PREDICTIONS: JIMMY THE GREEK, PAUL EHRLICH AND THE ART OF BEING WRONG.

PREDICTIONS: JIMMY THE GREEK, PAUL EHRLICH AND THE ART OF BEING WRONG. The track record for predictions for Malthus has not been good, but Malthus is a name known to most. Making a wildly wrong prediction can make a career. Jimmy the Greek became a national figure by picking the Baltimore Colts to beat the New York Jets by 18 points in the third Super Bowl, a much bigger margin than other sports figures predicted. When the Jets won, Jimmy the Greek. who had been wrong by the biggest margin, became a legend. Paul Ehrlich made dramatic predictions of famines in the seventies in which hundreds of millions would die. “All of the former’s [Ehrlich’s] grim predictions had been decisively overturned by events. Ehrlich was wrong about higher natural resource prices, about “famines of unbelievable proportions” occurring by 1975, about “hundreds of millions of people starving to death” in the 1970s and ’80s, about the world “entering a genuine age of scarcity.” In 1990, for his having promoted “greater public understanding of environmental problems,” Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. The quotes are from the account of his bets with the economist Julian Simon in Wikipedia. Julian Simon won all the wagers, but remained less well known.