179 Essays on Infinite Lifespans   Max More also multiply today’s production levels while solving several significant environmental challenges. [12] Visions that emphasize human ingenuity and opportunity have a far more impressive historical record than those that emphasize human passivity and helplessness. Paul Ehrlich is a classic case of thelattertypeandyouhaveonlytobrowsehisdark,alarmingbooks to recognize how consistently bad he has been at making environ- mental predictions. In a 1969 article, Ehrlich predicted the oceans dead from DDT poisoning by 1979 and devoid of fish; 200,000 deaths from ‘smog disasters’ in New York and Los Angeles in 1973; U.S. life expectancy dropping to 42 years by 1980 because of pesticide-induced cancers, and U.S. population declining to 22.6 million by 1999. [13] Ehrlich famously lost a ten year bet against cornucopian economist Julian Simon (and refused to renew the bet). [14] In 1974, Ehrlich recommended stockpiling cans of tuna due to the certainty of protein shortages in the USA. And so on. As Bailey explains [13], contrary to Ehrlich: Instead, according to the United Nations, agricultural production in the developing world has increased by 52 percent per person since 1961. The daily food intake in  poor  countries  has  increased  from  1,932  calories, barely enough for survival, in 1961 to 2,650 calories in 1998, and is expected to rise to 3,020 by 2030. Likewise, the proportion of people in developing countries who are starving has dropped from 45 percent in 1949 to 18 percent today, and is expected to decline even fur- ther to 12 percent in 2010 and just 6 percent in 2030. Food, in other words, is becoming not scarcer but ever more abundant. This is reflected in its price. Since 1800 food prices have decreased by more than 90 percent, and in 2000, according to the World Bank, prices were “lower than ever before”.