Soulful Sundays: Imagination

“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” – Neil Gaiman

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, in which he forecasted a bleak Malthusian future—full of famine and environmental degradation. He theorized that the 1970s and ’80s would see the starvation of millions of people as birth rates climbed and food production stagnated. He thought that basic goods would become unaffordable even in the most affluent countries. Ehrlich’s ideas became gospel among the burgeoning liberal environmental movement, but not everyone was convinced. In 1980, Julian Simon, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, publicly challenged Ehrlich and his scarcity mindset on the national stage. This battle of ideologies would become one of the most famous bets of the 20th century.

Ehrlich was raised in an upper-class liberal family in Philadelphia. He was a biologist and zoologist by training, with a specialization in entomology. He was a professor at Stanford University when he decided to take his ideas public in 1968, claiming that the world needed to be educated about the looming perils of population growth. That same year, he also founded the Zero Population Growth (ZPG) movement with his wife, Anne. Ehrlich was not alone in his pessimistic ideology. The Club of Rome, founded by Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King the same year as the publication of The Population Bomb, was also sounding the alarm about widespread resource decline and environmental catastrophe.

Simon, on the other hand, was raised by a working-class family in Newark, New Jersey. He served in the U.S. Navy in the 1950s before taking a teaching position at the University of Maryland. Simon was a staunch believer in the power of human ingenuity and social capital. He had been following Ehrlich (and the Club of Rome) closely during the ’60s and ’70s, publicly dismantling many of their more extreme warnings. But it wasn’t until 1980 that Ehrlich accepted one of his wagers.

Simon offered to bet any amount of money on any future trend that Ehrlich thought would worsen due to overpopulation. His only constraint was that Ehrlich had to specify a timeline of more than one year. Given the wide-open nature of this wager, Ehrlich could have picked anything and any timeframe. He collaborated with fellow scientists John Holdren and John Harte and selected five metals—copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten—that they believed would increase in price over a ten-year period from 1980 to 1990. The ante was $1,000. If the price went up, Simon would pay Ehrlich the difference. If the price went down, Ehrlich would owe Simon the discount.

Ten years went by. Technological advances improved mining and refining efficiency, substitution and recycling reduced demand pressures, and global economic shifts affected commodity cycles. All five metals dropped by 40% in real price. Ehrlich wrote a check for $576.07 and mailed it to Simon, claiming that the only reason he lost was because the timescale was too short—despite having been able to choose it in the first place. Simon gladly reopened his original offer, inviting Ehrlich to pick any timeline and any parameters. Ehrlich declined. So did every member of the Club of Rome whom Simon challenged.

In 1981, Simon wrote The Ultimate Resource, which was later expanded to include the results of the famous Simon–Ehrlich bet. In it, Simon writes, “The ultimate resource is people—especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit and so inevitably for the benefit of the rest of us.” He believed human ingenuity and imagination, not perceived measures of wealth or resource scarcity, were the true foundation of progress. Whereas Ehrlich argued that humans were like bacteria in a petri dish—doomed to eventually consume all available substrate—Simon embraced the belief that humanity could adapt to any constraint with the power to invent, substitute, and solve.

Creation is an act of rebellion. Imagination is the most dangerous thing one can engage in. Our entire future rests firmly in our ability to envision it—again and again.