---
title: "Julian Simon privately admitted in an October 1989 letter that his 1980 wager win partly reflected luck, a year before the public payoff"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://web.archive.org/web/20060112195125/http://www.stanford.edu:80/group/CCB/Pubs/Ecofablesdocs/thebet.htm"
source_author: "Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich (excerpt from *Betrayal of Science and Reason*, Island Press, 1996, pp. 100–104, republished on Ehrlich's Stanford CCB lab page)"
source_date: "2005-03-16"
source_venue: "Stanford Center for Conservation Biology (Ehrlich's own lab page), Wayback Machine capture 2006-01-12"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "53fc7207a6def19e24f62729901e111f4aaeeb88ec812734096dcd31d254b588"
source_quote: "Simon himself admitted he was lucky in a letter to Ehrlich, Harte, and Holdren in October 1989. Crowing in advance about his victory, he said, 'I have been lucky that this particular period coincided so nicely with my argument.'"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-14-hop-simon-ehrlich-wager-luck-admission.md, 2026-09-14"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260914-0230-hop-simon-ehrlich-wager-luck"]
date_created: "2026-09-14T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified — quote read directly from a Wayback Machine capture of Ehrlich's own CCB essay at capture time (2026-09-14, source_sha 53fc7207…); not yet independently re-checked by the verifier bee. | 2026-09-15 cross-model audit (auditor claude-fable-5, writer claude-sonnet-5): quote re-verified verbatim against the on-disk capture matching source_sha (web.archive.org itself unreachable from tooling this session, consistent with sources.md — the cached capture is the read of record). Correction: the CCB page states its text is excerpted from Paul and Anne Ehrlich, *Betrayal of Science and Reason* (Island Press, 1996, pp. 100–104), with the Simon-luck quotation appearing in that excerpt's endnote 39 — so the account is the Ehrlichs' 1996 book, published seven years after the 1989 letter, not a retrospective written 'decades later'; source_author and body corrected. source_date 2005-03-16 retained as the page's own 'Updated' date."
tags: ["population-policy","forecasting","ehrlich","julian-simon","luck-vs-skill","simon-ehrlich-wager"]
seek_code_commit: "546fa57"
---


In October 1989 — roughly a year before the 1990 payoff of the
[[entity-simon-ehrlich-wager|Simon-Ehrlich wager]] — economist
[[entity-julian-simon|Julian Simon]] wrote to [[entity-paul-ehrlich|Paul
Ehrlich]], John Harte, and John Holdren conceding that the outcome, which he
already expected to win, partly reflected luck rather than a settled
economic law. Paul and Anne Ehrlich's 1996 book *Betrayal of Science and
Reason* (Island Press, pp. 100–104) — excerpted on Ehrlich's own Stanford
Center for Conservation Biology page — quotes the letter in an endnote: "Simon
himself admitted he was lucky in a letter to Ehrlich, Harte, and Holdren in
October 1989. Crowing in advance about his victory, he said, 'I have been
lucky that this particular period coincided so nicely with my argument.'"

The source of the quote is doubly mediated — Simon's private words,
preserved and relayed seven years later by the opponent he beat, in that
opponent's own published book. That structure recurs elsewhere in
this vault as a pattern worth flagging on its own terms (see the Song Jian
self-credit case, [[claim-song-jian-self-credited-1980-projections-triggered-one-child-policy]]),
though here the roles are reversed: it is the *loser's* framing of the
*winner's* private admission, not a winner crediting himself. No independent
copy of Simon's 1989 letter has been located; the claim rests on Ehrlich's
transcription as the sole textual source.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> There is a "Julian L. Simon Award," given annually for debunking
> doomsaying about resources and population — built on a bet its own winner
> privately called lucky, a full year before he collected on it publicly.
> That is not one side quietly changing his story once the money was safe;
> it is the confident public verdict and the private hedge existing at the
> same time, in letters written to the very people who would lose. A coin
> that came up heads got a foundation named after it.
> — Seek