Introduction
Ehrlich had made his name two years earlier with a blockbuster jeremiad, The Population Bomb.Read more at location 110
Ehrlich warned in his book, predicting that hundreds of millions of people “are going to starve to death.”Read more at location 111
in Urbana, Illinois, a little-known business administration professor named Julian Simon, also thirty-seven, watched Ehrlich’sRead more at location 121
Carson asked Ehrlich about the relation between population growth and the food supply.Read more at location 122
Ehrlich said it was “already too late to avoid famines that will kill millions.”Read more at location 123
Yet to Julian Simon, the relation between population and food was anything but simple.Read more at location 125
processed fish, soybeans, and algae could “produce enough protein to supply present and future needs, and at low cost.”Read more at location 126
Simon and Ehrlich represented two poles in the bitter contest over the future that helped define the 1970s.Read more at location 131
Simon’s increasing skepticism helped fuel a conservative backlash against federal regulatory expansion.Read more at location 133
Ehrlich commented broadly on nuclear power and endangered species, immigration and race relations. He readily denounced “growthmanic economists and profit-hungry businessmen”Read more at location 136
Meanwhile, Simon for years played the role of frustrated and largely ignored bystander.Read more at location 139
in the late 1960s, Simon too had argued urgently in favor of slowing population growth.Read more at location 141
Rather than sparking the world’s crises, population growth would help resolve them.Read more at location 145
Ehrlich agreed to bet Simon that the cost of chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten would increase in the next decade.Read more at location 150
Ehrlich’s conviction reflected a more general sense after the 1973 Arab oil embargoRead more at location 153
The outcome of the bet would either provide ammunition for Ehrlich’s campaign against population growth and environmental calamity or promote Simon’s optimism aboutRead more at location 156
their bet resonated with the cultural clash occurring in the country as a whole.Read more at location 159
The bet also captured the starkly different paths of Democrat Jimmy Carter and his Republican challenger Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.Read more at location 159
Ehrlich’s widely publicized fears about population growth revived the arguments of the Reverend Thomas Malthus,Read more at location 176
Early critics of Malthus, however, such as the English philosopher William Godwin, anticipated Julian Simon’s critique of Ehrlich, mocking Malthus’s conviction that humanity was doomed to misery.Read more at location 185
Other nineteenth-century critics of Malthus, such as Friedrich Engels, thought that agricultural productivity could be “increased ad infinitum by the application of capital, labour and science.”Read more at location 189
What is the purpose of humans on earth? How should we measure the success of human societies?Read more at location 197
Julian Simon welcomed continued population growth because it meant that more people could live productive and meaningful lives.Read more at location 199
Simon did not speak in the elementary terms of “pain and pleasure.” But he also placed human welfare at the center of his moral universe.Read more at location 201
Humans needed to accept their proper role in a larger balance of nature on earth.Read more at location 204
the bet epitomized the increasingly polarized rhetoric of American politics.Read more at location 208
Underlying differences in social values and attitudes toward societal risk also often were left unacknowledged.Read more at location 212
prominent political debates over climate change, for example, starting in the 1990s slipped into rhetorical ruts established in earlier debates over population growthRead more at location 213
Instead of reading Paul Ehrlich’s clash with Julian Simon as a simple white hat–black hat morality tale, their story can move us beyond stereotyped portrayals of environmentalists and conservatives
IntroductionRead more at location 107
Note: ehrluch: fisso al carson show ad evocare la catastrofe diventando celebrities simon: a casina a mangiarsi le dita problema: la sovrapopolazione ci pirterá a carestie rovinose eh converte nixon che fonda l epa il legame tra cibo e demografia la controidea di simon: benvenuta la crescita di uomini: piú upmini più idee simon il convertito: temeva la bomba demogr la scommessa semplice: 5 materie 10 anni prezzi su o prezzi giù? 1000 dollari il great divide delk ambientalismo anni 70. vince simon e i conservatori prendono coraggio i precursori di eh: malthus quelli di simon: goodwin e engels reaganvs carter il dilemma filisofico: cosa conta nella vita? simob: solo l uomo e la sua felicitá. debito vs bentham eh: la natura. l uomo è solo una parte il dibattito attuale sul riscaldamento. cosa nn riproporre: la contrapposizione frontale. cosa riproporre: la passione il rigore e la chiarezza. imho: anche la scommessa come strumento epistemologico
