Simon-Ehrlich wager

A 1980 public wager between economist Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich: Simon bet that the inflation-adjusted prices of five metals (chosen by Ehrlich and colleagues) would fall, not rise, over the following decade. Simon won when the bet paid off in 1990, and the wager became a widely cited case study in the debate between techno-optimist and resource-scarcity-pessimist views of population growth — well-known enough to have its own Wikipedia page and an annual "Julian L. Simon Award."

Matters to this vault as a case study the vault reached via Paul Ehrlich's existing hub, and one that turns out to unravel on closer reading: the "winner" privately called the result luck a year before collecting, and a later legal-scholar review concluded the bet's mechanics couldn't actually test either man's underlying thesis about population and resources.

References

• claim-julian-simon-1989-letter-admitted-luck-in-ehrlich-wager
• claim-sunstein-2013-simon-ehrlich-wager-tested-neither-mans-thesis
• claim-sunstein-2013-applies-hedgehog-fox-typology-independently-of-tetlock
• claim-three-resamplings-estimate-ehrlich-would-have-won-54-to-63-percent-of-intervals