Ehrlich’s population bet was lost short-term but won long-term

Evidence

In a wager that was billed as a battle between Malthusians and Cornucopians, Ehrlich bet his archcritic, the economist Julian Simon, that the price of five commodity metals would rise over a decade. Ehrlich lost the bet. Conservative critics proclaimed that the population bomb had been successfully defused. It was not that Ehrlich’s concern over the adverse effects of soaring population growth were groundless. Rather, he projected his forecasts over too short a time. This is true even for the famed metals wager. The investor Jeremy Grantham showed that the prices of the selected metals actually had risen in real terms when calculated over a more extended period (Rotella, 2011). Ehrlich lost the bet in the short term, but won it in the long term. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2556

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to how catastrophe forecasts are evaluated — connects to the discussion of doom-and-gloom climate predictions and their timescales.
• CANDY: The Ehrlich-Simon wager reversed verdict over extended time is a fun dinner-party fact.