Bet Blogger To bet or not to bet

Precedent and legacy of the Simon-Ehrlich wager

This bet is admitted by both parties to be a good-natured resurrection of the same spirit and tradition behind the famous Simon-Ehrlich wager which spanned the years 1980-1990.

Tierney was a life-long friend and protégé of the late Julian Simon (the winner of the Simon-Ehrlich wager), and eagerly embraced the opportunity to follow in his mentor’s footsteps. Tierney is (as was Simon) an avowed Cornucopian, believing in the ingenuity of humankind to adapt and improvise. Meanwhile, Simmons’ “Twilight in the Desert” seemed to Tierney to be cut from the same gloom-and-doom cloth as Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, a book published in 1968 which later became the impetus for the Simon-Ehrlich wager. When that well-renowned wager was settled in 1990, Simon’s boomster victory over Ehrlich’s doomster philosophies was heralded as a triumph for Cornucopian economics.

Tierney made unabashed reference to that infamous wager as he gave his apologetic for embarking upon this redux of it:

I didn’t try to argue with [Simmons] about Saudi Arabia, because I know next to nothing about oil production there or anywhere else. I’m just following the advice of a mentor and friend, the economist Julian Simon: if you find anyone willing to bet that natural resource prices are going up, take him for all you can.

The inclusion of Rita Simon

After the bet was agreed upon (but before it was made public) Tierney immediately called Rita Simon, the widow of Julian Simon. She delightedly joined with Tierney’s effort to carry on with her late husband’s legacy, and even financed one half of Tierney’s obligation to the bet by contributing USD$2,500.00 of her own.

Ongoing updates

The price-per-barrel of crude oil is being heavily scrutinized by oil industry watchers aware of this bet. Many peak oil websites make frequent reference to the Simmons-Tierney bet^[1] and some have already begun daily tabulations and adjusted-for-inflation charts on the latest price-per-barrel. (The price-per-barrel of oil at the time of the bet — August 2005 — was around $65.00. The price as of the initial publishing of this article — May 10, 2008 — was $125.96; the record high of $147 in July 2008 was in large part attributable to a weak U.S. dollar.)

With the dramatic drop in demand and prices for many commodities in the economic crisis of 2008, the average per-barrel price for December 2008 reached a post-spike low of $40.88, then steadily climbed back to an average of $78.33 for the month of January 2010.^[2]

Both Simmons and Tierney (as of this writing) have publicly availed their e-mail addresses with a formal and open invitation to anyone else in the general population who might like to make similar wagers.

References

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.