Twice before, Western civilization has collapsed utterly, triggering half a millennium of darkness. At Blade of Perseus, Victor Davis Hanson wonders whether our current iteration, which delivered “constitutional government, rationalism, liberty, freedom of expression, self-critique, and free markets,” is due for its own catastrophic fall. “Salad-bowl tribalism replacing assimilation” is among the issues gripping Hanson, as is that “fertility has dived well below 2.0 in almost every Western country.”
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.
