What a great man and economist was Julian Simon! The other day I clicked into Amazon.com to see what Simon had written about the long-term trend of commodity prices, the subject that had catapulted him to fame. In 1980 he made a wager with a well-known environmentalist and population control advocate, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich. Simon claimed commodity prices would drop over time. What heresy. Recent were the days of gas-line panics and $800-an-ounce gold. A population explosion, such as imagined by Ehrlich and nearly everybody else back then, could only make prices soar. But Simon knew better. In fact, he was so confident of collecting on his bet that he let Ehrlich pick any five commodities he liked— and any future date at which the bet would take effect. Ehrlich picked five metals and 1990. Sure enough, the prices dropped, and Simon won. Ehrlich refused Simon's offer of a $100,000 second bet.
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