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Timothy Burke's avatar

In the Simon-Ehrlich thing, as I think you acknowledge, no matter who won, we all lose, because they're both terrible futurists--there are a zillion ways you can falsify cornucopianism (or point out that it always depends on the idea that somehow we will invent a magical just-in-time solution to a catastrophe right at the moment of its occurrence; when you observe that this wasn't so in many past catastrophes, the cornucopian moves the goalposts and goes for a variation of Keynes' in-the-long-run by saying that eventually everybody got better and humanity still survives so hakuna matata baby. Only, you know, that's not because somebody came up with a brilliant solution eventually; it's mostly dumb luck or because almost all of the somebodies in one place died and eventually somebody else moved in, or all the somebodies in the catastrophe place took off and went to a new place where nobody was that wasn't so catastrophic. We're fresh out of places to move to now (and fuck off, Elon, Mars is not an option).

But Ehrlich, man, not only was he wrong, he and his bunch were pushing a bunch of policy ideas that thankfully were not as widely adopted as they might have been, like mandatory sterilization; there was a powerful stench of eugenics floating around his discourse. And his ideas have remained in the cultural air in some really gross ways--you absolutely cannot convince a major fraction of educated people of my age that global population growth turned out not to be that big of a problem and that for the most part, population growth fell off without strong government interventions, that the real issue was and remains the distribution of resources, food, etc.

Kelly and Sale is a more complicated thing as you say because the bet was more complicated and because Kelly and Sale are both slightly more complicated thinkers and prognosticators than Simon or Ehrlich.

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Cheez Whiz's avatar

About Ehrlich, I suppose the problem is not in being apocalyptic to get people's attention, but what do you do with that attention once you have it? Choosing to be more apocalyptic since that worked before is not the best decision. Tech optimism is much the same thing. Look at all the magical tools we have! Surely all we need is more magical tools to fix any problems caused by our magical tools. What could possibly go wrong?

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