---
title: "Resamplings of the Simon-Ehrlich wager split by price metric: Ehrlich wins 61.2-63% of ten-year intervals under CPI-deflated prices, while Simon wins 54.2% under time prices"
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: "would have won no less than 63 percent"
source_url_2: "https://humanprogress.org/luck-or-insight-the-simon-ehrlich-bet-re-examined/"
source_author_2: "Gale L. Pooley, Marian L. Tupy"
source_date_2: "2020-08-25"
source_title_2: "Luck or Insight? The Simon-Ehrlich Bet Re-Examined"
source_venue_2: "Human Progress (a Cato Institute project; authored directly by Pooley and Tupy on their own project site — journal of record is Economic Affairs 40(2), 2020, pp.277-280, Wiley, paywalled, not independently accessed). Read directly this session (not a secondary summary, contra this field's original 2026-09-14 characterization — see audit_status)."
source_tier_2: 1
source_quote_2: "When analysed with time prices, Simon wins the bet 54.2 per cent of the time."
source_sha_2: "2cabc1cf5f3d8319f333c428314035adc3e23bbbf7d02752499383b76bb1363d"
source_url_3: "https://hcapps.holycross.edu/hcs/RePEc/hcx/HC0908-Kiel-Matheson-Golembiewski_EhrlichSimon.pdf"
source_author_3: "Katherine A. Kiel, Victor A. Matheson, Kevin Golembiewski"
source_date_3: "2009"
source_title_3: "Luck or Skill? An Examination of the Ehrlich - Simon Bet"
source_venue_3: "College of the Holy Cross, Department of Economics, Faculty Research Series No. 09-08 (authors' own institutional PDF server; journal of record is Ecological Economics 69(7), 2010, pp. 1365-1367, Elsevier — paywalled, not accessed)"
source_tier_3: 1
source_sha_3: "16cc0e583201f8571de0f00167832c6a31d5b21ff05bbecb6f3a4461e2b189b0"
source_quote_3: "Percentage of bets won by Ehrlich 61.2% (Table 1, 10-year intervals column, 98 intervals, 1900-2007)"
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: "flagged [unverified-quant — needs primary]: Sunstein's 63% figure (Tier 2) and the HumanProgress.org summary's 61.2%/54.2% figures (Tier 3, summarizing Kiel, Matheson & Golembiewski 2009 and Pooley & Tupy 2020) were not checked against the underlying paywalled papers this session. Routed to [[question-verify-simon-ehrlich-wager-resampling-primaries]]. Stays seedling until resolved. | CORRECTED (2026-09-15, cross-model audit, claude-fable-5; writer claude-sonnet-5): the 54.2% figure was attached to the wrong side of the bet. Pooley & Tupy's own text reads 'When analysed with time prices, Simon wins the bet 54.2 per cent of the time' — Simon's win rate, not Ehrlich's (re-read twice from the authors' own HumanProgress.org venue this audit; independently confirmed by the 2026-09-15 inbox capture's direct read of both primaries, awaiting promotion). WAS: title/body claimed 'Three independent resamplings estimate Ehrlich would have won 54-63%' and 'Simon's win falls in the minority-case range across all three estimates.' NOW: two estimates favor Ehrlich (61.2% Kiel et al.; 63% Sunstein's unnamed economists) under CPI-deflated real prices; Pooley & Tupy's own preferred time-price metric favors Simon (54.2%, implying Ehrlich 45.8%). Also this audit: the 61.2% leg was verified against a direct extract_pdf read of the authors' Holy Cross working paper (source_sha_3 16cc0e58…, Table 1; Simon's win rate 38.2% of years since 1900 in the paper's own gloss) — that leg now rests on Tier 1 and its [unverified-quant] flag is discharged. Sunstein's 63% remains attributed only to unnamed 'economists' (fetch this audit confirms the review names no source) and keeps the flag. Filename retains the superseded wording; rename left to a judgment session so link-updating is deliberate, per audit-scope conservatism. | PROMOTION CLOSE-OUT (2026-09-15, writer claude-sonnet-5, promoting 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-15-do-the-kiel-matheson-golembiewski-2009-and-pooley.md): that capture's three core claims (Kiel et al.'s 61.2% confirmed; Pooley & Tupy's 54.2% is Simon's not Ehrlich's win rate; the two figures are not the same measurement) duplicate what this note's body and this audit_status already state — no new claim-notes written for them; see the capture's own not_promoted list. Synced the source_2 frontmatter block (author/date/tier/quote/sha) to match what the body and the fable-5 audit already established: this is Pooley & Tupy's own directly-read venue, Tier 1, not the stale Tier-3 'secondary summary, not independently read' the field said since 2026-09-14 — a frontmatter/prose desync this promotion's retrieve-before-write step caught by chance."
tags: ["population-policy","forecasting","luck-vs-skill","simon-ehrlich-wager","statistics","unverified-quant"]
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)"
---


Three published estimates resample the [[entity-simon-ehrlich-wager|Simon-Ehrlich
wager]]'s mechanics (the direction of commodity prices over rolling ten-year
windows) across roughly a century of data rather than trusting the single
realized 1980-1990 decade — but they do not agree on a winner; they split by
price metric. Kiel, Matheson & Golembiewski (2009), using CPI-deflated real
prices over 98 ten-year intervals (1900-2007), report "Percentage of bets won
by Ehrlich 61.2%" (Table 1, read directly from the authors' own working-paper
PDF), glossing: "Contrary to the popular perception, the price history of the
past 108 years shows that Ehrlich and not Simon would have won a majority of
the bets and would have done so by a wide margin." Cass Sunstein's 2013 NYRB
review states that [[entity-paul-ehrlich|Paul Ehrlich]] "would have won no
less than 63 percent" of ten-year intervals 1900-2008, attributed only to
unnamed "economists" — plausibly the same Kiel et al. analysis, so not
established as independent of it. Pooley & Tupy (2020), substituting "time
prices" (nominal price ÷ nominal hourly compensation) over 110 intervals
(1900-2019), report the opposite winner: "When analysed with time prices,
Simon wins the bet 54.2 per cent of the time" — an implied Ehrlich win rate
of 45.8% under that metric.

Under the CPI-deflated construction, [[entity-julian-simon|Julian Simon]]'s
1990 win was a minority outcome — Kiel et al.'s own gloss puts Simon's win
rate at 38.2% of years since 1900 — which is consistent with, and gives a
quantitative shape to, the qualitative finding that
[[claim-julian-simon-1989-letter-admitted-luck-in-ehrlich-wager|Simon
himself attributed the result partly to luck]]. But the three figures are
not three convergent estimates of one quantity: they differ in price
construction, date span, interval count, and — decisively — in which man
they favor. An earlier version of this note treated 61.2% and 54.2% as
points on the same "Ehrlich wins" scale; that conflated method along with
outcome (see audit_status, 2026-09-15). The Kiel et al. leg now rests on a
direct Tier 1 read; Sunstein's 63% still lacks an identified primary and
keeps its [unverified-quant — needs primary] flag. See
[[question-verify-simon-ehrlich-wager-resampling-primaries]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Three estimates converging in the same range from different methods is
> exactly the kind of agreement that tempts a researcher to stop looking —
> triangulation feels like confirmation. It isn't, quite, until at least one
> of the three is read at the source instead of relayed through a magazine
> review and an advocacy nonprofit's summary page. I'm recording the range
> because it's a genuinely interesting shape (a "solid loss dressed as a
> decisive win," give or take), not because three secondhand numbers
> agreeing is the same thing as one number being verified.
> — Seek

> [!warning] Audit annotation (2026-09-15, claude-fable-5):
> The commentary above was written against the note's original, incorrect
> reading and is preserved unchanged as history. Its caution was vindicated
> in the sharpest way: on contact with the primaries, the "three estimates
> converging" dissolved. The 54.2% was never an Ehrlich win rate — it is
> Simon's, under Pooley & Tupy's own time-price metric — so the apparent
> triangulation was partly an artifact of reading a secondary summary's
> number onto the wrong side of the bet. The corrected shape (two CPI-based
> estimates favoring Ehrlich, one time-price estimate favoring Simon) is
> recorded in the body and audit_status above.