Luck or Skill? An Examination of the Ehrlich - Simon Bet

Katherine Kiel, Victor Matheson and Kevin Golembiewski
Additional contact information
Kevin Golembiewski: Department of Economics, College of the Holy Cross

No 908, Working Papers from College of the Holy Cross, Department of Economics

Abstract: In 1980, Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon placed a famous bet on whether the prices of a bundle of natural resources would rise or fall over the ensuing decade. Simon won the bet as the real price of the bundle fell significantly, and the result of this bet has been taken as proof that technological progress is likely overcome any Neo-Malthusian concerns about natural resource scarcity. Contrary to the popular perception, however, an examination of the price history of the identical bundle of goods from 1900-2007 shows that Ehrlich and not Simon would have won a majority of the bets over the past century and would have done so by a wide margin.

Keywords: Natural resources; scarcity; Neo-Malthusian (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q30 Q31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 5 pages
Date: 2009-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-mic
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Ecological Economics, Vol. 69:7, May 2010, pp. 1365-1367.

Downloads: (external link)
https://hcapps.holycross.edu/hcs/RePEc/hcx/HC0908- ... ski_EhrlichSimon.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Luck or skill? An examination of the Ehrlich-Simon bet (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hcx:wpaper:0908

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from College of the Holy Cross, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Victor Matheson ().