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.
“It’s feeling like something is about to break”
Markos Kounalakis, writing in Washington Monthly, explains that Cuba’s 65-year-old Communist regime – “one of the world’s longest-surviving single-party states and the oldest in the Western Hemisphere” – is on its last legs. Running out of other people’s money is the least of it worries. Says Kounalakis: “President Donald Trump and his team have all but said that they want to topple the government just as soon as he receives Iran’s ‘unconditional surrender.’”
