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Why Is It So Hard to Predict the Future? - The Atlantic

theatlantic.com · 2,302 words · saved by 2 readers

Credentialed authorities are comically bad at predicting the future. But reliable forecasting is possible.

The bet was on, and it was over the fate of humanity. On one side was the Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb , Ehrlich insisted that it was too late to prevent a doomsday apocalypse resulting from overpopulation. Resource shortages would cause hundreds of millions of starvation deaths within a decade. It was cold, hard math: The human population was growing exponentially; the food supply was not. Ehrlich was an accomplished butterfly specialist. He knew that nature did not regulate animal populations delicately. Populations exploded, blowing past t

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