Virtually shutting down the economy to stop the spread of the coronavirus has been widely accepted as harsh but necessary in many countries. But poverty too is a disease: once it infects, it spreads and it devastates lives. Heather MacDonald, writing in Spectator USA, assesses the costs of the metastasizing economic shutdown.
At Least He Paid his Losing Bet
Paul Ehrlich, author of the spectacularly incorrect 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb, recently died at 93. Despite his longevity, Ronald Bailey points out in Reason, Ehrlich did not live to see even one of his numerous apocalyptic predictions come true. The world’s population certainly grew, but not merely larger, richer and fatter too. Most famously, Ehrlich once bet economist Julian Simon that the world was approaching economic collapse – but in 1990 had to mail Simon a cheque.
