The United States, a nation once thought automatically prosperous, is suddenly thrown back on its essentials. Although the current unrest appears to be about race, Joel Kotkin argues in The American Mind they are more rooted in class. America, he says, has produced young, growing and multi-racial class of neo-serfs with few economic prospects and little hope.
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.
