John Tierney wonders if Dr. Holdren learned anything from his misguided bet with Julian Simon:
Dr. Simon’s victory was not (as some Lab readers suggested) a fluke based on exceptionally lucky timing, as you can see from this Wikipedia graph showing the inflation-adjusted prices for the five metals in the bet from 1950 to 2002. (Since 2002, metal prices rose sharply for several years but have since plummeted back to familiar levels.) Prices do sometimes shoot up for natural resources, but people react by finding new sources and substitutes, and prices come back down. If you look back over the past several centuries, as Dr. Simon demonstrated in his book, “The Ultimate Resource,” you’ll see that the trend was downward long before 1950, too.
What lessons Dr. Holdren learn from that bet? The only one I’m aware of is: Don’t test your theories by betting on them. After Dr. Simon collected his winnings in 1990, he offered to make another bet not just on natural resources but also on any measure of human welfare, like life expectancy or food per capita. Once again, Dr. Simon predicted that humans would adapt to new problems (like global warming) and end up better off in the future — by any measure at any future date that Dr. Holdren or Dr. Ehrlich cared to name. They refused his offer. They did, however, go on making more gloomy predictions and calculations about the problems of sustainability, as in this 1995 essay discussing how to avert future shortages of resources.
I find this particular appointment disquieting. As one of my commenters said earlier, I’d much prefer a “science advisor” who sees technology as a solution, rather than a problem. And, again, I have no idea what the implications of this pick are for space policy.