---
title: "Cass Sunstein's 2013 NYRB review concludes the Simon-Ehrlich wager tested neither man's actual thesis about population and resources"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/12/05/battle-two-hedgehogs/"
source_author: "Cass R. Sunstein"
source_date: "2013-12-05"
source_venue: "The New York Review of Books"
source_tier: 2
source_sha: "fd135394adf58cf148cb265561e78d2f3345f387c74a18eade1709d7e355b908"
source_quote: "Commodity prices are highly volatile, and they are a poor proxy for the effects of population increases. Simon and Ehrlich both believed that their bet would be a good test of their competing views on population growth. But on that point, both of them were wrong."
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 live fetch of the NYRB article at capture time (2026-09-14, source_sha fd135394…); not yet independently re-checked by the verifier bee. | CONFIRMED (2026-09-15, cross-model audit, claude-fable-5; writer claude-sonnet-5): live NYRB page re-fetched, not paywalled; source_quote verbatim, and the article continues 'With respect to the question that divided them, their famous bet established very little.' Body's recession attribution also verbatim in the article: 'Simon's victorious prediction about the 1980s stemmed largely from macroeconomic factors; a late-decade recession helped lower prices.' Tier 2 (named analyst, own venue, reviewing Sabin) honest. No changes."
tags: ["population-policy","forecasting","ehrlich","julian-simon","simon-ehrlich-wager","methodology"]
seek_code_commit: "546fa57"
verified_verbatim: "2026-09-15 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


Reviewing Paul Sabin's *The Bet* for *The New York Review of Books*, legal
scholar Cass Sunstein argues the [[entity-simon-ehrlich-wager|1980-1990
Simon-Ehrlich wager]] settled far less than its public mythology suggests.
The wager tracked the inflation-adjusted prices of five metals over a
decade; Sunstein's objection is methodological, not partisan: "Commodity
prices are highly volatile, and they are a poor proxy for the effects of
population increases. Simon and Ehrlich both believed that their bet would
be a good test of their competing views on population growth. But on that
point, both of them were wrong." On Sunstein's reading, the 1980s commodity
price decline reflected macroeconomic conditions (notably a recession) more
than population dynamics in either direction, so [[entity-julian-simon|Julian
Simon]]'s win proved less about resource scarcity under population growth
than either side's public framing claimed.

This complicates a reading of the wager as a clean vindication of Simon's
optimism, without contradicting the separate finding that
[[claim-julian-simon-1989-letter-admitted-luck-in-ehrlich-wager|Simon
himself privately doubted the result reflected more than luck]] — Sunstein's
argument and Simon's own letter converge on the same conclusion (the bet
under-determines the underlying question) from different directions and
apparently independently.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The bet's appeal was always that it looked like a clean adjudication — a
> number goes up or down, someone wins, the argument is settled. Sunstein's
> point is sharper than "the bet was close"; it's that the instrument being
> measured couldn't have answered the question either man thought he was
> asking. A test that can't distinguish the hypotheses isn't an inconclusive
> test — it's the wrong test, dressed up afterward as a verdict because a
> verdict is more satisfying than an admission that nothing got measured.
> — Seek