Part 7 (1/2)

James Howard Kunstler is an American but he doesn't like much about the United States. A journalist, social critic, and novelist, Kunstler is famous for his firecracker writing style and his bleak views on suburbia, consumerism, and popular culture. ”Our practices and habits in place-making the past half-century have resulted in human habitat that is ecologically catastrophic, economically insane, socially toxic, spiritually degrading, and fundamentally unsustainable,” he wrote in a typically frenzied burst. ”We have built a land of scary places and become a nation of scary people.”

Kunstler first heard about the Y2K computer glitch in 1998. It was a revelation. ”For five years, I have been flying around the country telling college lecture audiences and conference-goers that our f.u.c.ked-up everyday environment of strip malls, tract houses, outlet malls, parking lots, and other accessories of the national automobile slum was liable to put us out of business as a civilization,” he wrote in an April 1999 essay. ”I a.s.serted that the culture growing in this foul medium had gotten so bloated and diseased that it would succ.u.mb sooner rather than later to its own idiot inertia. I still believe that today. It is both a conviction and a wish, because to go on in our current mode would be culturally suicidal.” Kunstler had no doubt that the slouching beast that is American society would stumble and collapse into the dirt. He likened it to ”evolutionary biology, where organisms achieve their largest scale and greatest complexity at the cost of their ability to adapt to changes in their surroundings. They flourish during periods of extraordinary stability and die off when conditions destabilize. The United Parking Lot of America seemed to me to be just this sort of overgrown, overly complex organism.” But what exactly would kill the creature? When Kunstler heard about Y2K, he had his answer. ”I now see Y2K as the mechanism that will force events to a tipping point much more quickly and surely.”

As we saw earlier, Kunstler's Y2K predictions were very specific and very grim. At a minimum, Y2K would cause a crisis similar to the 1973 oil embargo. But that was just the beginning of the possibilities. There could also be ”a worldwide deflationary depression,” Kunstler wrote. ”I will not be surprised if it is as bad in terms of unemployment and hards.h.i.+p as the 1930s.” War and dictators.h.i.+p were distinct possibilities. Kunstler was also clear about the timing. ”Y2K will not 'strike' at the midnight hour on 1/1/00,” he wrote. ”It will unfold fractally as a series of events over the next several years, with accelerating disruptions across the remainder of 1999, a 'spike' of failures around New Year 2000, and a ripple of consequences acc.u.mulating, amplifying, and reverberating for months and even years afterward. I expect problems with business and government to be evident by the middle of 1999.”

The problems were not evident by the middle of 1999, nor did they appear when 1999 rolled over into 2000. An elevator or two got stuck, but Y2K did not cause a war, a depression, or a recession. It didn't even crash a plane. Just as the failure of a giant sea to cover most of North America demonstrated that Marian Keech's prediction was wrong, the failure of Y2K to cause any notable disaster would seem to be clear disconfirmation of James Howard Kunstler's forecast. But does Kunstler see it that way? In response to an e-mail, Kunstler fired back an 850-word message that can be summarized in one short sentence: I was right.

”What we've been seeing during the past decade might be understood as a kind of 'meta' event, of which the Y2K episode was an early chapter,” he began. ”Overall, this meta-event has been about systemic socioeconomic collapse as a result of overinvestments in hypercomplexity. . . . We are seeing now, ten years later, a full playing out of these trends in the collapse of banking and capital finance, and consequently in the real economy of ordinary business activity and households.” After some more in this vein, Kunstler connected it to the Millennium Bug. ”Y2K was, in my opinion, an early apprehension of the dangers of growing hypercomplexity.” In the late 1990s, computerization ”came on very quickly and it began to dawn on people paying attention that there might be dangerous unintended consequences in turning over control of so many vital activities to complex machines and their algorithms.”

But what exactly does this have to do with the rather straightforward fact that what he predicted would happen did not happen? After two paragraphs about Y2K ”in the psycho-social realm,” Kunstler acknowledged that ”as the 'rollover' date approached, I took the position that we were in for a lot of trouble. The trouble, as it turned out, was averted. This is the part of the story usually overlooked by those who mock the Y2K episode. Billions of dollars were spent, and scores of thousands of man-hours were dedicated, to mitigating this problem. . . . There were no 'cascading' failures of the kind that were most feared. Lots of systems did fail, but not a critical ma.s.s of the largest and most critical ones. The Y2K incident pa.s.sed into history as a joke. I don't think it was a joke. I regard it still as a legitimate potential catastrophe that was averted.”

There are several striking elements in Kunstler's response. First, he understates his prediction-he called for considerably more than ”a lot of trouble”-and overstates the actual damage done by Y2K. This closes some of the gap between the two, easing the cognitive dissonance.

More important is his claim that Y2K was a catastrophe averted by lots of money and hard work. A key fact Kunstler doesn't mention is that throughout 1998 and 1999, there was a steady stream of reports from corporations and governments saying that they were working hard, spending lots of money, and their systems would not fail in the rollover. In his April 1999 essay, Kunstler scoffed at these claims. ”A lot of the information released to the public so far has been self-serving and of questionable value-for instance, reports of Y2K readiness released by government agencies whose chief interests might be 1) covering their own a.s.ses, and 2) trying to quell public concern that could escalate to panic,” he wrote. So Kunstler was either wrong about Y2K or he was wrong about Y2K remediation efforts. In either event, he made a mistake. But looking back, he doesn't see any error.

Another omission in Kunstler's response is considerably more revealing. Anyone even slightly familiar with the Y2K issue knows there is a standard response to the claim that Y2K would have been a catastrophe if vast sums hadn't been spent to fix the problem. It is this: Some corporations and countries-notably Italy, Russia, and South Korea-did not spend vast amounts on Y2K remediation. Their efforts were haphazard at best, and all through 1999 these laggards were criticized for putting themselves and others in jeopardy. But on January 1, 2000, they suffered no worse than anyone else. Korea Telecom did ”nothing” about Y2K, noted Cambridge University computer scientist Ross Anderson in a BBC interview. ”It took the view that, hey, if it breaks we'll fix it. Then you have British Telecom, which was spending five hundred million pounds on bug-fixing. And they couldn't both be right. They were using the same sort of equipment on the same sort of scale. The fascinating thing that we observed in the end is that the Koreans called it right.” Whether or not this is conclusive, it is important evidence and anyone who wants to honestly a.s.sess Y2K must deal with it. But Kunstler didn't even acknowledge it. That's willful blindness, which is precisely what a psychologist would expect to see in a highly committed individual suffering the pangs of cognitive dissonance.

Following the failure of his prediction, Kunstler, like Keech before him, became even more convinced of the beliefs that led him to make the prediction. In 2005, he published The Long Emergency, which reads like an expanded version of his Y2K essay, with the one important exception that Y2K itself has vanished. The sole reference comes when Kunstler mocks those who think fears of ”peak oil” are ”another fantasy brought to us by the same alarmists who said that the Y2K computer bug would bring on the end of the world as we know it.” Readers are not told that Kunstler was one of those alarmists.

Whether The Long Emergency is prescient or silly is something that cannot be decided today because the forecasts Kunstler makes extend decades into the future. We can be reasonably sure, however, that no matter what happens, James Howard Kunstler will believe he was right.

ROBERT HEILBRONER.

Anyone who has studied economics, even briefly, has probably come across Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers, a study of the lives and ideas of the great economists that has been a staple of economics cla.s.ses since it was first published in 1953. But Heilbroner, an American economist, was also a prolific social critic with a keen interest in figuring out how the future would unfold, and he laid out his predictions in a series of books and essays spanning decades. One is particularly famous-and particularly useful for present purposes.

Heilbroner wrote An Inquiry into the Human Prospect in 1972 and 1973. The mood was one of ”puzzlement and despair,” he noted. ”There is a question in the air, more sensed than seen, like the invisible approach of a distant storm, a question I would hesitate to ask aloud did I not believe it existed unvoiced in the minds of many: 'Is there hope for man?'” Like a G.o.d standing at the crest of Olympus, Heilbroner gazed across history and the globe and rendered his verdict: Not really. ”The outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seems to be very slim indeed. Thus, to antic.i.p.ate the conclusions of our inquiry, the answer as to whether we can conceive of the future other than as a continuation of the darkness, cruelty, and disorder of the past seems to me to be no; and to the question of whether worse impends, yes.”

The first of the nightmares afflicting humanity is the population bomb. ”The demographic situation of virtually all of Southeast Asia, large portions of Latin America, and parts of Africa portends a grim Malthusian outcome,” Heilbroner wrote. And don't look to the Green Revolution for salvation. The technical obstacles to growing more food may be insurmountable, and if they were overcome, it would be a disaster-because it would ”enable additional hundreds of millions to reach childbearing age,” which would make everything worse. Thus, there are only two possible futures. ”One is the descent of large portions of the underdeveloped world into steadily worsening social disorder.” There would be starvation, stunted children, declining life expectancies. Nations would descend into near anarchy. The alternative, which Heilbroner thought more likely, is the rise of ”iron” governments, ”probably of a military-socialist cast,” that would hold things together with brute force. These governments would not be so forgiving of the gap in wealth between the world's haves and have-nots, Heilbroner believed, making it likely there would be war between the poor world and the rich. And with nuclear weaponry becoming cheap and easy to develop-even terrorists would have nuclear a.r.s.enals-these wars could mean annihilation. But Heilbroner didn't think it would come to that. It was ”more plausible” that the dictators of the poor world would engage in nuclear blackmail-threatening to incinerate the rich world if suitably large and regular cash payments were not made.

But that wasn't the worst of it, in Heilbroner's view. A more fundamental threat came from the environment and dwindling resources. Pollution would steadily worsen and demand for oil would soon outstrip supplies. Worse still, the climate would change. Industrial activity generates heat as a by-product, Heilbroner wrote, and so, if industry keeps growing, it will eventually generate so much heat the earth will cook. Industrial activity would have to stop or all human life-perhaps all life-would be consumed. In any event, ”one irrefutable conclusion remains. The industrial growth process, so central to the economic and social life of capitalism and Western socialism alike, will be forced to slow down, in all likelihood within a generation or two, and will probably have to give way to decline thereafter.”

So is humanity doomed? Not at all, Heilbroner a.s.sured his readers. ”The human prospect is not a death sentence. It is not an inevitable doomsday to which we are headed, although the risk of enormous catastrophes exists.” It's more like ”a contingent life sentence-one that will permit the continuance of human society, but only on a basis very different from the present, and probably only after much suffering in the period of transition.” Unfortunately, that new basis would be brutal authoritarianism in the United States and other developed countries because only such governments would have the strength to see us through the dark days ahead. These new regimes would feature a government that ”blends a 'religious' orientation with a 'military' discipline,” Heilbroner wrote. The closest thing to it was China under Mao Zedong. ”Such a monastic organization of society may be repugnant to us,” Heilbroner wrote with some understatement, ”but I suspect it offers the greatest promise of making those enormous transformations needed to reach a new stable socio-economic basis.”

So that was the human prospect: Maoist China or extinction.

Even by the standards of the early 1970s, this was grim stuff from a leading intellectual, and it got a lot of attention. But what makes An Inquiry into the Human Prospect stand out today is that the book was republished in 1980 and again in 1991, and both times Heilbroner added commentaries after each that looked at what he had written in light of what had happened as the years pa.s.sed.

In his first retrospective, written in 1980, Heilbroner begins with what appears to be an admission that he was a little off base. ”I am acutely aware that things do not look quite the same today as they did when I wrote this opening chapter,” he began. The ”atmosphere of siege” has lifted. ”The rumblings of a civilizational malaise” are not heard so much. But this doesn't mean Heilbroner was wrong. It means that people are increasingly deluded about humanity's prospects-which are as awful as ever. True, Heilbroner acknowledges, the population problem has changed dramatically thanks to surprising downturns in fertility rates all over the world, but ”if the cancer is now spreading less rapidly, it is still spreading.” There have been ”several serious famines since The Human Prospect first appeared,” he notes, and more are sure to come. And while the poor nations have not yet produced authoritarian governments bent on war with the rich world, well, just wait. Nuclear weapons are even cheaper now. And poor nations with oil (”a fast-disappearing resource”) could choke the life out of rich countries-although rich countries like the United States and Canada could retaliate with ”food power” because ”each year the Asian and African countries” import more food to keep their populations from starving.

As for the environmental predicament, Heilbroner felt in 1980 that he was just as right as he had been in 1973. ”I see little need to alter the thrust of my original argument, even though, since the first edition appeared, the attention of scientists has been directed at the climate problem from a somewhat different perspective than its long-term heating-up from the release of combustion energy,” he wrote. ”The emphasis today is on a short-term effect that results from the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a by-product of combustion. There, the CO2 forms an invisible 'pane' of gas that acts like the gla.s.s in a greenhouse, trapping the reflected rays of the sun, and warming the atmosphere just like the air in a greenhouse.” Note what Heilbroner has done here: In 1973, he predicted that the heat produced as a by-product of industrial activity would warm the atmosphere, putting the very existence of life in jeopardy. That was one of many climate-change hypotheses making the rounds at the time, but by 1980, most scientists had decided it was wrong. And yet, Heilbroner didn't conclude that his prediction had been even a little wrong. Instead, he acknowledged ”a somewhat different perspective”-as he describes the rise of a completely different theory that happens to lead to a similar conclusion. It's as if someone predicted Muslim insurrections would cause the collapse of the Soviet Union and then boasted when the Soviet Union collapsed for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with Muslims.

Heilbroner's 1991 commentaries are even more interesting because, by then, major changes had happened. Resource prices had fallen and the world was awash in cheap oil. The Green Revolution had produced huge increases in food in the developing world. Equally significant was what had not happened in the almost two decades since An Inquiry into the Human Prospect was first published. There was no war between the poor world and the rich. Nuclear weapons had not proliferated. Authoritarianism had not flourished. In fact, it was clear that freedom, not authoritarianism, was on the rise. In 1973, 46 percent of countries in the world were rated ”not free” by Freedom House, the internationally respected NGO; 25 percent were ”partly free”; 29 percent were rated ”free.” By 1980, when Heilbroner wrote his first retrospective, 35 percent were not free, 33 percent were partly free, and 32 percent were free. By 1991, the Iron Curtain had been raised and the percentage of ”not free” countries had fallen by half to 23 percent; 35 percent were partly free; free countries were now the largest category at 42 percent. History had delivered exactly the opposite of what Heilbroner had expected.

Still, Heilbroner saw nothing significantly wrong with his 1973 forecast. ”Specific predictions, estimates, and measurements have all changed, but only marginally. The basic a.s.sessment remains. With them also remains the demanding, uncomfortable, despairing-but not defeatist-prospect for humanity.” How could Heilbroner draw that conclusion in 1991? By writing nothing about oil and resources, food supply, the fate of freedom, or other subjects that were critical to the original forecast. Thus he was spared unpleasant encounters with facts that had changed in ways that contradicted his beliefs.

Heilbroner did note the fall of the Soviet bloc, however. He had to. It was 1991, the collapse of the East Bloc had already happened, and the final crumbling of the USSR was taking place as he wrote. This was a problem, because Heilbroner had argued that both capitalist and socialist systems would be strained by environmental pressures, and the latter had a better chance of coping. ”That conclusion has been dramatically proved wrong,” he wrote, at least ”for the form of socialism known as communism.” This was admirably forthright, but Heilbroner quickly added that it didn't really change anything. ”The great challenge affecting all socioeconomic orders in the twenty-first century remains the approach of ecological danger,” he wrote. ”Twenty years have not affected that outlook one iota.”

Of course, he may still be right about that last statement. But it's hard to escape the conclusion that for Robert Heilbroner the human prospect was grim, and it would remain so no matter what happened.

LORD WILLIAM REES-MOGG.

”We got some things wrong but we got enough right to justify writing them,” Lord William Rees-Mogg, the former editor of The Times of London, says about the three thick volumes of prognostication he and James Dale Davidson, an American investment adviser, published between 1987 and 1997. This is British understatement. Looking back in 2009, Rees-Mogg thinks he and Davidson nailed pretty much all the important trends and events of our time. ”We got basically the decline and fall of the Soviet Union right. We saw, though we got the timing wrong, the weaknesses which led to the crisis of the economic system. We even got the attack on the Twin Towers right, in that we pointed to the vulnerability of the Twin Towers as symbolic of the vulnerability of modern society.” When I ask what he got wrong, Rees-Mogg acknowledges being off on timing occasionally. ”We were much too early” in calling the crash of 2008, he says. And the high-tech crash of 2000: ”I became very bearish about the American economy, and nervous about it, as early as the mid-nineties.”

Yes, the timing. That's always the tricky part. But Rees-Mogg's view of what can and cannot be predicted is modest, he says. ”The point of this kind of forecasting is to explore trends that people need to look out for. You obviously can't both foresee the future and foresee the timing of the future. You sometimes get it right. You sometimes get it wrong. But you can help people to understand the process in which they're involved, in which the world is involved, at this time.” And in that sense, Rees-Mogg and Davidson did a fine job. ”I think that our general view of the world fits reasonably well with what happened.”

I'm sure he does believe that, but I suspect few others would agree.

The basic vision of Rees-Mogg and Davidson's first book of predictions, written in 1986, is summed up nicely in the t.i.tle: Blood in the Streets: Investment Profits in a World Gone Mad. ”The best time to buy is when blood is running in the streets,” the authors quote Nathan M. Rothschild as saying. Rees-Mogg and Davidson saw lots of blood and buying ahead.

Fundamental trends, particularly technological trends, are driving events, they argue. The world is rapidly approaching ”an electronic feudalism, an environment in which cheap and effective high-tech weapons will give increasing numbers of disgruntled groups a veto over almost any activity they do not like.” When every thug and terrorist can buy cheap missiles, the power of national military forces will be dramatically weakened. The United States will suffer worst. ”The sun is setting now on the American Empire, as it once set on the British Empire. As it does, shadows fall on formerly safe streets everywhere. The political equivalent of youth gangs, petty local leaders, are reaching for their guns. They will make the rules now. Rules that are enemies of progress. Rules that are a way of saying 'nothing may pa.s.s this way without my say-so.' Rules that tax or inhibit trade. Rules that usurp and confiscate investment-the way street bullies take whatever they can get away with.”

International trade will give way to protectionism, real estate values will plunge, and stock markets will crash. Debt default will sweep the world. Nations will splinter and crumble. How bad will it get? There are obvious parallels with the Great Depression, the authors wrote, but it's much worse than that. ”We suspect that the forms of the nation-state would remain, as in Lebanon, as indeed, the form of the old Roman Empire was preserved, like an unburied mummy, throughout the Middle Ages. We could be slowly entering a period as violent and murky as the feudalism of old.” And the transformation of the world is already well under way. ”Economies, even in Europe and the United States, have begun falling into their foundations, like old houses with rotten beams.”

In 1991, Rees-Mogg and Davidson published The Great Reckoning: How the World Will Change in the Depression of the 1990s. Although their earlier predictions had been ”considered improbable or even ridiculous,” the authors wrote, subsequent events had proved them right. Stock markets plunged in October 1987, mere months after the publication of Blood in the Streets. Communism collapsed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and was on the verge of death in China, just as they had predicted. The ”multi-ethnic empire” the Soviets had inherited from Czarist Russia was crumbling right on schedule. And so much else was bang on. ”We predicted the increase in protectionism, intensified terrorism, and more.” True, humanity hadn't plunged into a global depression, the authors acknowledged. But just wait. The signs were everywhere.

Having established their prophetic prowess, Rees-Mogg and Davidson repeated and expanded the gloomy prognosis of Blood in the Streets. ”We expect the 1990s to be a decade of escalating economic and political disorder unparalleled since the 1930s.” Economies around the world will experience a ”deflationary collapse” and the United States will not be able to bail anyone out because the American economy will itself be crippled. ”The simultaneous decline in the relative power of both the United States and the Soviet Union is bound to be fundamentally destabilizing, economically as well as politically.” At a time when Third World dictators are getting nuclear weapons and using terrorists to ”deliver them by overnight express,” the world will be without a leader. ”Smaller and smaller groups will gain military effectiveness. Violence will tend to rea.s.sert itself as the common condition of life.” Disintegration will sweep the globe. ”We will see the breakup not just of the Soviet Union . . . but Canada, China, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, and other countries.” East Germany will become democratic in the newly unified Germany but ”much of Eastern Europe, like the Soviet Union itself, has a future much like the past of Latin America”-meaning rule by uniformed thugs. Eventually, in the twenty-first century, international order may be restored by the rise of a new global policeman. But it won't be the United States. ”If there is to be a new hegemonic power in the world, it is likely to be j.a.pan.”

And the same forces of disintegration will be felt within the United States, Rees-Mogg and Davidson warn. Gangs and terrorists will become increasingly powerful as high-tech weapons proliferate. Suburbs will decay and grow dangerous while inner cities turn into war zones. Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston: ”Practically every city with a large undercla.s.s is at risk.” New York will suffer worst. ”By the year 2000, New York could be a Gotham City without Batman.”

In 1997, Rees-Mogg and Davidson returned with The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age. After the usual list of predictions the earlier books got exactly right, Rees-Mogg and Davidson repeat their familiar themes and forecasts, along with a few new twists. Y2K will be huge. And cyberterrorism looms. But the biggest threat is the millennium itself, the authors say. They see cycles in history, and the year 2000 marks the end of the biggest. ”More than 85 years after the day in 1911 when Oswald Spengler was seized with an intuition of a coming war and 'the decline of the West,' we, too, see 'a historical change of phase occurring . . . at the point preordained for it hundreds of years ago.' Like Spengler, we see the impending death of Western civilization, and with it the collapse of the world order that had predominated these past five centuries, ever since Columbus sailed west to open contact with the New World. Yet unlike Spengler we see the birth of a new stage in Western civilization in the coming millennium.”

The year 2000 did see the death of many dot-com stocks. But Western civilization? That's a stretch, as is Rees-Mogg's positive a.s.sessment of these forecasts.

In the twenty years that followed Blood in the Streets, protectionism did not dominate. Globalization did. Trade barriers fell to historic lows and the economies of many developing countries-notably China, India, and Brazil-grew faster than ever. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia did break up-Yugoslavia was already falling apart when Rees-Mogg and Davidson put it on the endangered list-but disintegration did not become a global trend. In fact, the European Union expanded rapidly into Eastern Europe, bringing the continent a degree of unity and order it had not enjoyed since the glory days of the Roman Empire.

As for the United States, the general trend was up. The latter half of the 1990s, in particular, saw a roaring economy, soaring stocks, and swelling federal government surpluses. With the greatest of ease, the United States bailed out Mexico and other foreign nations that suffered economic crises. And far from turning into urban wastelands, American cities enjoyed a renaissance; New York, in particular, was transformed for the better. At the same time, American geopolitical power grew so dramatically that, by the mid-1990s, a French minister famously complained that the United States had moved beyond superpowerdom and become a globe-dominating ”hyperpower.” International security improved as well. Instead of the rising bloodshed Rees-Mogg and Davidson predicted, the long-term rise in democracy continued, interstate wars became increasingly rare, civil wars became less common, and all wars became less deadly. There was also a steep decline in the number of genocides and ma.s.s killings.

The United States and the world took a big hit in 2008, of course. But even in the worst days of that crisis, neither America nor the world looked like the dystopian horror forecast by Rees-Mogg and Davidson. More crucially, Blood in the Streets and the other books made it clear that the disaster they predicted was imminent, not decades off.

As for terrorism, it continued to plague humanity in the years after Rees-Mogg and Davidson published their books, as it always has. But it did not escalate in frequency: The annual number of international terrorist attacks, which had been rising since the 1960s, peaked in 1991 at 450 incidents; it then fell steadily and substantially until 2000, when there were 100 incidents. Nor did terrorism go nuclear or high tech, as Rees-Mogg and Davidson had predicted. The 9/11 attacks were carried out by nineteen men armed with nothing more sophisticated than box cutters and plane tickets.

Rees-Mogg's claim to have predicted the breakup of the Soviet Union is only slightly less tenuous. The pair's whole argument was that technological change was empowering small groups and individuals and that this would fracture nations everywhere, the Soviet Union being only one. As their larger point is clearly wrong, it's not unreasonable to think it was only luck that they called the fall of the Soviet Union correctly. After all, a few hits are to be expected when you publish three thick books stuffed with predictions-a simple truth demonstrated nicely by British astrologers whose collective forecast of what would happen in the 1980s was wrong about almost everything except the a.s.sa.s.sination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

But even if Rees-Mogg and Davidson are credited with predicting the collapse of the USSR, would an impartial observer agree with Rees-Mogg that his books' ”general view of the world fits reasonably well with what happened”? I doubt it. And yet I don't doubt that Rees-Mogg is sincere in his a.s.sessment because he very much wants it to be true, and a yearning mind is a creative mind. Unmistakable failures are forgotten. Other memories are altered subtly, so they appear less wrong or almost right. Rationalization and confirmation bias multiply the hits. And time frames are stretched and stretched until finally something that looks even slightly like the prediction appears and the desperate prophet is able to shrug and say, ”I was only off on timing.”

That's how cognitive dissonance works.

PAUL EHRLICH.

The sentence by which The Population Bomb should be judged is not the famous introduction: ”The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” Nor is it the frightening elaboration in the second sentence: ”In the 1970s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” No, the sentence that makes all the difference is the third sentence of the book: ”At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to 'stretch' the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production.”