To judge by the flurry of recent books and articles, liberalism is either dead or in the ICU. Writing in Quillette, Cathy Young advises that we delude ourselves if we believe classical liberal values are approaching their end days. Every attempt to build a utopian post-liberal future, she reminds us, has invariably ended in a regression to barbarism.
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.
