The Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of populist parties attest to deeply-rooted challenges to liberalism’s underlying premises. Writing in The Critic, Nick Timothy reviews two new books documenting liberalism’s naïveté and subsequent geopolitical failures. To put things right, argues Timothy, we need to chart a course that is both conservative and pragmatic.
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.
