Episode 496 – The Most Important Bet You’ve Never Heard Of

Have you heard of the bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. You know, the bet about whether commodity prices would rise or fall in the 1980s? If you’re like most of the population, you haven’t. That’s because this wasn’t some mere wager about economics, this was a contest between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Spoiler: the forces of good won. And that’s why we’re not taught about this bet in the public indoctrination system. Let’s fix that. Today on The Corbett Report, James fills in the missing pieces about the most important bet you’ve never heard of and what it tells us about the value of human life.

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TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:

JAMES CORBETT: It was a bet between a sick, twisted, malevolent entomologist masquerading as a demographic expert who called babies a disaster and was wrong about literally everything he ever predicted and a pro-human, life-affirming economist who switched from team death to team life when he realized that the ultimate resource—that is, humanity’s capacity for ingenuity and adaptation—was something to be celebrated, not something to be decried, as our would-be overlords bid us do.

It was a bet, in other words, between good and evil.

Paul Ehrlich bet against humanity.

Julian Simon bet on humanity.

Now, here’s the awkward part for the psychopaths and twisted individuals In establishment media and academic circles who seek to curry favor with the would-be social engineers by being so against humanity: Julian Simon won the bet.

And that’s precisely why you’ve never heard about it.

Let’s fix that. Today on The Corbett Report, we’re going to do a deep dive on The Most Important Bet You’ve Never Heard Of.

Corbett Report Theme

PAUL EHRLICH: The first thing that should happen is that the president ought to say from now, here on out, no intelligent, patriotic American family ought to have more than two children, preferably one, if you’re starting a family now. Not any law, but just say this is what responsible people do. He ought to make the FCC see to it that large families are always treated in a negative light on television wherever they appear.

 

There ought to be a tremendous amount of television time devoted to spot commercials—the sort we’ve had against smoking. But ones, say, in the middle of, say, Beverly Hillbillies, you get a scene which shows Los Angeles in the smog and it says: “This city has a fatal disease. It’s called overpopulation.” pffft. So long!

 

Now that sort of campaign, you could have a sample census which would see if that was having a desired effect. If that didn’t, you could move to giving bonuses to women for not having babies. That almost certainly would do the job.

 

If that didn’t have the effect, then you could move to changing the tax structure so that people who had the money and had the children paid for the children. In other words, you would increase taxes on people with children rather than decrease them, since when they have the children, they require more services.

 

If that doesn’t work, then you’ll have the government legislating the size of the family. And people say, “Oh, that’s impossible! Government can never intrude and tell you how many children to have.” Well, I’ve got news. You know, it intruded a long time ago and told you how many wives you can have.

 

And there’s not the slightest question that if we don’t get the population under control with voluntary means then in the not-too-distant future, the government will simply tell you how many children you can have and throw you in jail if you have too many.

 

SOURCE: Dr Paul Ehrlich Tape 2 (10m18s – 11m39s)

CORBETT: Welcome back, friends. Welcome back to another edition of The Corbett Report. I’m your host, James Corbett of corbettreport.com, coming to you, as always, from the sunny climes of Western Japan here in late March of 2026, with episode 496 of The Corbett Report podcast: “The Most Important Bet You’ve Never Heard Of.”

Now, as I am sure that my well-informed listeners and viewers are well aware, that was a snippet of an interview conducted with Dr. Paul Ehrlich by WOI-TV of Ames, Iowa in April of 1970, aka that period of time—that strange and interesting period—where this otherwise obscure entomologist (aka bug scientist) was rocketing to worldwide fame on the back of the success of his 1968 fear-mongering, hype-filled book of doomsaying called The Population Bomb and his subsequent appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and other media outlets.

Yes, in that strange time—late 1960s, early 1970s—Paul Ehrlich became the government-approved, establishment-media-sanctioned academic superstar who was allowed to pronounce on the fate of humanity, however wrong he was in those pronouncements.

As I say, I’m sure that my well-informed audience is aware of Paul Ehrlich and his infamous career of predicting things that did not come to pass time and time and time and time again throughout the years. But, if not, you can get caught up to speed not only with his recent death and our recent pronouncements on that in the recent edition of New World Next Week, “Ehrlich Contributes to the Depopulation Agenda” with James Evan Pilato of MediaMonarchy.com, but of course you can also consult Episode 339 of the Corbett Report podcast on “Meet Paul Ehrlich, Pseudoscience Charlatan.”

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Ehrlich was many things, but cautious and understated he was not. The Population Bomb opens with the lines: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

And it only got worse from there.

EHRLICH: As far as petroleum goes, you all know that where the action is there we’re running out rapidly. Some estimates are it’ll all be gone by the year 2000 and conflict over that is getting to be rather serious.

 

SOURCE: Dr Paul Ehrlich in the Armory

 

EHRLICH: You just gotta remember this: There’s no way out of the arithmetic. There will never be 7 billion people in the year 2000.

 

SOURCE: Dr Paul Ehrlich Tape 2

 

EHRLICH: Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come. And by “the end” I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.

 

SOURCE: Population Bomb: The Dire Prediction That Fell Flat

Incredibly, these predictions of doomsday are no mere aberrations in the career of an otherwise careful and understated researcher. In fact, they barely scratch the surface of the catalogue of Ehrlich’s ridiculous—and ridiculously wrong—Chicken Little pronouncements.

Speaking at the Institute of Biology in London in 1969, Ehrlich opined that “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Ehrlich told Mademoiselle magazine in 1970. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

And what of the decade after that? Writing about the “Great Die-Off” in the pages of The Progressive in April 1970, Ehrlich warned that 4 billion people would starve to death in the 1980s, including 65 million Americans.

Most remarkable of all, decades of being spectacularly wrong have not stopped Ehrlich from continuing to spread his particularly distasteful brand of doomporn. He was back at it just this past March, assuring readers of The Guardian that overpopulation means that the collapse of civilization itself “is a near certainty in the next few decades.”

If only Paul Ehrlich was an unsuccessful charlatan, barking his end-of-the-world predictions like a madman on a street corner, it may be possible to dismiss him as a harmless crank. But rather than being shunned as a charlatan, Ehrlich has been embraced by the “respectable” scientific community.

He has been awarded The Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the World Ecology Award from the University of Missouri, the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, as well as prizes and awards from the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund, the United Nations and a slew of other organizations. He was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2012. He continues to deliver lectures around the world and is still sought after for comment on population and ecology issues by mainstream media outlets, and he currently holds the position of Bing Professor of Population Studies of the Department of Biology at Stanford University.

But none of this—not the consistently wrong predictions, not the fearmongering, not the accolades and career success—is as concerning as Ehrlich’s ultimate “solution” for the “problem” of overpopulation that he claims to detail.

ADRIANA ZAJA: Hi. My question is for Paul Ehrlich. Do you have any regrets about urging developed countries to use their political power to coerce vulnerable countries into drastic population control programs, having heard of the atrocities in India and China?

 

EHRLICH: Yes, definitely. If I were writing the – if Anne and I were writing The Population Bomb again today, we’d write it differently. Sometimes you make mistakes. I think that was a mistake. I don’t think the – the recent thing that the are you going to have a question later on the Chinese policy?

 

TONY JONES: No, please, you can go on. I’m not trying to censor what you say here.

 

EHRLICH: No, no, no. That’s all right. I think the main problem with the Chinese stopping, I think, their one child family program is the moral hazard one, that is the Chinese it is not going to increase their family size very much. We know now that in the past they probably would have gotten to the same place if they had not had the relatively coercive program. It is still much debated. But some of the things we did not recommend. We said these are the sorts of things that have been suggested or could be done. A good example is we said in one of our publications that it would be one of the things that might be good if you could do it safely and biologically safely would be to add something to the water supply – excuse my laryngitis – add something to the water supply that would make you have to take an antidote before you can have a baby and everybody say, “That’s just terrible. That is ghastly.” Ghastly? It would get rid of the whole abortion problem. It would get rid of the whole unwanted child problem, make people make rational decisions. It is certainly one of the things that every government must pay great attention to is the size and composition of its population. It’s probably the number one thing that should be in government policy. It at least discussed in Australia. In the United States, you can’t even dare discuss it.

 

SOURCE: GST, Gonski, Population and Diversity

Protestations aside, forced sterilization programs were indeed something that Ehrlich discussed frequently and in great detail in his early work on the population issue—that is, before the public fully realized the horrors of his ostensible “solution” to the population “crisis.”

In 1969 The New York Times reported how Ehrlich had told the United States Commission for UNESCO that “the Government might have to put sterility drugs in reservoirs and in food shipped to foreign countries to limit human multiplication.”

A 1972 article in the Boca Raton News noting this proposal decried Ehrlich as “worse than Hitler,” and pointed out how he opposed efforts to lift the Chinese out of poverty. It also quoted him as suggesting that some form of world governance was going to be necessary to institute “international policy planning” to “save the globe.”

But most damning of all is Ecoscience, a 1977 textbook co-authored by Paul Ehrlich, his wife, Anne, and John P. Holdren, who would go on to become Obama’s “science czar.” In this book they not only double down on the idea of adding sterilants to the water supply (noting that “No such sterilant exists today” and lamenting that it would have to clear a number of technical hurdles in order to be “acceptable”), but they actually go so far as argue the constitutionality of population control and even forced abortions, concluding that such a practice “could be sustained under the existing Constitution.”

In this book they also greatly elaborate on the type of world governmental body that would be required to enact a truly global population control program. Calling it a “Planetary Regime,” which they describe as “sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment,” they argue that it could “control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist,” including all international trade and all food on the international market.

“The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

SOURCE: Episode 339 – Meet Paul Ehrlich, Pseudoscience Charlatan

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CORBETT: As I say, I’m sure that my well-informed listeners and viewers already know at least a little bit about Paul Ehrlich and his incredible track record of getting everything he ever pronounced completely, 100% demonstrably wrong, and yet being lauded in the establishment media as some sort of scientific hero for doing so. But if you aren’t aware of that story, then yes, please, absolutely, you should check out Episode 339 of The Corbett Report on “Meet Paul Ehrlich, Pseudoscience Charlatan,” because I go into that story in great depth and also introduce another character who is the other side of today’s eponymous bet. Namely, Julian Simon, a professor of economics and business administration at the University of Illinois in the 1960s, 70s, 80s—at the exact same time as Paul Ehrlich was operating—who, like Ehrlich, became very interested in the question of population and natural resources, and who, like Ehrlich, started from that Malthusian worldview that there are too many people and we must find a way to reduce that number, but [who] ended up coming to a very different conclusion.

JULIAN SIMON: I came here to Washington to enlist the aid of the State Department’s Agency for International Development (AID), in an experiment to pay people in India to have fewer children because I—as so many other people then, it was almost everybody then, and it’s still most people now—thought that fewer people would be a good thing and that population growth was one of the great threats to human kind along with war.

 

And as I was waiting for this appointment, I leaned over the balcony—it was a spring day—and I saw a sign pointing to the Iwo Jima memorial. And I remembered reading about the Jewish Chaplin giving a eulogy at Iwo Jima and saying “I wonder how many Mozarts and Einsteins and Leonardo DaVincis we are burying here today.” It moved me when I read it. It moved me when I think about it now.

 

And then I got to thinking, what am I doing in this business trying to have fewer human beings on the face of the earth, which may mean fewer Einsteins, fewer Leonardos and so on?

 

So that moment was a big shock to me, yes indeed. It happened about the same time when I first came across this evidence suggesting that more human beings, more rapid population growth did not mean poor economic development. So the two things went hand in hand.

 

SOURCE: PRC Forum: Julian Simon (S1031) – Full Video

CORBETT: Now, hopefully my audience is aware of Julian Simon and his work, if only because I have had cause to mention it a number of times here on the Corbett Report. Not only, for example, in the aforementioned Episode 339 of this podcast, but also in my important but oft-neglected Questions For Corbett on “Are There Limits to Growth?” So if you are interested—if you do not remember that episode or if you didn’t see it at the time—please consult the transcript for today’s episode at corbettreport.com/thebet for a link directly to that episode.

But long story short: yes, Julian Simon had a very—in fact, precisely—contradictory view of human population growth as compared to Paul Ehrlich and the Ehrlichs of the world generally.

But if you don’t know about Julian Simon or his ideas, well, you’re not to be blamed for that. I suppose it isn’t hard to see why Ehrlich became a media superstar and Simon was shunted off into obscurity. And there are a couple of reasons for that.

First and most easily understood is that Paul Ehrlich’s idea, his fundamental argument for “population growth bad” is so simple that a five-year-old can understand it. “I want candy. That boy ate candy. Now there’s no candy! Waaaaah!” is a very simple argument. But it is also very simplistic.

Julian Simon’s counter to that, however, is not at all intuitive, but is actually demonstrably correct and much more insightful. Namely, the observation that as growing population puts greater demand on various resources, the human ingenuity that is used to devise solutions to that problem of growing demand—whether that be better methods for extracting or refining or using materials or finding alternative materials, etc.—actually leaves humanity better off than it was before that problem arose.

As I say, that is not at all intuitive, but it is not only insightful, it is demonstrably correct. Any resource that you can think of is orders of magnitude cheaper for us to procure today than it was for our ancestors a century or two centuries or a millennia ago.

That’s, again, not something that most people understand right away. It has to be explained to them. And undoubtedly, there are still those who need explanation about that, which is why you should see “Are There Limits to Growth?”

But the other and perhaps even more obvious answer to why Ehrlich became the superstar who won all the accolades and awards and was the scientist (the “expert”) that we all had to listen to, whereas Simon is a footnote in the history of economics, is because Ehrlich was the mouthpiece for the psychopathic, malevolent, anti-human social engineers who want to engineer their hatred of humanity into us so that we begin to desire our own extinction. That is why Ehrlich became the media darling.

And, I guess, again, there are many things to say about this, but one thing that needs to be clarified is that me calling Ehrlich wrong about everything, and Simon was the one who had it right, is not just a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of fact. And that revolves around the bet that this podcast is about.

So, what was that bet? How did it arise? And what was the wager?

The celebrity environmentalist and the little-known skeptic collided directly at the end of the 1970s, ending the decade locked in a bet that would leave their legacies forever intertwined. In 1980, Simon challenged Ehrlich in Social Science Quarterly to a contest that directly tested their competing visions of the future, one apocalyptic and fearful of human excess, the other optimistic and bullish about human progress.

 

Ehrlich agreed to bet Simon that the costs of chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten would increase in the next decade. It was a simple thousand-dollar wager: five industrial metals, ten years, prices up or down. At the same time, the bet stood for much more. Ehrlich thought rising metal prices would prove that population growth caused resource scarcity, bolstering his call for government-led population control and for limits on resource consumption. Ehrlich’s conviction reflected a more general sense after the 1973 Arab oil embargo that the world risked running out of vital resources and faced hard limits to growth. Simon argued that markets and new technologies would drive prices down, proving that society did not face resource constraints and that human welfare was on a path of steady improvement. The outcome of the bet would either provide ammunition for Ehrlich’s campaign against population growth and environmental calamity or promote Simon’s optimism about human resourcefulness through new technologies and market forces.

CORBETT: That was a short extract from The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth s Future by Paul Sabin, which is one of the few, if not the only, full-length, manuscript-level study of the bet between Simon and Ehrlich. And I bring it to your attention because it is one of the very, very few mainstream—and at least known—studies of what actually happened between Simon and Ehrlich. But that is not an unreserved recommendation and there are some quibbles that one might have with this book and its fundamental bias, so on that note, I’ll send you to Pierre Desrochers of masterresource.org and his recent re-review of that book, “A Re-Look at ‘The Bet’ (Simon, Ehrlich, and Paul Sabin).” Definitely worth checking out.

Anyway, this is one of the very, very few times that the bet has been covered in detail. But as DeRocher mentions, probably still the standard for this bet and coverage of it was set of all places in The New York Times Magazine in December of 1990 by John Tierney, who wrote “Betting on the Planet.” And the reason that this managed to get any coverage whatsoever in the establishment press—and then and only then only in The New York Times Magazine—was because John Tierney was a standard establishment media repeater who, like all of the people in his class reporting for the Epstein class and the paymasters of The New York Times Magazine, had the same worldview, the same malevolent, Malthusian, anti-human worldview as all of his colleagues.

And [he] was, in 1985, preparing a report for some mainstream publication or other—Rolling Stone or Newsweek or Atlantic Monthly or any of the other periodicals he was reporting for at the time—on population growth in Kenya. And he reached out to an economist for a quote about population growth, expecting the standard quote that everyone would expect. The economist lecturing, “oh, there are too many people and we’re going to have to do something to reduce the population.” Instead, he got Julian Simon on the other end of the line, who surprised him by saying, “isn’t it a wonderful thing that so many people can be alive in that country today?” And that struck John Tierney like a lightning bolt. And from that point on, he very much changed his tune and began reporting against the interests of the Epstein class on things like the bet.

And so he was the only reporter to give any coverage of the bet and what happened with it there in December 1990, as the bet finally concluded. So his way of framing this in this article was:

Simon offered to let anyone pick any natural resource — grain, oil, coal, timber, metals — and any future date. If the resource really were to become scarcer as the world’s population grew, then its price should rise. Simon wanted to bet that the price would instead decline by the appointed date. Ehrlich derisively announced that he would “accept Simon’s astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in.” He then formed a consortium with John Harte and John P. Holdren [that’s a name that should ring a bell to my regular audience], colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley specializing in energy and resource questions.

 

In October 1980 the Ehrlich group bet $1,000 on five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — in quantities that each cost $200 in the current market. A futures contract was drawn up obligating Simon to sell Ehrlich, Harte and Holdren these same quantities of the metals 10 years later, but at 1980 prices. If the 1990 combined prices turned out to be higher than $1,000, Simon would pay them the difference in cash. If prices fell, they would pay him. The contract was signed, and Ehrlich and Simon went on attacking each other throughout the 1980s.

And so just on one economic note about what this bet was and how it was structured, please note that Simon was really putting himself on the line for absolutely any price rise to any level. So, if prices rose to the point where it was a million dollars to buy those five metals, well, he’d have to pay the $999,000 difference to Ehrlich. But on the other side, Ehrlich could only be on the hook for $1,000. So if somehow the resources dropped to $0 by 1990, he would have to pay $1,000. So, Simon was unlimited liability and Ehrlich had $1,000 liability.

So, it was a very, very fair and safe bet that Ehrlich—how could he lose? Because he knows that, I mean, hell, millions of people are—tens of millions! hundreds of millions of people!—are going to starve to death by 1990, let alone the price of commodities. “Oh, yeah, you’re going to try to buy commodities in 1990? Let me tell you, that’s not going to work!”

Well, what actually happened? So after a lengthy and very voluminous detailed study here, we get to the punchline.

The bet was settled this fall without ceremony. Ehrlich did not even bother to write a letter. He simply mailed Simon a sheet of calculations about metal prices — along with a check for $576.07. Simon wrote back a thank-you note, adding that he would be willing to raise the wager to as much as $20,000, pinned to any other resources and to any other year in the future. [“This fall,” of course, indicating 1990 when this article was written.]

 

Each of the five metals chosen by Ehrlich’s group, when adjusted for inflation since 1980, had declined in price. The drop was so sharp, in fact, that Simon would have come out slightly ahead overall even without the inflation adjustment called for in the bet. Prices fell for the same Cornucopian reasons they had fallen in previous decades — entrepreneurship and continuing technological improvements. Prospectors found new lodes, such as the nickel mines around the world that ended a Canadian company’s near monopoly of the market. Thanks to computers, new machines and new chemical processes, there were more efficient ways to extract and refine the ores for chrome and the other metals.

 

For many uses, the metals were replaced by cheaper materials, notably plastics, which became less expensive as the price of oil declined (even during this year’s crisis in the Persian Gulf, the real cost of oil remained lower than in 1980). Telephone calls went through satellites and fiber-optic lines instead of copper wires. Ceramics replaced tungsten in cutting tools. Cans were made of aluminum instead of tin, and Vogt’s fears about America going to war over tin remained unrealized. The most newsworthy event in the 1980’s concerning that metal was the collapse of the international tin cartel, which gave up trying to set prices in 1985 when the market became inundated with excess supplies.

 

Is there a lesson here for the future?

 

“Absolutely not,” said Ehrlich in an interview. Nevertheless, he has no plans to take up Simon’s new offer: “The bet doesn’t mean anything. Julian Simon is like the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and says how great things are going so far as he passes the 10th floor. I still think the price of those metals will go up eventually, but that’s a minor point. The resource that worries me the most is the declining capacity of our planet to buffer itself against human impacts. Look at the new problems that have come up: the ozone hole, acid rain, global warming. It’s true that we’ve kept up food production — I underestimated how badly we’d keep on depleting our topsoil and ground water — but 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. If we get climate change and let the ecological systems keep running downhill, we could have a gigantic population crash.”

Simon was not surprised to hear about Ehrlich’s reaction. “Paul Ehrlich has never been able to learn from past experience,” he said, then launched into the Cornucopian line on the greenhouse crisis — how, even in the unlikely event that doomsayers are right about global warming, humanity will find some way to avert climate change or adapt, and everyone will emerge the better for it. But Simon did not get far into his argument before another cheery thought occurred to him. He stopped and smiled.

 

“So Ehrlich is talking about a population crash,” he said. “That sounds like an even better way to make money. I’ll give him heavy odds on that one.”

All right. So there you have it. This is the actual result of this infamous decade-long bet. And there is no doubt Simon was the winner. And Ehrlich did not even have the courtesy to so much as supply a note along with the check. He just mailed a check and had done with it and never engaged Simon again because he knew he would be made a fool of again.

If you’re so sure of your convictions, I don’t know: $20,000, any resource that you pick over any period of time, Paul Ehrlich, put your money where your mouth is! “No, that doesn’t mean anything.”

All right, so what does this bet really mean? What does it really prove? Does it prove anything at all? Or is it just economic hocus pocus?

Well, there are arguments to be made that this is certainly not a definitive death blow to the Malthusians because they still exist (although they are one fewer in rank as of today in March of 2026.) But anyway, yes, they still exist.

They’re still around. They’re still making their arguments. How so, when they lost the bet?

Well, there are a number of arguments that could be made, but it is important to note that there are things that really did happen in the 1980s that really did prove the point that Simon was making, and that was the underlying basis of the bet itself.

For example, one can drill down on, say, tin. What did happen in the tin markets in the 1980s, and what does that show us?

The “everyday market forces” that Simon, Robert Solow, and other economists had cited in response to The Limits to Growth—technological innovation and substitution, price-driven competition, and new sources of supply—also helped lower commodity prices. Each mineral had a slightly different story. Tin was used in the late 1970s and 1980s largely to coat the interiors of steel containers, as well as for soldering electronic components. International tin prices depended heavily on agreements that tin-producing countries had made to limit production and sustain higher prices. During the late 1970s, tin prices rose sharply. Many observers anticipated shortages. Malaysian producers sought to corner the tin market to force prices even higher in 1981 and 1982. New high-quality tin deposits discovered in the Brazilian Amazon, however, undermined this market-cornering effort. By the end of the 1980s, Brazil, a previously marginal producer, produced roughly one quarter of the world’s tin supply. At the higher prices of the late 1970s, demand for tin also started to fall. Manufacturers substituted aluminum and plastic for tin in packaging. Trying in vain to stabilize prices, the International Tin Agreement held a quarter of the world’s annual tin production off the market. The International Tin Council soon ran out of money, however, and the agreement collapsed. Tin prices went into “free fall,” dropping more than 50 percent from $5.50 per pound in October 1985 to $2.50 per pound in March 1986. Overall, between 1980 and 1990, the gyrations of the tin market supported the arguments of Simon and the economists. New sources of supply, product substitution, and, above all, the breaking of the tin cartel had a far greater impact than population growth on tin prices, ultimately driving them down almost 75 percent.

CORBETT: So the price of tin in the 1980s exactly reflects Simon’s overall argument that, in fact, not only did it not go up because, “oh my God, we’re running out of tin!” but in fact, the price fell dramatically because other methods were found, other resources were found for various production needs for tin. At the same time that the market cartel trying to keep prices up through artificially limiting the supply fell apart because, “oh my God, we discovered tin over here and now a producer that was completely marginal in the world economy is now a major producer of tin, so we can’t keep the price down like we used to!”

Hmm, I wonder if that applies to other resources on the planet today, like, oh, I don’t know, oil? Yes, it does. And that is exactly the point.

Yes, cartels can function through various means of duplicity and government intervention to try to keep prices artificially up. And certainly that does happen. But the point is that, yes, as the prices rise, human ingenuity will lead to ways to make that irrelevant.

And again, this is not an intuitive point for people to understand. So I try to frame it in a way that maybe people can grasp it. I call it: “Oh my God! We’re running out of whale blubber!” argument,

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PIERRE DESROCHERS: So I don’t know if you’ll show this image but there is obviously a finite amount of petroleum on earth. We don’t know how much, but we first begin drilling for the most easily available resources and then we expand over time with new technologies. But the mistake that people like Ehrlich make is to think that, “Well of course we skim the best deposits first, and as a result the price of extracting the resource will increase over time.” Whereas Simon and people of his mindset will point out, “Well, no, look at the historical data.” The price is not only not going up, it’s often going down, and that’s because on the one hand you’ve got the type of deposits that you have access to, on the other you’ve got the new technologies to access those deposits. And what human history teaches us—even in the world of non-renewable resources—is that the human brain or capacity to come up with new ideas always more than make up for the fact that we’re tapping into increasingly less interesting deposits.

 

And so with new technologies you can actually extract petroleum which might seem more difficult to reach than previous deposits. You can access it more easily and extract it more profitably or at least at a lower cost than before. And so you must always look at the kind of physical stuff that is around you but you must never forget the capacity of the human brain to develop technologies to tap into those resources ever more efficiently, which is why Simon referred to the human brain as “the ultimate resource.”

 

Ultimately what is around us is not what matters. You know, there was coal for long before human beings came along, natural gas, iron ore, but this physical stuff only became a resource through the development of human technologies that allowed our ancestors to turn this otherwise worthless stuff into things that are valuable, and to do it increasingly efficiently over time. And when in the context of a market economy, Simon and others will tell you you’ve got a few things happening. You’ve got a feedback mechanism which is the price system, which tells you that when the price of a resource temporarily goes up—you know, there might be a war, there might be a shortage, there might be a new demand for a particular resource—well, this tells people to look for more of the stuff, to use it ever more efficiently, and to develop substitute.

 

And through the combination of these three forces triggered by the price mechanism, humanity has been able to expand its resource base. And after a century—after almost two centuries of industrialization, we’ve never not only run out of theoretically depletable resources, we’ve got more resources than ever before.

 

CORBETT: I like to think of the Ehrlichs of the 19th century screaming from the rooftops “Oh no! We’re running out of whale blubber! How will we heat our homes? How will we have light? Oh no! We’re all going to hell!” and the Simons of the 19th century pointing out, “Well, you know that sticky stuff that keeps bubbling up out of the ground? That might be important in the future.”

**[CUT TO]**

…Of course, the point is that our lack of imagination can be a severe impediment to our ability to understand how the world is unfolding, and that’s the point that I think Simon is pointing out.

 

And it’s a non-intuitive point it’s not immediately understandable in the way that someone like an Ehrlich getting up and saying, “Look, we’re running out of this, therefore we’re doomed!” is immediately understandable and immediately appeals to people.

 

But I think it’s important to get to the underlying philosophy of Ehrlich, which as I think you mentioned goes back to Thomas Malthus.

 

DESROCHERS: —Or even before that. It’s just that in the English-speaking world, Malthus is the best known, but the first modern Malthusian was actually an Italian Jesuit, so the current pope is a Jesuit, so the Apple didn’t fall too far from the tree for that.

 

But yes, the the point is that you know the problem with Malthus—and the name of the previous fellow was [Giovanni] Botero—but the point is that they they view the world and they view resources as a finite pie.

 

And so, you know, how do you deal with a finite pie? Well, the less people you have, the bigger the share for each individual, right? Or at least that’s their thinking.

 

The problem—and, of course, someone like Simon will view the resources rather like a garden, you know? It’s not only that you can plant more stuff but you can expand your garden over time and grow ever more things.

 

SOURCE: Interview 1107 – Pierre Desrochers Explains the Bet of the Century

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CORBETT: That was Pierre Desrocher of masterresource.org. I hope people are familiar with him because I interviewed him over a decade ago about the Simon-Ehrlich bet. But also, hopefully you know of his work and his writings, which you can find, again, linked in the transcript for today’s episode at corbettreport.com/thebet.

But I hope that you are starting to understand the bigger picture, the real point that is being made here.

There is much more to discuss about these points and the objections that people might have economically to the points that are being raised, for example, talking about fluctuations in markets not being relevant over, say, a 10-year period, et cetera.

Yes, of course. And that’s a point that Julian Simon himself made. For example, if you watch the full video—we watched a short clip of Julian Simon earlier in today’s episode‚ if you go to the transcript at corbettreport.com/thebet and watch the full video, you will see that he makes that precise point. People concentrating on a two-year economic trend or a five-year price trend or a 10-year trend are missing the point. No, this is about the intergenerational centuries long span where it is demonstrable that any key resource that you look at today is orders of magnitude cheaper for us than it was for our forebears, hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago. And that is the point.

And I hope people can understand the deeper point that is being made here. It is not an economic point. This is not about the price of metals. It’s not about monetary prices. It’s about what that indicates about the availability of various resources in a growing population, in a world of a demonstrably growing human population. And yet things are easier to get than they were before.

“How can that possibly be? We are on a finite fixed pie, and if you take a slice of pie, that’s one less slice for everyone else, and we’re going to run out.”

But that is not the case, and that is so hard to understand. I recognize that that is not an intuitive point, but it is a demonstrable, very, very important insight, and one that flies directly in the face of the favorite worldview of the master manipulators of humanity, the social engineers who make Paul Ehrlich a star for telling you that babies are a disaster. That humans are a cancer on this earth. That we need to limit the human population. That we need presidents coming in and telling the FCC that they must show programming—programming—which tells you that “Big families are bad and only stupid people have big families. We don’t want that. We want fewer children.”

Well, guess what, guys? Mission accomplished. Birth rates [are] absolutely plummeting across the entire planet! Demographic winter is upon us. The human population is shrinking!

And I know that many people, even in my own audience, are cheering it on: “Yay! Wonderful! We need fewer people. I have decided that I don’t like all these people running around living their lives on my planet, taking my share of the pie. Therefore, I have decided it’s a good thing that the human population is declining.”

Not only is that demonstrably wrong for all of the reasons we said today, it’s demonstrably wrong for other reasons.

For example, I’ve talked about the recent book, After the Spike, a few times in recent months, and I would, again, commend that to your attention, in which the authors make the very important point that there is absolutely no precedent in all of human history for a sustained decline, [a] plummeting birth rate going below replacement rate and then returning to some replacement rates so that we can achieve some optimal balance in the human population.

I see people—even someone in my own comment section quite recently—opining that he feels that the right number of people on the earth is 500 million. “Why do we need any more than that?” he asks. And no doubt those types of people cheer on the plummeting birth rates, the declining human population, thinking that we’re going to just magically level out at whatever they have decided. 1 billion, 2 billion, 500 million people, however many people they think there should be. We’ll just magically materialize a sudden return to replacement birth rate and everything will be fine after that.

No, After the Spike makes the point that once you plummet through a certain minimum population for civilizational capacity, bye-bye civilization! And we end up going back to hunter-gatherer times and nobody’s fixing that with some magical, “oh, we’ll just level out and have today’s exact standards of human population but at, you know, one-tenth of the level today!”

500 million. I wonder why people are so interested in that number. It couldn’t possibly be because that’s what the Georgia Guidestones is predictably programmed into them. The Epstein class, literally card-carrying eugenicists behind the Georgia Guidestones. Oh, you don’t know that story? Well, I’ve talked about that in the past, so I’ll put that link in the transcript as well so that you can go and find out who was behind the Georgia Guidestones and why they might be interested in getting you to desire their agenda of human depopulation.

That is what this is about. And that is the sick, twisted, malevolent, psychopathic, human-hating mentality that has been drilled into so much of the population that even the population that prides themselves on, I’m not manipulated, I see through the propaganda, have adopted the Ehrlich, Epstein-class view of humanity. “Babies are a disaster. We need fewer people on this planet!”

Meanwhile, the people who have been naysaying that doomsaying and being on Team Humanity, Team Life, have been consistently denigrated to the extent that they’ve received any coverage whatsoever.

Well, you have two choices. Choose death or choose life. I choose life.

So, on that note, I think I’m going to leave the final words today to Julian Simon. Thank you for enjoying and investing your time in this exploration today.

As I say, all of the complete hyperlinked transcript with links to absolutely everything that I’ve talked about today is at corbettreport.com/thebet, which is also the place for corporate report members to go log in and leave your comments on today’s episode. I’m looking forward to reading them.

On that note. I think I’ll leave this today, but I am James Corbett of corbettreport.com, looking forward to talking to you again. in the near future.

SIMON: I think the attribute that distresses me most—aside from the usual ugly things of people who are bullies or exploiters—but among ordinary good people the attribute that causes me most trouble is lack of imagination and the inability to imagine the good things that can be created by other people.

 

This feeds into people’s fear about population growth, about their fear that we are going to be running out of copper and of oil. They can’t imagine—so many people simply are unable to conceive—how other people can respond to problems with new ideas, with imagination of the solutions which will leave us better off than if the problems had never arisen.

 

SOURCE: PRC Forum: Julian Simon (S1031) – Full Video