A Bet On Oil
New York Times columnist John Tierney doesn't think oil prices will stay high for long. But this isn't idle speculation. He has bet an energy industry analyst $5,000 that crude oil will not be more than $200 a barrel by 2010.
The wager draws inspiration from one of Tierney's mentors, the late economist Julian Simon, who made an famous bet with ecological doomsayer Paul Ehrlich that the price of five metals would decline in a decade. Ehrlich, known for his dire malthusian prophecies that global famine would strike in the 1970s and 80s, was equally wrong in this prediction, and Simon won the bet handily.
In a similar vein, check out this debunking of a New York Times Sunday Magazine article called "Peak Oil", which tries to argue that world oil demand will pretty much remain higher than output from here on out. Unfortunately, the article essentially refutes itself, as economist Steven Levitt illustrates. I just read Levitt's book, Freakonomics, which he co-wrote with journalist Stephen Dubner. It's 200 of the most informative and entertaining pages you'll read about the dismal science.
Hey Mayor, how are those tar sands coming along?
The wager draws inspiration from one of Tierney's mentors, the late economist Julian Simon, who made an famous bet with ecological doomsayer Paul Ehrlich that the price of five metals would decline in a decade. Ehrlich, known for his dire malthusian prophecies that global famine would strike in the 1970s and 80s, was equally wrong in this prediction, and Simon won the bet handily.
In a similar vein, check out this debunking of a New York Times Sunday Magazine article called "Peak Oil", which tries to argue that world oil demand will pretty much remain higher than output from here on out. Unfortunately, the article essentially refutes itself, as economist Steven Levitt illustrates. I just read Levitt's book, Freakonomics, which he co-wrote with journalist Stephen Dubner. It's 200 of the most informative and entertaining pages you'll read about the dismal science.
Hey Mayor, how are those tar sands coming along?
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