Hacker Remix

Who would have won the Simon-Ehrlich bet over different decades?

74 points by sien 2 weeks ago | 74 comments

olalonde 1 week ago

Not Paul Ehrlich's worse prediction. His most infamous was that "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death" in the 1970s[0]. It’s curious how he managed to remain influential despite a track record of such inaccurate forecasts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich#The_Population...

roenxi 1 week ago

It depends on whether you are the sort of person who tries to account for recency bias or not. We're living through the most anomalously prosperous period in not just the history of history, but probably also including the unrecorded aeons before humans even existed on earth that there was no particular reason to anticipate at the time.

If you go with the gut, then sure everything was fine and dandy. But a more data-oriented approach will still get people to the conclusion that we're on the clock until billions of humans starve to death.

So on the one hand, the predictions were completely wrong. On the other, none of the underlying problems have really gone away and any analysis of the future will still conclude that population growth (even flat-lining at this point) is insanely risky in terms of how much human suffering it will eventually lead to. So the people pushing it still have influence. Although I've been a lot more chipper about the situation since it turns out that wealth leads to depopulation which is one of those wonderful and unexpectedly good things. Plus obviously the AI and presumably coming robotics revolution are just absurdly promising.

cowsandmilk 1 week ago

This isn’t anomalous or recency bias. You go back in history and everyone who makes predictions similar to Ehrlich about population crashes have been wrong. Malthus was saying the same things 150 years earlier and there were others before him and in between.

kurthr 1 week ago

Every bacteria in the Petri dish doubles each generation, until it doesn’t.

It really doesn’t seem like a winning bet (other than fear mongering popularity), because you’re unlikely to be right, and when you are things seem to be falling apart. See also Peak Oil.

However, birth rates in most of the world (except Africa, SE Asia, and India by a bit) are falling below replacement. Many are looking at this as a good thing (exponentials can’t go on forever), and there are the contrarians, but being at the edge of a long term exponential transition is dangerous. There are many cultural and economic systems that have worked the way they do and grown to be dominant because of the exponential growth. People will continue to hope and believe long after things become obvious (see climate change). See also Moore’s Law.

Isamu 1 week ago

> But a more data-oriented approach will still get people to the conclusion that we're on the clock until billions of people starve to death.

You’ve piqued my interest, where can I read about this data oriented approach that leads to this conclusion?

roenxi 1 week ago

Most people live in cities [0] and requires ~2,000 k/cal a day. The systems required to feed people are complex and energy demanding. There are 8 billion humans which is a large number relative to the amount of food we can store.

It is a matter of time until we have a multi-billion person famine. Hopefully multiple centuries away if the transition away from oil to something else works out. Something like the year without summer [1] could be even more catastrophic, for example. Or wars, particularly of the nuclear variety.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

braiamp 1 week ago

The problem with such prediction is that it presumes that the population would grow at a accelerating pace, while the opposite is happening.

xyzzy123 1 week ago

For me it's not about population growth so much as societal risk; our current population is only sustainable due to a complex web of interdependent systems.

How often do complex societies break down or decline in such a way that the complex systems which keep our urban populations alive are compromised?

lazide 1 week ago

The more people we have, also the more people we have available to keep these systems running and figure out new replacements. Assuming the caloric ‘profit margin’ stays positive anyway.

patrickk 1 week ago

The Netherlands managed to dramatically raise crop yields after WWII by intensive farming methods like building a massive amount of greenhouses. The crop yield per hectare is insane as a result. It was as a response to WWII that this system of farming was adopted.

So if we reach a point of mass starvation many counties will adopt similar strategies and drastically raise crop yields.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33763087

throw_pm23 1 week ago

It is a tradeoff though, crop yield is one thing, but most of the produce from the NL is bland, tasteless, full of chemicals, something that would have been considered unsuitable for human consumption earlier, and achieved at a cost of great environmental degradation.

patrickk 1 week ago

That’s true, intensively farming in a small country will come with serious downsides. But if it’s a choice between starvation vs mass producing bland food and creating pollution, there is only one choice to make.

rat87 7 days ago

> most of the produce from the NL is bland

Credible Citation needed.

> full of chemicals

So what? You're also full of chemicals.

> something that would have been considered unsuitable for human consumption earlier

Actually our standards for consumption have gone up a lot. People used to eat all sorts of stuff when danger of starving was higher and population was poorer.

lordnacho 1 week ago

We seem to be so far past breakeven food/water/warmth that most of our efforts are spent getting all sorts of other stuff, though?

It's recent, I'll grant you that. I can't even think of when there was rationing in the west? Shortly after the war? At least the current grandparent generation seems to have childhood memories of that.

But to me, it looks like we've figured out those basic necessities to the point where at least ordinary variation in harvest won't be making us hungry. You could call that being noise proof.

The danger is that we systematically alter how the planet works, so that is not just bumps in annual crop yields, which we also seem to be doing, but it's not clear that we've messed up our basic necessities pipeline yet. It's also not clear that we'll inevitably do that.

jl6 1 week ago

One risk is that our systems are now extremely efficient, and one aspect of efficiency is that it tends to eliminate “unnecessary” buffers and stockpiles. Just-in-time manufacturing pulls supplies in response to demand. The global food supply chain still has buffers and stockpiles (e.g. grain bins) due to the seasonality of growing, but if hydroponics becomes the dominant method of agriculture (say, in a world with a more chaotic climate that needs to be kept at bay by greenhouses), then highly efficient farmers could optimize out all of their resiliency.

bryanrasmussen 1 week ago

>I can't even think of when there was rationing in the west? Shortly after the war? At least the current grandparent generation seems to have childhood memories of that.

there was a pandemic a few years ago in which various western countries experienced shortages and in some cases rationing of some things.

There is rationing of water usage in many parts of the world, including parts of Western countries in which people live in water constrained areas, although that rationing is for garden usage - not drinking water.

I'm sure similar things can be thought of.

Obviously you don't mean those forms of rationing, you seem to mean large rationing of many different necessities and materials. But the fact that these rather minor forms of rationing exist in contrast to that in place during WWII does indicate that the system is not as able to handle all needs as well as you and a few other people in this thread seem to believe.

on edit: added word "exist"

alex_smart 1 week ago

All that is to say that the Malthusians are not just wrong, they are not even wrong.

olalonde 1 week ago

I disagree that the prosperity we've experienced was truly "unexpected". Humans are self-regulating: fertility rates drop as resources become scarce (e.g. people are less likely to have children when struggling to meet basic needs), and markets innovate in response to scarcity (e.g. the Green Revolution). Technological progress, though unpredictable in its specifics, has consistently been a reliable force for adaptation. Ehrlich's predictions underestimated humanity's resilience, oversimplifying a highly complex system by reducing it to a linear regression.

roenxi 1 week ago

This is that recency bias thing in action. Constant surprising technological progress of the sort we've seen for the last century or two is unprecedented and not at all the sort of thing that is suitable for long term planning. I usually wouldn't bother pointing that out, but there are two points I really want to emphasise as wildly optimistic:

> Humans are self-regulating: fertility rates drop as resources become scarce (e.g. people are less likely to have children when struggling to meet basic needs)

We didn't have birth control until the 20th century and it is mostly used by people who, historically speaking, are living with resources far in excess of their basic needs. Traditionally the self regulation was that people were born then the ones that couldn't eat enough to survive died.

And there is a pretty high risk of not finding stable equilibrium. The logistic map isn't a totally crazy model and displays some rather chaotic behaviour [0]. In practice that looks like a lot of famines.

> ... markets innovate in response to scarcity ...

Markets have existed forever, usually the innovative response to food scarcity was, once again, people starving to death. It is hard to underline just how weird the Green Revolution is. Obviously a great time to be alive but it is not a normal thing in the human experience.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map#Behavior_dependen...

olalonde 1 week ago

I’m not sure why you keep invoking "recency bias." When forecasting the near future, as Ehrlich was doing, it’s entirely reasonable to use recent trends as a baseline. Are you suggesting progress might slow to the levels seen in prehistory, antiquity, or the medieval period? That seems highly implausible, barring a catastrophic event that disrupts modern civilization.

If anything, you might be underestimating the ongoing momentum of technological progress, which is not just sustaining its pace but accelerating across many fields. Some experts predict AGI is right on the corner - a development that could drastically amplify innovation and potentially eliminate the challenge of food scarcity.

Additionally, birth control will only keep becoming increasingly accessible worldwide, enabling more effective regulation of fertility rates in response to resource constraints.

tsimionescu 1 week ago

> Humans are self-regulating: fertility rates drop as resources become scarce (e.g. people are less likely to have children when struggling to meet basic needs)

The exact opposite is what we are observing: people in poorer parts of the world, and poor people in richer parts of the world have way more children than people who have all their basic needs met and then some.

The best known predictor of average number of children is infant mortality rate: without fail, as infant mortality decreases, average number of children per family decreases as well.

olalonde 1 week ago

I didn't claim the relationship was linear. People in poorer countries still have relatively abundant food by historical standards and aren't at risk of starvation. However, when food availability drops below a certain threshold, reproduction rates tend to decrease - this is basic ecology. Historically, the most populated regions were also resource-rich, like the fertile river valleys. But we're now living in an era of abundance where even the poorer regions have access to plenty of food.

ekianjo 1 week ago

> people are less likely to have children when struggling to meet basic needs

Completely disproven by the baby boom era where people were poor in many countries for years after the war but still made a lot of babies. Reality bites hard.

riidom 1 week ago

I'm not in the topic really. Apparently 9 million people die from starvation each year. This is recent data, I don't know the 70ies data (things to consider: A lot less people on the planet, on the other hand the problem was less tackled than it is today).

But just going with this number, since "the 70ies" refer to a time span of 10 years, that'd be 90m people, and I don't quite understand why his forecast is considered to be so wildly inaccurate then.

didgeoridoo 1 week ago

Because the 1970s was — uniquely — the decade in which global starvation deaths crashed by >80% due to technological and social advances around the world. [0]

Nobody could be that stupid by accident. Ehrlich is a ghoul who was excited about people dying because it would have justified his preferred political philosophy.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/259827/global-famine-dea...

dredmorbius 1 week ago

It is true that the tide of the battle against hunger has changed for the better during the past three years. But tides have a way of flowing and then ebbing again. We may be at high tide now, but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts. For we are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction. Man has made amazing progress recently in his potential mastery of these two contending powers. Science, invention, and technology have given him materials and methods for increasing his food supplies substantially and sometimes spectacularly... Man also has acquired the means to reduce the rate of human reproduction effectively and humanely. He is using his powers for increasing the rate and amount of food production. But he is not yet using adequately his potential for decreasing the rate of human reproduction. The result is that the rate of population increase exceeds the rate of increase in food production in some areas. There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.

The speaker is Nobel Peace Laureate Norman Borlaug, in his acceptance speech for that award. For those unfamiliar, it was his work developing high-output agricultural staple variants, the heart of the Green Revolution, which was the basis of that award.

<https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1970/borlaug/accepta...>

The 1960s and 1970s were a period in which concern over global population growth and the apparent insufficiency of the food supply were absolutely rampant. It's a depressingly common trope, and not only on HN, to deride such concerns as misguided and laughable, but the truth is that the trends at the time were quite dire. Concerning now, global margins of crop production and surplus suplies have been narrowing over the past decades, and it is in fact food supplies and their reflection in prices which have been fingered as major components of recent political upheaval: the Arab Spring (2010--2012) was motivated in large part by populations stressed by high food prices and reduced supplies. Food price inflation in the US, Canada, and Europe are behind much of the anti-incumbancy mood in those nations --- being part of the advanced world is no guarantee that even modest disruptions to basic human needs won't have political ramifications.

Food Price Index, US, 1968--2022:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_prices#/media/File:Food_P...>

rat87 6 days ago

> The speaker is Nobel Peace Laureate Norman Borlaug, in his acceptance speech for that award. For those unfamiliar, it was his work developing high-output agricultural staple variants, the heart of the Green Revolution, which was the basis of that award.

Right so he went out and improved things.

> It's a depressingly common trope, and not only on HN, to deride such concerns as misguided and laughable, but the truth is that the trends at the time were quite dire

I'd say its sadly not common enough. If anything I'd say that the reason it can't be written off as laughable is not because they had a point but because it helped cause a lot of violations of peoples rights with not fully informed consent sterilization and the one child policy.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/book-incited-world...

Sure they didnt have knowledge we have now but we do. We know that birth rates fall when poverty falls and more women get educated and that coercive methods are not necessary. We also know that the capacity to grow food was much larger.

Ehrlichs predictions were wrong. He predicted

> “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

And from my understanding hasn't admitted being wrong (and trying to be figure out how he became so sure of something that was incorrect) implying that it may still happen someday(when he predicted it would have happened long ago).

Mass famine isn't exactly the same thing as expensive food although obviously it can lead to higher levels of starvation. Fundamentally famine and even high levels of starvation are due to bad government and or economic systems. Its no suprise the Arab spring started with a fruit seller who set himself on fire in response to corrupt policeman preventing him from making a living/stealing his wares.

dredmorbius 6 days ago

My point in mentioning Borlaug specifically was that 1) he's the single person most responsible for the post-1950s population boom not ending in mass global famine and 2) he was scared fucking spitless himself. Which means that Ehrlich was far from the only person voicing such views and that the views were not some environmental fringe. I've spent quite a bit of time going through literature of the time, and strongly recommend William Ophuls book Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977) for, if nothing else, its bibliography which is an excellent and largely balanced selection of the literature of its time.

<https://archive.org/details/ecologypoliticso0000ophu>

(Ophuls bibliographies and biblographic notes are in general absolute gold mines.)

Ehrlich himself rapidly learnt, and spent much of his career arguing, that coercive measures are hugely harmful and largely don't work. What does work best and foremost is women's education, along with social stability, medical and family planning services, and the like. Ehrlich wrote about 40 books as well as numerous papers and articles, he's remembered most for one of the earliest. A quite different thought process is evident in later ones, such as One With Niniveh (2004)

<https://archive.org/details/onewithninevehpo0000ehrl_z0h7/pa...>

Or this 2013 release:

"Equal rights, education for women key to avoiding civilization's collapse"

[T]he Ehrlichs offer a roadmap for avoiding society's total collapse, emphasizing that giving women equal rights worldwide is a critical first step.

<https://phys.org/news/2013-01-equal-rights-women-key-civiliz...>

Not a step, but a critical and first step.

In 1968 the situation appeared absolutely calamitous, Borlaug's Nobel speech came two years later, and concerns over overpopulation continued in the mainstream well through the 1970s and 1980s. That's 40 and 50 years ago now, beyond the ken of most reading this no doubt, but very much the spirit of the times. Influenced in part by Ehrlich, but also by many others. Drastic measures, as one possible tool, and proposed with grave concern, were among the possible interventions.

What ultimately did occur was that, despite several more famines (Sahel drought, 1968--1972, 1,000,000 dead; Ethiopia, 1972-1973, 60,000; Bangladesh, 1974, up to 1.5 million; Khmer Rouge, 1975--1979, 500,000; Ethiopia, 1983--1985, ~500,000; Sudan, 1988, 100,000; Somalia, 1991--1992, 300,000; North Korea, 1994--1998, up to 3.5 million, Congo, 1998--2004, 2.7 million; Somalia, 2011--2012, 285,000; Tigray, Ethiopia, 2020--present, up to 200,000; Gaza, 2023--present, 62,000, and many others <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines>), overall population growth has decreased markedly through much of the world, to the extent that low birth rates are a concern in Europe, Japan, and the United States, and most of the world, and quite notably the largest populations in India, China, and elsewhere aren't living with looming hunger. But that balance is delicate and precarious as we're constantly reminded.

And for those scanning my or Wikipedia's larger list and objecting "but most of those were political, civil war, or other conflicts", I ask preëmptively what the hell do you think drives most such conflict and unrest? Food insecurity (or its near peer, water insecurity) is a primary driver of social unrest around the world and throughout history:

See e.g., "Food Insecurity and Unrest: What You Need to Know" (2022)

<https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2022/07/12/food-insec...>

rat87 7 days ago

People arent dying of starvation due to overpopulation but due to messed up economic and political systems. He was wrong and remains wrong.

palmfacehn 1 week ago

> It’s curious how he managed to remain influential despite a track record of such inaccurate forecasts.

1. Political expediency. Look to the institutions which celebrated his work.

2. Easy to understand. Scarcity doom can be sold easily. Simon's ideas require considering or observing second order effects at a minimum.

esperent 1 week ago

From reading around, although I didn't find a definitive source worth sharing here, it seems like across several famines in the 1970s, somewhere in the low tens of millions died, while another several tens of millions came close to starvation.

So the prediction was off by an order of magnitude.

glaucon 1 week ago

| If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000

I would love to know what it was about England that meant it's end was nigh, I mean what about France, Norway or Belgium ?

Also, when he said "England" was he actually referring to the United Kingdom (as Americans often are) or were Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland going to be spared in some way ?

bleuchase 1 week ago

Good article. I look forward to the day when Ehrlich’s bad ideas are no longer en vogue.

braiamp 1 week ago

Interesting that many people take this as a further prof that Ehrlich was wrong, when actually he was unlucky. This "bet" doesn't further our understanding of how anything works, and the article probably should drive the point across more forcefully. The bet itself is useless to tell us anything about "the long run". In the "long run" everyone is dead, so your lifetime isn't enough to predict a trend. You could have seen all your life an indicator heading in one direction, die, getting revived 200 years later, and the trend vanish, because someone discovered a better way.