We don’t need to look far to find Gwyn Morgan’s “magically imagined world” (above). For decades, California pursued environmental policies “tethered to reality by the slenderest of threads,” to channel P.G. Wodehouse. Victor Davis Hanson, writing in National Review, recounts how a once-innovative and prosperous state has devolved into a civilization in near ruins.
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.
