2016 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize Awarded to Paul Sabin, Associate Professor of History

May 27, 2016

Paul Sabin, Associate Professor of History, is this year’s winner of the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research by a junior faculty member.

The prize honors his book The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble of Earth’s Future (2013). The Bet is public-spirited scholarship in the best sense. It tells a largely forgotten story—about a wager between economist Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich about the future prices of five metals—that comes alive with significance in Sabin’s narrative. The year was 1980, and the growing environmental movement had focused on over-population as a major threat to the Earth’s future, a development Ehrlich had led with his book The Population Bomb, which predicted widespread scarcity, famine, and suffering in a future of unchecked population growth. Julian Simon mounted a counterargument based on his profound optimism about human ingenuity: he argued that technology, robust markets, and human flexibility would allow life on Earth to thrive. The bet—on the prices of metals the men agreed would be indicators of the health of life on Earth—crystalized their different approaches to thinking about human impact on the environment and captured the imagination of the public. Sabin tells the stories of the two men’s lives and their evolving thinking, while showing readers the roots and structures of debates that continue to rage today. In the best tradition of public history at Yale, the book has been widely discussed by general readers, scientists, activists, and policy-makers. The prize this year thus honors both the book itself—which is well-researched, readable, and revelatory scholarship—and its significant impact on discussions shaping environmental policy today.