In 1980, the economist Julian Simon took to the pages of Social Science Quarterly to place a bet against his intellectual rival, the biologist Paul Ehrlich. The Population Bomb , Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, had argued that the staggering growth of the human species threatened to jeopardize life on Earth. Simon insisted that, contrary to Ehrlich’s predictions, humanity would not self-destruct by overusing the planet’s resources. Instead, Simon believed that humans would innovate their way out of