Jennie Bristow in Spiked laments plunging post-pandemic school attendance, which recently prompted the UK government to launch…an ad campaign. The social contract among schools, parents and teachers was not, however, broken by the Covid-19 lockdowns, Bristow argues. As damaging as the school closures were – resulting in 100,000 chronically truant “ghost children” – the overall problem is even larger and longer-term.
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.
