Video Notes:
The Planet Money episode on the Bet is excellent (it is from the era when Planet Money was actually good), but it lets Ehrlich off too easy, IMO. A better, definitive treatment of the Bet is from the ever-excellent Hannah Ritchie: https://ourworldindata.org/simon-ehrlich-bet.
My thought with the video was to do an updated version of the Bet incorporating Ritchie’s research. Toss in an Ehrlich takedown, since public intellectuals who don’t admit mistakes don’t deserve the standing Ehrlich enjoyed.
The video veers far more personal than usual at the end. I do this because
1) delaying children is indeed a huge regret of mine, and
2) I believe my generation was severely misinformed about fertility. The received wisdom I got was that there is a fertility cliff after 35 and you can always do IVF. These just aren’t true. Conceiving can be a long process at any age, and IVF’s chances of success are small to nonexistent past 40.
Further, we were severely misinformed about children themselves. Children were seen as a burden, a money and time vacuum. These again aren’t really true in my experience. I suppose they can be a money suck, but the spending is somewhat optional: Public schools and cheap activities exist. Day care is admittedly expensive, though; there is no way around that unless one partner doesn’t work or there are grandparents about. Time-wise, the first six months are genuinely awful, but after that, the good far outweighs the bad. The best days of my life are just simple days spent with my son doing mundane activities like biking on the beach or going to the movies.
My trip to the Simon Archive in Maryland was my first ever real research trip. As an economist, you mostly just download data and work with it. So a trip to look through Simon’s papers was a treat. I went through a couple of boxes, and it took two days. It was definitely an arduous but enjoyable process just seeing the correspondence of a great man. My only main insight is how little the life of a tenured professor has changed. He was dealing with regrades, referee reports, and reimbursements, the minutiae of academia.
Sources in order of appearance
New York Times obituary for Ehrlich: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/books/paul-r-ehrlich-dead.html
Ehrlich, Paul R. (1968). The population bomb. Internet Archive. New York, Ballantine Books
Ehrlich famine quote is from: Williams, Nigel. “The population bomb.” Current Biology 18.13 (2008): R535-R536.
Famine data is from: https://ourworldindata.org/famines
Ehrlich claims about future famines and India are from: Ehrlich, Paul R., and Anne H. Ehrlich. “The population explosion: why we should care and what we should do about it.” Envtl. L. 27 (1997): 1187.
India statistics: Life Expectancy and GDP per capita
Ehrlich’s England comments are from a 1971 speech. Multiple sources, here is one: https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/paul_ehrlich_1969_predictions.pdf
Crop yields and land use is from OurWorldinData: https://ourworldindata.org/yields-vs-land-use-how-has-the-world-produced-enough-food-for-a-growing-population
Ehrilich’s comments about the Green Revolution are from: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/12/ehrlich/377016/
Many of Ehrlich’s appearances and quotes are sourced from this excellent NY Times piece, specifically the India part: The Population Bomb? | Retro Report | The New York Times
Hvistendahl section taken from the referenced book: Hvistendahl, Mara. Unnatural selection: Choosing boys over girls, and the consequences of a world full of men. Public Affairs, 201
Raw correlations between population size and GDP per capita: https://medium.com/@davidsmits_55886/population-size-and-country-performance-fafae7df7374
Coal resources of Great Britain: https://nmrs.org.uk/mines-map/coal-mining-in-the-british-isles/collieries-of-the-british-isles/
Current Coal usage: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/coal-power-has-effectively-died-in-the-united-kingdom
UK GDP stats: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/uk-log-of-real-gdp-per-capita-in-2011-us
Metal prices and quantities are from the aforementioned excellent Hannah Ritchie article on the bet: https://ourworldindata.org/simon-ehrlich-bet
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