered to let the other person specify any future date. Professor Ehrlich and two colleagues said they would "accept Simon's astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in". They chose five metals -- copper, chrome, nickel, tin, and tungsten -- and a ten year period. At settling time in September, 1990, not only the sum of the prices, but also the price of each individual metal, had fallen. John Tierney told the story in The New York Times Magazine. The article was so well written, and the subject interested so many people, that it was reprinted in newspapers in such cities as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Louisville, as well as in Great Britain and Holland, and in smaller papers throughout the U. S. The Reader's Digest excerpted it. It elicited editorial comment like you'd never believe -- for some examples that friends sent, the Traverse City, Michigan and Fresno, California papers reprinted an editorial from the Florence, S. Carolina Morning News. [******Texts... recommend reading JEL, etc. See betnew folder and clip file.] Famous science writer Iasaac Asimov expressed the bewilderment of a person who at least faced up to the intellectual predicament, as Ehrlich et. al. do not. Asimov read about the resources bet and then wrote: Naturally, I was all on the side of the pessimist and judge my surprise when it turned out he had lost the bet; that the prices of the metals had indeed fallen; that grain was cheaper; that oil...was cheaper; and so on. I was thunderstruck. Was it possible, I thought, that something that seemed so obvious to me - that a steadily rising population is deadly - can be wrong? Yes, it could be. I am frequently wrong. Asimov let himself be bewildered. "I don't understand this." And he says about economics in general: "I cannot understand it, and I cannot believe that anyone else understands it, either. People may say they understand it...but I think it is all a fake."<1> Unlike Asimov, the doomsayers refuse to allow themselves to be bewildered by the facts. Instead, they simply reject the facts - and deride anyone who presents the facts. A common reaction -- for example, weekly columnist Jessica Mathews in the Washington Post (who also happens to be a Vice President of the environmentalist World Resources Institute, the sort of dual connection that usually horrifies newspapers) -- was "We knew it all the time." Sure they did. With excellent hindsight Mathews says that "Ehrlich didn't need to be an economist to have seen how long the odds were against winning"; he should have read her organization's "World Resources" report. (Typically, Mathews attempts to marginalize me by referring to my ideas as "extreme". She notes that Ehrlich lost the bet, I won, and she asserts that the truth apparently is somewhere in between these extremes. Because she derided the bet as being on the wrong matters, I offered: "Would you like to bet on any of these matters? If you can propose a measure or measures for worldwide -- which I am willing to interpret to mean everywhere - - I would probably be happy to wager on that one, also." But she prudently did not respond." Mathews and others went on to say: You're ignoring the main issue. Why don't you bet on the environment? She writes, "A smart bettor might wait until the middle of the coming recession and take him up on it. I won't. But not because he's right that the planet's resources are infinite (palpable nonsense) or that environmental trends are nothing to worry about. If he's interested in betting on more meaningful measures than today's prices, though, I'd consider it." And William Conway, General Director of the New York Zoological Society challenged me in the New York Times to "bet on the decline of living habitat or the increase of extinctions". So here is the new offer. To Ms. Mathews with respect to the future of our air and water: I'll bet that that the standard EPA measures of air breatheability and water drinkability in the United States will improve, rather than get worse, over any period in the future she specifies, just as they have been getting cleaner over past decades. (The developing world is a more complicated story, but when a country gets sufficiently rich it will repeat the European and U.S. pattern, it is safe to say.) To Mr. Conway: I'll bet that the number of scientifically- proven species extinctions in the world in the year 2000 is not even one-hundredth as large as the 40,000 as conventionally forecast; any other year will be fine, too. (The highest recorded average is one per year.) And I'll bet that the number of trees growing in the United States will be greater than now rather than less -- pick your year. "Tropical deforestation" is more complex, but we can find a way to bet that the standard dire forecasts for the future will not happen. Details of the bet offer: 1. Five years or more, to ensure that there is time for conditions to change and to reduce the likelihood of statistical blip. 2. Measures of actual welfare, rather than intermediate conditions. That is mortality and morbidity, for example, rather than incidences of particular diseases. (I have taken a bet on AIDS that breaks both this and the previous specifications, but that was simply because I felt that I could not with good grace decline it.) 3. I would prefer to bet on some set of characteristics -- perhaps a collection of countries rather than one country, for example. 4. A list of the measures that I would consider most appro- priate are: Life expectancy, purchasing power, ownership of specific assets, costs of resources, amount of leisure time, amount of schooling, amount of housing space. 5. It is interesting to speculate that my prediction of improvement extends to every single house in the world right now, or to the grounds it stands on plus any subsequent house. [I do not offer to bet on the progress of particular physical conditions such as the ozone layer, because I'm not an atmospheric scientist, and because there are always some physical characteristics moving for a while in directions that worry people. But I will bet on aspects of human welfare connected with these physical changes - for example, the trend in skin-cancer deaths and any other health evils thought to result from increased ozone. The same is true with respect to global warming. I'll even bet that overall life expectancy continues to rise over the next decade or so in countries where AIDS is now most worrisome. ] [It is of course true that life expectancy has been falling in Eastern Europe as of the time of writing. We are certainly capable of doing ourselves in with faulty political decisions, and again and again societies show that we do so. But I consider the odds to be against such bad outcomes. And I'm only offering to bet; I'm not promising a rosier future in all respects as a sure thing.] These offers are open to all comers. And I'm prepared to make similar wagers about the course of just about every other trend in absolute basic human welfare (though not, of course, the progress of this group compared to that one), including future resource prices, of course. As in the past, my winnings will go to supporting basic research. EXPLAINING AWAY THE RESULTS OF THE BET What meaning should one attach to the outcome of a bet? That depends on what the bet is about. A bet about a fact simply draws attention to the correct fact after the bet has been settled, and may help others judge the propensity of the bettors for knowing what they are talking about. But what about a bet on the prediction of events? Referring to the Ehrlich-Simon bet, one writer (Espenshade, 1991, 336) said that "It should not be used as proof of the rectitude of Simon's ideas." Certainly he is right that a bet about a single instance throws little or no light about the entire set of events; judging an aggregate from a tiny sample is the very error which has afflicted the entire history of Malthusian-scarcity predictions. Many people have asked Ehrlich him about the bet, and a few of the answers have reached me. To a college newspaper he said: "The bet doesn't mean anything".<2> On BBC television: "It was an excellent bet. We happened to lose it. You can lose making an excellent bet".<3> (Indeed that is quite correct. But one should then be anxious to repeat the bet.) But on the same program he said, "I debated a long time about whether to take him up on the bet because it was the wrong bet [but compare his remark cited on page 000 about how anxious he and his colleagues were to make the bet, and to make it much larger]. On the other hand, it was very hard to explain the right bet to him and finally we decided that if we took the bet we'd shut him up for at least ten years". - which Ehrlich refuses to do.) To a book interviewer: "We knew if we bet on metals there would be a fair chance we'd lose. But we knew at the very least that if we took him on we could keep him quiet for a decade. But the bet was trivial; we could have bet on the state of the atomosphere or on biodiversity loss..."<4> And "The bet doesn't mean anything. Julian Simon is like the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and says how great thing are going so far as he passes the 10th floor. I still think the price of those metals will go up eventually...I have no doubt that sometime in the next century food will be scarce enough that prices are really going to be high even in the United States". But of course Ehrlich says he has no plans to bet again though <5> Others have attempted to explain the bet away, too. Norman Myers writes: "The Ehrlich group lost the bet, but through unusual circumstances of the 1980s that prompted Simon himself to write...`I have been lucky that this particular period coincided so nicely with my argument'"[<6> Myers's statement is false; I was not "prompted" by "unusual circumstances" to say "I have been lucky". Rather, there always is a certain amount of uncertainty in any wager, and the soundest wager can be lost if one has bad luck; that is all that I meant. In fact, I consider the circumstances in the 1980s not the slightest bit unusual. If Mr. Myers himself believes that the circumstances were unusual, why will he not take me up on my offer to repeat the wager - for any period he picks, for any commodities? During our debate I repeatedly challenged him to wager on this and any other trend of material welfare. But he merely ignored my offer, just as Ehrlich and others have ignored the offer of another go-round - in the same breath as they try to explain away losing the first time. An entire article was devoted to "How Julian Simon Could Win the Bet and Still Be Wrong". The argument is: "Most economists would have bet on Simon from the start...but many of them also know that Ehrlich is right. Quality of life did deteriorate worldwide in the ten year interval."[<7> (Nobody said that the bet was an index of "quality of life". But in any case, quality of life has not deteriorated, as this book shows aplenty.) I suggest that such a bet should be considered as one should consider a television shot of a homeless person on the street, or a wretched immigrant behind a chain-link fence, or a victim of war or tragedy. If the photo is representative, then it is dramatic corroboration which helps communicate a valid picture of a phenomenon. But if the picture is not representative -- as it is so often with television and newspaper coverage of social issues -- then the bet or the picture should be considered perverse. The key point is that whoever provides such a picture, or communicates the result of such a bet, has an obligation to verify whether it is corroborated by the larger factual picture; to do otherwise is to engage in spurious journalism (if the picture is unrepresentative) or lazy writing (if the picture is accurate but unchecked with regard to the whole). SOME OTHER BET OFFERS MADE IN FRUSTRATION Here's how a bet offer can confront bold falsehood. The scare about the urbanization of farmland in the 1970s led to the the Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Lands Study. NALS promptly announced that the rate of urbanization had jumped in the 1960s from the historical level of one million acres a year to an astonishing three million acres yearly. Several of us scholars quickly showed that there was no basis for this frightening scenario except a single obviously flawed survey. And soon the NALS staff fell wrangling, the research director saying that the NALS head, Robert Gray, was ignoring contrary evidence and disseminating the 3 million acre figure for political reasons only. In 1984 the Department of Agriculture turned on its heel and announced that a new survey showed that the NALS assertion was entirely wrong. But no newspaper or magazine carried the retraction, until in 1986 the Atlantic finally exposed the scam. In 1990 in the Washington Journalism Review I related the whole sordid episode, hoping to awaken the media to a general tendency in environmental reporting. In a response, Robert Gray - - who now runs the American Farmland Trust, an organization with a multi-million dollar budget founded on the proposition that farmland is being "lost" at an unprecedented rate -- wrote that my "allegations...are...factually incorrect" and he repeated his discredited claim that "during the late 60s and through the 70s, 3 million acres ...were lost...annually". I then replied: "I will wager $10,000 with him that 1 million acres is a more appropriate figure than the 3 million he asserts". Mr. Gray was not heard from. I regret that I did not think to make the same offer in 1980. Another example: A quarter of a century ago I developed a better way to do most problems in statistics with simulations, without any of the baffling formulae that statisticians make a living on, and that torture every generation of university students. The "resampling" method has now been validated theoretically, and controlled empirical studies have proven its worth in classrooms. But of course the statistics establishment has not embraced this device that breaks their rice bowls. So I have offered to wager $5,000 against any teacher of conventional statistics that students taught resampling will, after half the number of hours of instruction, get more numerical problems correct, and like the subject much better, than when taught by any instructor using the conventional method. No takers yet. Julian L. Simon teaches business administration at the University of Maryland, and is the author most recently of Population Matters: People, Resources, Environment, and Immigration, published by Transaction Press and the Hudson Institute. Espenshade, Thomas, review of The Population Explosion by P. and A. Ehrlich, Population and Development Review, 17, June, 1991, 331-339. page 1/article1 betnew2/March 30, 1995 Politely and in a quiet tone, I wrote letters to the editor of both respected newspapers, accepting those offers. I believed that vaunted journalistic fairness, as well as demonstrated public interest in the subject, would cause publication of my responses to these offers, and to the ridicule heaped on me. But no luck, though there was room for a raft of letters critical of me. In response to additional letters, I wrote again. Again the letters did not appear. Hence this shriller and less polite essay. **ENDNOTES** <1>: "Editorial: The Dismal Science", in a magazine of which Asimov was the editor. I possess only the photocopy of this page. <2>: The Red and The Black. April 9, 1991. <3>: Dodging Doomsday, in the Horizon series, June 1, 1992. <4>: Moffett. <5>: Tierney, p. 81. <6>: Myers and Simon, 1994. <7>: Abernethy, 1991. The author, who teaches in a department of psychiatry, is the editor of the journal in which this article appeared. It purports to be an economic argument, but I cannot follow enough of it to criticize it. page 2/article1 betnew2/March 30, 1995