The Irish Times owes its readers an apology

It owes Robert Solow, the distinguished economist at MIT, an apology too. It published a silly rant by John Gibbons, a green activist who calls himself a journalist although it is more accurate to say he is in advertising and publishing. Gibbons’ rant this week is against economists, although his past targets included people who weigh more than him and people who rent storage space (seriously). I have no particular objection to people criticizing economsts (I have done some of it myself), but it needs to be based at least loosely on actual, you know,facts. Here is Gibbons:

Ask an economist to value a forest, and he’ll tell you how much timber sells by the tonne.
Well, maybe, but it depends on why the question is asked. If the question is about the value of flood control, that would be an incomplete answer. If the question is about incentives to timber producers, the market price matters a great deal. This reflects, at best, wilfull ignorance by Gibbons about what economists do. Environmental economics has focused on questions of unpriced environmental goods since at least the 1960s. His complaints about economic growth and population growth are similarly inane. But get to the journalistic complaint. Gibbons writes about economists:
Perhaps their greatest sleight of hand has been in selling the notion of infinite growth within a finite – and sharply declining – ecosystem. Take Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize-winning US economist. “The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources,” was his breathtakingly myopic analysis.
The line comes from a 1974 paper by Solow, titled “The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics” in the May 1974 American Economic Review (not online except through the subscription only JSTOR). Here is what Solow wrote:
As you would expect, the degree of substitutability is also a key factor. If it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is in principle no “problem.” The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources, so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe. Nordhaus’s notion of a “back-stop technology” is just a dramatic way of putting this case; at some finite cost, production can be freed of dependence on exhaustible resources altogether. If, on the other hand, real output per unit of resources is effectively bounded-cannot exceed some upper limit of productivity which is in turn not too far from where we are now-then catastrophe is unavoidable. In-between there is a wide range of cases in which the problem is real, interesting, and not foreclosed. Fortunately, what little evidence there is suggests that there is quite a lot of substitutability between exhaustible resources and renewable or reproducible resources, though this is an empirical question that could absorb a lot more work than it has had so far.
By ripping part of Solow’s sentence entirely out of context, Gibbons has made a conditional theoretical statement appear to be an assertion of fact. The most generous explanation is that Gibbons is merely mindlessly repeating some mantra picked up from a fellow green. The least generous is that he is lying. Gibbons can leave that to his conscience, but the Irish Times should be ashamed of itself for allowing this distortion. It owes it readers an apology and a correction. I doubt that Solow’s enormous and well-deserved professional reputation will be damaged by a frivolous attack by a hack, but the Irish Times owes its readers better.