Paul Erlich is Dead, his Environmentalism is (still) refuted

Environmentalist Paul Erlich alarmed the world back in 1968 predicting a "population explosion" which forecast “the greatest cataclysm in the history of man” -- food shortages escalating hunger and starvation “into famines of unbelievable proportions.”

In the obituary for the 93-year-old doom-monger, who died this week, the New York Times called his predictions "premature." But they weren't even wrong. They didn't happen, and they never will. (See above for how cataclysmically wrong the catastrophiser really was.)

Some of his other failed and frankly nasty predictions:

• "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."
• "In ten years [this was 1970] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish."
• "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."
• “Sometime in the next 15 years the end will come, and by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
• “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun."
• “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”
• "We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."

Yet despite being wrong about everything, the failed forecaster made a million and was showered with awards.

He never recanted.

Doom sells. Sadly. Still.

He was a gambler. A few years back, I wrote about a famous bet, for which this is the winning cheque:

Several decades ago, gloom-monger Paul Erlich and techno-optimist Julian Simon had a bet.

Erlich was certain resources were running out and humanity was doomed. Simon asserted they weren't and wouldn't be. The bet was that, by the end of that decade, a basket of resources chosen by Erlich would cost more to buy — more, said Erlich, because by then those resources would be running out. Less, said Simon in reponse. (Simon, you see, was confident that the ultimate resource, from which all others derive, is the human mind — a machine for turning shit into useful stuff.) 

Simon won. 

Resources weren't running out. 

They still aren't.

The "Simon Abundance Index" (SAI, below),which measures the relative abundance of resources since that bet, now stands at 609.4. Meaning that in 2023, the Earth was 509.4 percent more abundant in 2023 than it was in 1980!

How astonishing is that! World population since 1980 has almost doubled; while resources produced by human beings have multiplied by more than five times!! 

Turns out that as global population increases, that "virtually all resources became more abundant. How on earth (literally) is that possible?"

Unlike Erlich and the sundry other doom-sayers who litter the planet today, Simon recognised that without the knowledge of how to use them, raw materials have no economic value whatsoever. They are just so much stuff. What transforms a raw material into a resource is knowledge — knowledge of how that stuff might satisfy a human need, and how to place it in a causal connection to satisfy that need. (The great Carl Menger explained this process way back in 1870!) And since new knowledge is potentially limitless, so too are resources.

 Infinite, because the ultimate resource is the human mind.

In this sense, as George Reisman puts it, environmentalism is refuted.

The Simon Abundance Index: 1980-2023 (1980=100)

Marian Tupy points out some interesting parallels with other catastrophisers:

1. Malthus published his book on English overpopulation and overconsumption in 1798. Thereafter, the population of England rose, and the prices of wheat fell relative to wages.
2. Marx published 'Das Kapital' in 1867, arguing that workers' wages would be squeezed to zero by capitalist competition (based on a much-debated and probably incorrect "Engels' Pause"). Thereafter, English wages skyrocketed.
3. Ehrlich published his book about coming global famines in 1968. Thereafter, global famines collapsed, and standards of living across much of the world rose.

Forget these failed forecasters. Sign up to Tupy's Human Progress agenda instead.

RELATED:

"He came up behind him like a librarian": Vale Dennis Cometti (1949-2026)

In the front rank of sporting commentators anywhere was West Australia's Dennis Cometti, who passed away this week.

These were some of his best commentary moments ...

On Charlie Kirk (1993-2025): "A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy."

I agree with very few of Charlie Kirk's points of view, except one. His apparent commitment to open debate. Ezra Klein is on the money:

The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence. To lose that is to risk losing everything. Charlie Kirk — and his family — just lost everything. As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything, too. ... 

You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it.... 

That was not all Kirk’s doing, but he was central in laying the groundwork for it. I did not know Kirk and I am not the right person to eulogize him. But I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness. In the inaugural episode of his podcast, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California hosted Kirk, admitting that his son was a huge fan. What a testament to Kirk’s project.

And what a hell of a time to be American. 

Bob Jones: "proof, if any were needed, that God doesn’t make the same mistake twice."

"I detested Bob Jones for many years. My loathing had its genesis in the run-up to the 1975 election when Bob was the brains and financial brawn behind billboards mushrooming across the capital depicting Labour leader, the able, affable and unfailingly courteous Bill Rowling as a timid mouse. It was a malicious propaganda campaign that contributed hugely to the landslide victory of National’s coarse, unfailingly belligerent Rob Muldoon. ...

"[W]hen our paths finally crossed [in 1979] at a cartoon exhibition ... I sported a flaming-red lumberjack beard and had a ginger Jimi Hendrix Afro to disguise my receding hair that wasn’t fooling anyone – least of all Bob. He said, “You’re losing your hair, old man, and you’re fat!” I told Bob that next time I drew him I would make him look even more like PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, who he uncannily resembled. ...

"Early on I had no reason to report on Bob in my Listener columns, but in 1983, disgusted with the National government’s wage and price freeze and authoritarian ways, he formed the New Zealand Party with the express intention of removing his old chum Rob Muldoon from office. This left me no option but to cover him. He was great copy, amusing and disarmingly candid to the point where the news media often had to protect him from himself.

"Bob invented Fake News long before it became a thing. After Muldoon called the snap election in 1984, [his] New Zealand Party swung into action and selected an impressive raft of candidates. Bob allowed television news crews a quick peek from the door into their campaign headquarters in downtown Wellington – it resembled the Houston space flight control centre on steroids. Gorgeous women sat at clacking keyboards and flickering screens while fax machines and printers buzzed and hummed. Bob told me later that computer companies renting office space from him were induced to provide the electronics and he provided the women. It was an elaborate ruse designed to demoralise National and it worked. Their normally well-oiled machine corked and hamstrung morale, and discipline crumbled. ...

"I attended a rowdy lunchtime speech Bob gave standing on a trestle table in the smoko room of the local freezing works. Taking questions from the floor Bob was asked by a burly slaughterman if New Zealand’s problems stemmed from our short, three-year parliamentary term, meaning economic policy changed all the time, and as a result 'interest rates went up and down like a whore’s drawers.' 'Can I just correct you there,' grinned Bob, 'trust me on this, whores don’t wear drawers!' Deafening applause, the stamping of boots on concrete and hearty laughter rolled on for ages. ...

"Despite running the best campaign, saturation advertising and Bob’s noisy, colourful presence ... David Lange’s Fourth Labour Government romped into office. Despite getting 12 percent of the vote and contributing to National’s crushing loss, the NZ Party failed to win a seat. [But it was their manifesto that Lange's Government implemented - Ed.] ...

"Bob’s death, while a shock, was not entirely unexpected – for most of his life he burnt millions of candles at both ends. There was no one else like him and there will never be anyone like him again, proof, if any were needed, that God doesn’t make the same mistake twice."

~ Tom Scott from his obituary ahead of today's memorial service for Bob Jones: 'Tom Scott farewells Bob Jones'. Read on there for Steve Braunias's postscript on the very best of Jones's twenty-four books ...

Vale Bruce Moon (1930-2025)

Renegade historian Bruce Moon passed away peacefully yesterday morning. Many NOT PC readers will be aware of his work, perhaps from his contributions to the books 'Twisting the Treaty' or 'One Treaty, One Nation' (to which I also contributed), or from one of his many articles, letters, or submissions to Parliament.

Roger Child's obituary below gives us a glimpse of the man we have lost. 

The passing of leading historian Bruce Moon

By Roger Childs

"Of all the fake history with which New Zealand is swamped today, nothing is more

blatant than the claim that “Aotearoa” is, or was, the Maori name for our country."

~ Bruce Moon

Sadly I never met Bruce Moon face to face, but we did exchange scores of e-mails. Like Waikanae’s John Robinson, Bruce was a mathematician and scientist who came to history later in life. Like many of us, he couldn’t believe how many so called “respected historians” like Anne Salmond, Jock Phillips and Vincent O’Malley twisted elements of our country’s story, notably the history of Maori-Settler relations, and of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Bruce was a stickler for evidence-based history—taking notice of what people who witnessed the actual events had to say. (In his writing he was meticulous in citing his sources.) He rejected “presentism” and the dishonesty of many Maori activists and their fellow-travelers in looking back at events from a one-sided point of view, often without quoting references.

He was also dismayed at the obsession of the mainstream media in promoting the view that Natives/New Zealanders (only called “Maori” from the 1840s), had been given a hard time by settler governments, when in the Treaty of Waitangi —and in subsequent legislation like the establishment of four special seats in parliament and votes for women —they had been treated humanely.

No Maori land was “stolen,” his writing argued, and confiscations only occurred when forewarned tribes rebelled against the government. Compare the Maori’s experience of colonisation with Aborigines in Australia, the black tribes of South Africa and Native Americans in the United States.

A distinguished career

Bruce Moon was born in Christchurch in 1930 and after attending Southland Boys High School he took his degree at Otago University, majoring in mathematics. He pursued a career in computer science, working in this field in England, Australia and New Zealand. In 1981 he became General Manger of Business Computers Limited. He was a Past President of the NZ Computer Society.

Later he lectured in mathematics at Canterbury University, rising to become Associate Professor. After retiring he taught mathematics and science in a mission school in Vanuatu; was a volunteer in an Indian village for disabled people; and taught English and physics to Tibetan refugees.

When he started looking closely at New Zealand history late in life, he was amazed at how some historians twisted the truth,  basing their conclusions too often on unreliable oral history.

Bruce was also appalled at Maori academics making connections between modern-day events and past treatment of Maori.  In commenting on the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attacks, for example, Waikato University’s Leonie Pihama and Tom Roa claimed that Maori had been victims to acts of terrorism in Aotearoa in the past. Bruce took them to task in a long open letter which ended: "I accuse you of using the tragic events in Christchurch for an inexcusable attempt to advance a racist political agenda and in contempt of the fine principles of scholarship which a university should stand by."

Speaking the truth to all

For some people, Bruce Moon was a man to fear! Some years ago he was scheduled to speak on 'Twisting the Treaty and other Fake History' in Nelson, but the Council was worried there would be trouble, so would not allow one of their venues to be used. The talk now called 'A Jaundiced View of the Treaty' was held later with no problems. Not surprisingly, the House Full sign went up.

The fight at Rangiaohia [sic] for the recovery of McHale’s body, February 21 1864 (excerpt, colourised), by L.A. Wilson

A few years back Stuff made the ludicrous decision to apologise to Maori for nasty things Stuff-owned papers had said in the past. These articles, claiming to correct untruths of the past, used as their sources people like  tribal leaders and "woke" historian Vincent O’Malley. One article repeated the lies about a “massacre” at Rangiaowhia in 1864. Quite independently, Bruce and I protested in letters to the paper. Unsurprisingly neither was published.  [One of Bruce's articles on which his letter is based is here. My own piece on the incidents at Rangiaowhia, and some of their context, is here. - Ed.]

When Hamilton’s Bishop Stephen Lowe preached a sermon in 2021 about the “massacre,” he also wrote to the Catholic bishops of New Zealand. In the letter he explained the truth about General Cameron’s largely peaceful occupation of the town, and dispelled the myths about a “massacre.” In Bruce’s words, the bishops addressed had neither the courtesy nor the courage to reply.

Bruce will be greatly missed

It is wonderful that Bruce lasted into his mid-nineties. To the end he remained a staunch advocate for getting our history right, and ensuring that our children are taught the truth.

He was a contributor to the excellent Tross publication One Treaty, One Nation with articles on 'There is Only One Treaty' and 'A Very Greedy Tribe – Ngai Tahu.' He also assembled the best of his writings and letters in a collection titled New Zealand: The Fair Colony.

A stickler for truth, evidence, honesty and fairness, Bruce will long be remembered as one of New Zealand’s greatest historians— one with courage and integrity and decency.  He was truly both a gentleman and a scholar.

* * * * 

Roger Childs is a writer and freelance journalist. 

He is a former history and geography teacher, who wrote or co-authored 10 school textbooks. 

His article previously appeared at the Waikenae Watch website.

Vale Bob Newhart

 

"I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who do like country music, denigrate means 'put down'."

~ comedian Bob Newhart, died at 94 — the man after whom Billy T. James named his new heart. You can tell how old he was 'cos he was making jokes about tobacco...

"The capitalist system was termed 'capitalism' not by a friend of the system, but by Karl Marx" [updated]

"The capitalist system was termed 'capitalism' not by a friend of the system, but by an individual who considered it to be the worst of all historical systems, the greatest evil that had ever befallen mankind. That man was Karl Marx. Nevertheless, there is no reason to reject Marx’s term, because it describes clearly the source of the great social improvements brought about by capitalism. 

    "Those improvements are the result of capital accumulation; they are based on the fact that people, as a rule, do not consume everything they have produced, that they save—and invest—a part of it. 

    "There is a great deal of misunderstanding about this ... [not least that] capitalist savings benefit workers.

"An often unrealised fact about capitalism is this: savings mean benefits for all those who are anxious to produce or to earn wages. When a man has accrued a certain amount of money—let us say, one thousand dollars—and, instead of spending it, entrusts these dollars to a savings bank or an insurance company, the money goes into the hands of an entrepreneur, a businessman, enabling him to go out and embark on a project which could not have been embarked on yesterday, because the required capital was unavailable.
    "What will the businessman do now with the additional capital? The first thing he must do, the first use he will make of this additional capital, is to go out and hire workers and buy raw materials—in turn causing a further demand for workers and raw materials to develop, as well as a tendency toward higher wages and higher prices for raw materials. Long before the saver or the entrepreneur obtains any profit from all of this, the unemployed worker, the producer of raw materials, the farmer, and the wage- earner are all sharing in the benefits of the additional savings.
    "When the entrepreneur will get something out of the project depends on the future state of the market and on his ability to anticipate correctly the future state of the market. But the workers as well as the producers of raw materials get the benefits immediately....
    "The scornful depiction of capitalism by some people as a system designed to make the rich become richer and the poor become poorer is wrong from beginning to end. Marx’s thesis regarding the coming of socialism was based on the assumption that workers were getting poorer, that the masses were becoming more destitute, and that finally all the wealth of a country would be concentrated in a few hands or in the hands of one man only. And then the masses of impoverished workers would finally rebel and expropriate the riches of the wealthy proprietors....
    "If we look upon the history of the world, and especially upon the history of England since 1865, we realize that Marx was wrong in every respect. There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way. All these improvements of the last eighty or ninety years were made in spite of the prognostications of Karl Marx.
    "We must realise, however, that this higher standard of living depends on the supply of capital. ... A country becomes more prosperous in proportion to the rise in the invested capital per unit of its population."

~ Ludwig Von Mises, from the collection of six of his lectures titled Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow, and in Brazil under the title As Seis Lições (The Six Lessons) [hat tip Renato Moicano]

UPDATE:  Sad news just in that economic historian Robert Hessen has just died. David R. Henderson remembers him, and quotes from his contribution to the Concise Encylopaedia of Economics on Capitalism. 

"Capitalism,” a term of disparagement coined by socialists in the mid-nineteenth century, is a misnomer for “economic individualism,” which Adam Smith earlier called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” (Wealth of Nations).   Economic individualism’s basic premise is that the pursuit of self-interest and the right to own private property are morally defensible and legally legitimate. Its major corollary is that the state exists to protect individual rights. Subject to certain restrictions, individuals (alone or with others) are free to decide where to invest, what to produce or sell, and what prices to charge. There is no natural limit to the range of their efforts in terms of assets, sales, and profits; or the number of customers, employees, and investors; or whether they operate in local, regional, national, or international markets.

Here’s another great paragraph:

In early-nineteenth-century England the most visible face of capitalism was the textile factories that hired women and children. Critics (Richard Oastler and Robert Southey, among others) denounced the mill owners as heartless exploiters and described the working conditions—long hours, low pay, monotonous routine—as if they were unprecedented. Believing that poverty was new, not merely more visible in crowded towns and villages, critics compared contemporary times unfavourably with earlier centuries. Their claims of increasing misery, however, were based on ignorance of how squalid life actually had been earlier. Before children began earning money working in factories, they had been sent to live in parish poorhouses; apprenticed as unpaid household servants; rented out for backbreaking agricultural labor; or became beggars, vagrants, thieves, and prostitutes. The precapitalist “good old days” simply never existed (see industrial revolution and the standard of living).

And:

Despite these constraints, which worked sporadically and unpredictably, the benefits of capitalism were widely diffused. Luxuries quickly were transformed into necessities. At first, the luxuries were cheap cotton clothes, fresh meat, and white bread; then sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods, and musical instruments; then automobiles, washing machines, clothes dryers, and refrigerators; then telephones, radios, televisions, air conditioners, and freezers; and most recently, TiVos, digital cameras, DVD players, and cell phones. ...

That these amenities had become available to most people did not cause capitalism’s critics to recant, or even to relent. Instead, they ingeniously reversed themselves. Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse proclaimed that the real evil of capitalism is prosperity, because it seduces workers away from their historic mission—the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism—by supplying them with cars and household appliances, which he called “tools of enslavement.”Some critics reject capitalism by extolling “the simple life” and labeling prosperity mindless materialism. In the 1950s, critics such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Vance Packard attacked the legitimacy of consumer demand, asserting that if goods had to be advertised in order to sell, they could not be serving any authentic human needs. They charged that consumers are brainwashed by Madison Avenue and crave whatever the giant corporations choose to produce and advertise, and complained that the “public sector” is starved while frivolous private desires are being satisfied. And having seen that capitalism reduced poverty instead of intensifying it, critics such as Gar Alperovitz and Michael Harrington proclaimed equality the highest moral value, calling for higher taxes on incomes and inheritances to massively redistribute wealth, not only nationally but also internationally.

Shane MacGowan (1957-2023)

 

"Yes, the greatest songwriter of the Eighties has left us. The man who singlehandedly resuscitated traditional Irish music, and spiked it with the din of London punk, has retired to the great drinking establishment in the sky. He was 65. Younger generations will never understand how crazy it is that Shane MacGowan made it to retirement age. ...
    "Yet even as we marvel at the length of MacGowan’s life, and the almost studied debauchery of it, we must honour its achievements, too. They are legion. ...

"Originally called Pogue Mahone – Irish for ‘kiss my arse’ – the Pogues diplomatically whittled their name down in the early Eighties. They burst on to the music scene with their album Red Roses for Me in 1984. That was the year of the New Romantics and Band Aid. Of men in make-up looking earnest next to smoke machines on Top of the Pops and Bob Geldof’s sad-eyed minions wondering if the starving folk of Ethiopia even know it’s Christmas. (Sixty-five per cent of them are Christians, so I’m guessing they do, yes.) Then along comes this hybrid Irish / London band, part-trad, part-punk, as if Brendan Behan and Johnny Rotten had defied the laws of nature and had offspring, singing ‘The Auld Triangle’ and ‘Poor Paddy’ and ‘Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go’. No wonder Melody Maker described Red Roses for Me as brilliant but ‘strangely irrelevant’, like ‘a particularly bloody two-fingered [gesture] aimed at all things considered current and fashionable in 1984’. Yes, quite correct....

"They were the cultural outliers who inspired wild devotion among fans. MacGowan declared himself the enemy of pop worthiness, a one-man screw-you to the po-faced bent of so much Eighties pop. Asked why his punkish Irish outfit enjoyed so much success, he said‘[because] we weren’t a faggot and a guy with a synthesiser’. ... No one wanted ‘another bunch of straights playing “world music”’ either, he said. They ‘wanted the Pogues’, they wanted ‘nutters’. It’s true, we did....
    "We will see a lot of Pogues nostalgia in the coming days. MacGowan will be praised to the hilt by people who would have cancelled him in a heartbeat if he emerged today....
    "Ireland’s Taoiseach, Tánaiste and president will pay tribute to MacGowan. Even as they trounce the Ireland he represented. Even as they rush through hate-speech laws that would potentially have led to someone like MacGowan being dragged to court for his sinful utterance of a word like ‘faggot’....
    "His music will outlive these people. It will survive cancel culture. It will outlast a pop scene where binding one’s breasts and saying ‘I love Greta’ are insanely considered acts of rebellion. ‘We watched our friends grow up together / And we saw them as they fell / Some of them fell into Heaven / Some of them fell into Hell’, he sings on ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’. Let’s hope he’s falling into Heaven today. He deserves it.

~ Brendan O'Neill, from his post 'The last Irish rebel'

“The consequences for human welfare involved in questions [of economic growth] are simply staggering" - Vale Robert Lucas

“The consequences for human welfare involved in questions [of economic growth] are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.”

~ the most-quoted line from the just-deceased Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas [hat tip Roots of Progress]

Vale historian Paul Johnson, (1928-2023)

 

Source: Daily Telegraph

I'm disappointed this morning to hear that historian Paul Johnson has died -- aged 94, it seems!

I haven't read him for a while, but I did, many years ago. In some ways he provided my introduction to a lot of 19th and 20th century history through his two books Birth of the Modern, and Modern Times, which is still a masterful account of the post-colonial independence movements around the post-WWII-world. I still reflect occasionally on his comment in the latter that New Zealand represents a lonely beacon with a unique respect for individual human lives.

He wrote well, and broadly -- both things rare these days in a historian.  Those two books above remain my two favourites of his. 

Others I rate would be his A History of the American People (he rates the creation of the United States, with only slight hyperbole, as "the greatest of all human adventures" -- "no other national story holds so many tremendous lessons," he says) -- and Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre & Chomsky, in which he "revels in the wickedness" of so many who have shaped history for the worst. None emerge well. It's less an attack on their ideas than on the distance between their ideas and their private lives. Of Marx, for example, he reveals that he never went near a factory in his life, that many of the most lubricious 'facts' related in Das Kapital were from long-out-of-date government reports scarcely reflective of contemporary working conditions, and that maybe the only exploited labourer he every knew personally was his maid -- whom he impregnated, forcing the child into an orphanage, and never paid her a cent for her work.

He visited New Zealand in 1995, at the invitation of the Business Roundtable, and you can still read the talks he delivered here. One topic seems especially relevant today...

As an author, he was prolific. He was reputed to write in a small study in his house, a "writing machine" lined with book shelves all within arm's reach, which he pre-loaded with pre-prepared file cards (see pic above) and all the books necessary for his forthcoming tome. I've tried that too. It takes a lot of books!

"His stream of books was almost torrential," writes Theodore Dalrymple in his obituary of the man. "Perhaps his biggest and most influential one was Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties(1983)."

"What Johnson called 'gangster despots' came to dominate the history of the first half of the twentieth century, and he was scarcely more flattering about the self-proclaimed liberators of the second half. Even those who did not altogether approve of, or share, his historical outlook admitted that this book was a tour de force. 'Modern Times' influenced a generation of American conservatives....
    "Johnson liked nothing more than to infuriate by means of iconoclastic polemic. His book 'Intellectuals' (1988) provided potted biographies of such revered figures as Rousseau, Marx, and Tolstoy, demonstrating what rotters they all were in their personal lives. This was not exactly an exercise in scientific method, but it was good fun and gave pleasure to those who distrust intellectual gurus. It also gave rise to insinuations that Johnson himself did not always quite live up to the moral ideals that he so fiercely propounded in public.
    "He coined striking phrases—Hitler’s views, for example, were 'the syphilis of antisemitism in its tertiary phase'—and he could never be accused of mealy-mouthedness. His views, though somewhat changeable, were expressed with vigour approaching dogmatism, though they were always well-informed. You knew where you stood with him.
    "It is customary to say of remarkable men that we shall not see their like again. Whatever may be the case with other remarkable men, this is likely to be true of Paul Johnson. It is unlikely that anyone will tackle so huge a range of subjects again with such knowledge and verve."

Johnson is somewhat of a litmus test for contemporary times. Without changing his own views substantially -- he was, and remained, an individualist -- he was first seen as a proud and leading member of Britain's intellectual left (he as editor for a time of the New Statesman) and then as a Thatcherite; in the US he was enthusiastically embraced by a generation of conservatives (as Dalrymple relates above), then dropped for being too "challenging."

For one thing, his conservatism was unmistakably 'Thatcherite' and had free market undertones, which are less popular now than they used to be. For another, Johnson was a polemicist but his books (and his understanding of history) are rich with nuances. And that doesn’t go very well with the Zeitgeist, left or right.

This says more, of course, about the changing periods through which he lived and wrote, than it does about Johnson himself. A fact the great historian would no doubt have found fascinating.

"...Gorbachev’s legacy falls far short of the praise heaped on it."

"Although he foresaw and avoided the deadly consequences of both armed conflict in Soviet republics and the continuation of Cold War hostilities, Gorbachev’s legacy falls far short of the praise heaped on it. Instead, the final Soviet leader’s legacy should serve to illuminate the evils of communism and collectivism more broadly. As Ayn Rand said, 'Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.' Gorbachev’s reign demonstrated the terror and destruction that follow from subordinating individual rights to the state, a lesson that the Western leaders who praised him would do well to learn."

~ Nicholas Baum, from his obituary 'Does Gorbachev Deserve All the Praise'

PJ O'Rourke (1947-2022)

 Unfortunately, it's time to re-post your memories of or pics of yourself with PJ O'Rourke.

Funny as hell he may have been*, but by God he was a short-arse:

PJ in Auckland 2009, complete with adoring rabble

* Alright, yes, he was the funniest libertarian there has even been, and likely now ever will be. 

Bloody sad. Nothing to laugh about here.

Bloody cancer.

Sidney Poitier (1927 - 2022) [updated]

 

One of my heroes has just died, at the age of 94. In every role he played, actor Sidney Poitier was the very model of dignity, intelligence and resolve. And he invariably had a twinkle in his eye too. 

If you haven't before, I strongly recommend you catch up with my three favourites of all his films:

1. In the Heat of the Night
2. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and
3. Raisin in the Sun.

It's literally true to say that they don't make them like this anymore. Neither the films, nor the man.

UPDATE:

Sidney Poitier on the press's reductive focus on his 'blackness' [hat tip @FreeBlackThought]: 

"You ask me one-dimensional questions about...the Negro-ness of my life. I am artist, man, American, contemporary. I am an awful lot of things, so I wish you would pay me the respect due."

Context: 

"Why is it that you guys are hounds for bad news? At this moment, you could ask me many questions about many positive & wonderful things that are happening in this country. But we gather here to pay court to sensationalism... to negativism."

Julie Burchill on 'The Beauty and Importance of Sidney Poitier':

As Martin Scorsese put it, ‘He had a vocal precision and physical power and grace that at moments seemed almost supernatural’....

He played men of science and of academia and of action. Virgil Tibbs, from In the Heat of the Night, was a detective and expert in forensic deduction who insisted on being called Mr Tibbs. In To Sir, With Love, Poitier tells his delinquent, mainly white, teenage pupils, ‘You will show respect to me and each other at all times. You will address me as “Sir” or “Mr Thackeray”. Boys will be addressed by their last names; the girls will be likewise addressed, and as “Miss”.’ ...

Poitier was a man of immense self-possession... At a time when the segregation and fetishisation of race is being pushed as a radical act, we have lost a shining example of the fact that the colour of our skin is one of the least interesting aspects of our fascinating humanity.

 

"...economics provides us with is a way to see what makes a society of peace, cooperation, and progress possible."

Steve Horwitz, the libertarian economist whom we've posted here at NOT PC a few times, died yesterday at the cruel age of 57, after a years-long battle with plasma-cell cancer (multiple myeloma).

The comments on his last Facebook post (which is public) give a sense of how much he inspired people.
And this excerpt from a talk he gave in 2019 gives some small idea of why they felt that way:

❝ I want to argue that what an understanding of economics provides us with is a way to see what makes a society of peace, cooperation, and progress possible. The reason to care about economics, and the reason to study it, is not just to understand material well-being, but instead it’s about a much bigger picture: how we cooperate in a world of strangers and diversity, and how we turn that cooperation into better and longer and more peaceful lives for more people….
    Through this process, exchange brings strangers into each of our communities, and helps transform them from a potential enemy to a friend. We trade across differences all of the time, and there’s no better way of reducing the suspicions and stereotypes about 'the other' than to enter into a mutually beneficial exchange relationship with them….
    Nothing symbolises this better than the 'double thank-you' of the marketplace. How often when we conclude an exchange do both parties say “thank you?” That’s symbolic of the mutual benefit, cooperation, and interdependency that markets and liberalism create. It’s a world of peaceful human cooperation and progress captured in the simplest of acts. It is also, I should note, an expression of gratitude to the other party. And gratitude for the bounty that markets and liberalism have given us is in short supply these days.
    We live in a world of secular miracles, not the least of which are the drugs that are beating back diseases and extending human lives, including a bunch that have made it possible for me to be here tonight. The poorest of Westerners lives far better than the kings of old, and many of the global poor have access to all the world’s knowledge in their pockets….
    We’ve learned that the positive-sum game of the liberal order is better at producing the world of Micah’s vision than the zero- and negative-sum games of plunder, whether feudal or socialist. Or nationalist. An increased understanding of economics helped make this happen and has sustained it in the face of enemies, old and new.
    Unfortunately, we are at a dangerous point of losing this learning these days thanks to the revival of the forces of nationalism and socialism. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I do think that liberals need to engage in some self-reflection about whether our own rhetoric and way of talking about economics and liberalism don’t bear some responsibility for our dilemma. How often do we speak of markets as sources of not just prosperity, but prosperity for the least well off? How often do we speak of markets as the cause of peace and social cooperation and mutual interdependence? How often do we talk about how markets have humanised us and reduced our propensity to violence, and turned strangers into honorary friends or kin? It’s important to stress the material wealth that markets produce, but the point of even that is enabling us to live lives of peace, cooperation, and security.
    Perhaps more focus on economics as the study of peaceful human social cooperation and how markets and liberalism enable us to bridge our differences and leverage our diversity can bring more people who are concerned with peace, prosperity, and progress to appreciate the study of economics and the institutions of the liberal order as a means to those social ends. ❞

[Hat tip John Althouse Cohen and David Pritchard]

Vale John Ridpath

 

I'm posting this video today of this landmark debate to mark the passing of John Ridpath, the professor of intellectual history who largely dominates it. [Bookamark it and come back to it again when you have time.] I know many New Zealanders have seen it, and enjoyed it -- and been persuaded by it to rethink many of their views -- so will join with me in mourning the passing of this articulate, passionate man with a deep well of well-integrated knowledge he was always eager (and very able) to share.

His lectures on his field of intellectual history were mind-expanding. I was lucky enough to enjoy one in person, to see his intellect up close: a series in London on "how Say's Law integrates all of economics" literally tied up the whole field of study with one bow -- and then integrated it with all of human endeavour. It was astounding.

Tie that to what became a near-annual tribute at Objectivist conferences to the founding of America -- the first nation of the Enlightenment -- at which he unfailingly came to tears when telling of the final victory at Yorktown, and you may understand how his broad intellect fired his passions: and that he understood that freedom, and its birth, to be so selfishly important. That he was Canadian, and not American, indicates simply that he knew it also to be universally important.

The Ayn Rand Institute has posted this brief tribute:

Dr. Ridpath was an emeritus associate professor of economics and intellectual history at York University in Toronto, Canada, and featured Rand’s ideas in his courses at the university. During his long career, he received numerous teaching awards and was much sought after throughout Europe and North America as an engaging and charismatic public speaker.
    Dr. Ridpath was outspoken in defense of reason, individualism and capitalism. His writing appeared in, among others, The Objectivist Forum, The Intellectual Activist and The American Journal of Economics and Sociology; he also contributed chapters to Essays on Ayn Rand’s “We the Living” and Why Businessmen Need Philosophy.
    In a powerful 1984 debate, “Capitalism vs. Socialism: Which Is the Moral System?,” Dr. Ridpath joined Dr. Leonard Peikoff to present the moral case for capitalism against two democratic socialists, Gerald Caplan and Jill Vickers. With the permission of the copyright holder, ARI will soon publish the video of that enlightening must-watch debate.
    A topic of special interest to Dr. Ridpath was the impact of philosophic ideas on Western history, particularly America’s Founding era. His course on the philosophic origins of Marxism is available on the Ayn Rand University mobile app and on the ARI Campus website. Additional talks by Dr. Ridpath can be found here.

    The Institute plans to discuss in more depth the contributions Dr. Ridpath has made to the advancement of Ayn Rand’s ideas and the Objectivist movement.

His appeal too was truly universal. A Brazilian reader of Atlas Shrugged posted this brief clip of Ridpath a few years back, saying "this truly captured the way I felt reading Francisco Danconia."

It also truly captures the sense of life of this wonderful intellectual warrior for freedom, Vale, Mr Ridpath. Vale.

"He found ready adversaries among fellow Black Americans, whom he criticized as defining themselves in racial terms and as reducing the broader Black experience to one of victimization." #QotD

"He [Stanley Crouch] found ready adversaries among fellow Black Americans, whom he criticized as defining themselves in racial terms and as reducing the broader Black experience to one of victimization.
    "He vilified gangsta rap as “‘Birth of a Nation’ with a backbeat,” the Rev. Al Sharpton as a “buffoon,” the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “insane,” the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison “as American as P.T. Barnum” and Alex Haley, the author of “Roots,” as “opportunistic.”
     "By contrast, he venerated his intellectual mentors James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who, by his lights, saw beyond the conventions of race and ideology while viewing the contributions of Black people as integral to the American experience.”

~ from the NY Times obituary: 'Stanley Crouch, Critic Who Saw American Democracy in Jazz, Dies at 74'

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"To exist in this vast universe for a speck of time is the great gift of life. It is our only life ... the greatest value we can have. Cherish it for what it truly is ... Rise up and live it.”

 

"To exist in this vast universe for a speck of time is the great gift of life. It is our only life. The universe will go on, indifferent to our brief existence, but while we are here, we touch not just part of that vastness, but also the lives around us. Life is the gift each of us has been given. Each life is our own and no one else's. It is precious beyond all counting. It is the greatest value we can have. Cherish it for what it truly is . . . Your life is yours alone. Rise up and live it.” 

          ~ author Terry Goodkind, quoted as his obituary.

[Hat tip James Valliant]

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Goodbye Mrs Peel

Diana Rigg (1938-2020)

Mike Moore, 1949-2020

On Labour: "It was Nye Bevan ... who said that Labour used to be the cream of the working class. Now it is an intellectual spittoon for the middle class."
~ from his valedictory speech, 1999

"We're full now of people with [an] upper-class nature, [from] private schools, who now lecture to us [working-class people] about what we should do. I find that very funny."
    ~ from the 2017 interview for The Ninth Floor

"How many of those people on Country Calendar do you think vote Labour now? ... Because we’re not seen to be on the side of those who are strivers. I do think we’ve got trouble.”

    ~ from the interview for The Ninth Floor

On leaving parliament: "My friends wanted the best for me, and my enemies wanted to see me go. For once, I was able to please everyone. At last, I enjoyed the total support of my party."

On foreign investment: "The central purpose [of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment] is to ensure that foreign investors are not the subject of discriminatory or xenophobic behaviour on the part of governments in the host country... This is not a new wave of colonisation or the rise of corporatist world government. The Agreement is designed to PROTECT and ENCOURAGE foreign investment because it is such investment that has helped fuel global economic growth and the increasing globalisation of wealth... The MAI will be of the greatest long-term benefit to developing nations."

    ~ from his 1997 recommendation on the agreement to the Labour caucus 

On globalisation: "When the Berlin wall came down, when Nelson Mandela was freed, and when freedom has flourished elsewhere, the world celebrated. We celebrated the universal values of political and economic freedom. No one shouted, cursed and swore about the evils of globalization or common values then."

    ~ from a 2000 speech as Director-General of the WTO

On poverty: "Poor countries need to grow their way out of poverty. Trade is the key engine for growth... Open markets can play an important role in lifting billions of people out of abject poverty...

    "Liberalisation works. The multilateral trading system works. The last 50 years have seen unparalleled prosperity and growth and more has been done to address poverty in these last 50 years than in the previous 500."
    ~ from a 2001 speech as Director-General of the WTO

On freedom: "The more closed the economy, the more corrupt the practices.... We have learnt that freedom works, and as it grows, so do people’s living standards... "
    ~ from a 2002 speech as Director-General of the WTO

On peace and free trade: "Internationalism and globalisation will be to the 21st Century what Nationalism was to the 20th Century. Thus mankind has learnt the most profound lessons of this century from the great depression and the second world war."

    ~ from a 1997 address by Moore to a seminar on “International Liberalisation”

On Keynesianism: “The lesson of the last 25 years tells us that no individual country can anymore successfully prime an economic pump, even Mitterand discovered this in the 80s when, by priming the French pump, all he did was flood his country with imports from Italy and from Germany. He reversed that position."

    ~ from a 1997 address by Moore to a seminar on “International Liberalisation”

On protectionism: "The 1987 stock market crash was greater and deeper than the Wall Street crash of the 20s. But, the world did not plunge into lasting depressions. Leaders nerves held, there wasn’t an orgy of protectionism and tariff increases which exacerbated the 20s crash... We got through it, we have learnt.”

    ~ from a 1997 address by Moore to a seminar on “International Liberalisation”

On global institutions: "The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) have unearned reputations born of the Cold War of being anti-poor, anti-developing countries. The opposite should be the truth. [But] no one believes that any more, except a few deranged misfits on the edges of obscure universities, people who tuck their shirts into their underpants, the remnants of pressure groups and a few geriatrics who claim that Marxism, like Christianity, has not been tried yet.”

    ~ from his 1998 book A Brief History of the Future: Citizenship of the Millennium

On betrayal: "In the end, it's the silence of your friends you remember, not the misdeeds of those who dislike you."

    ~ from the 2017 interview for The Ninth Floor

On Moore: "Mike Moore was like the opposite of L&P: world-famous, just not in New Zealand."

    ~ attributed to Jane Clifton

Here's John Lennon:

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A last word from Philip Roth (1933-2018)

“The road to Hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
~ Philip Roth
   [See: 'Philip Roth, the Incomparable American Novelist, Has Died, Aged Eighty-Five']

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