Ep. 501 How Libertarians Won the Bet of the Century
The Tom Woods Show
Tom Woods
4.8 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2015
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1980, Julian Simon offered to let doomsayer Paul Ehrlich choose any commodity metals he liked, and if their inflation-adjusted prices increased by 1990, Simon would pay $1000. But if they fell, Ehrlich would pay. The question was: would human ingenuity figure out ways to conserve on these metals, and/or find substitutes for them? By 1990, all five metals had fallen in price, and Ehrlich paid up. What does it all mean? That's what we discuss today.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Tom Woods Show, episode 501. |
| 0:03.3 | Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion. |
| 0:08.0 | Your daily dose of liberty education starts here, the Tom Woods Show. |
| 0:14.3 | Hey, everybody, there's an excellent case to be made for buying gold for the long haul, |
| 0:18.5 | but we shouldn't forget about silver, according to Peter Schiff |
| 0:21.0 | and the folks at Schiff Gold, who have just released a free report, the powerful case for silver. |
| 0:27.3 | Check it out at tomwoods.com slash silver. |
| 0:30.3 | Welcome to episode 5001. |
| 0:33.1 | Today we're talking to Pierre de Roche. |
| 0:35.8 | Let me spell that for you. |
| 0:45.0 | D-E-S-R-C-H-E-R-S. He is a professor of geography at the University of Toronto. |
| 0:52.2 | I'm going to link to his faculty page at tomwoods.com slash 501. So you can find out more about his work. He's joining us today, as I mentioned on yesterday's |
| 0:55.8 | program toward the end, to talk about the 25th anniversary of the famous debate, well, |
| 1:03.5 | I'll bet, actually, between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. Very, very interesting and important |
| 1:09.9 | to people who are interested in free market |
| 1:11.7 | economics and in libertarianism. This is a debate that began in 1980. That's when they made the bet, |
| 1:18.4 | and then they settled up on it in 1990. And it had to do with the fundamental question of whether |
| 1:23.0 | things are getting better or not. Whether things are getting scarcer or more abundant, whether the |
| 1:28.4 | human mind is coming up with ways of minimizing our use of certain things, coming up with |
| 1:33.8 | substitutes for certain things, being more creative in our use of certain things. |
| 1:38.2 | And I don't want to give away the whole story of the bet, but at least setting the stage this |
| 1:43.9 | much, you'll know kind of why the |
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