The prophets of scarcity.

AuthorLuttwak, Edward N.
PositionOFF THE NEWS - Brief article

There is nothing natural about economical access to "natural resources"--it depends on the cost-effectiveness of the relevant technologies, which keep improving.

But the prophets of inevitable, doom-laden scarcity need not be gloomy, not at all. Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb predicting imminent resource exhaustion turned out to be 100 percent wrong, gloriously remained the revered prophet (inevitably receiving a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award). Meanwhile, John Paul Holdren, who joined him in the famous (losing) ten-year bet against Julian Simon (who predicted increasing abundance), is at this writing the senior advisor to President Barack...

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