Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist whose 1968 blockbuster book “The Population Bomb” became one of the highest selling academic tomes of modern times, died this week at the age of 93. The doom and gloom book may have been the loudest primal scream in world history.
Its message of a coming overpopulation apocalypse and its endorsement of Stalinistic birth control measures influenced governmental economic, demographic and environmental policies around the world for decades.
It penetrated pop culture, so much so that Ehrlich appeared multiple times on The Johnny Carson Show.
Many of his wild claims seem laughable today. He predicted that “population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make.” Famines would be so prevalent that “at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years [by 1980].” The chart below shows famines have been almost eliminated.
Just at the time Ehrlich predicted global food shortages, the world had entered the “green revolution” in agriculture which spectacularly increased agricultural production across the globe.
Ehrlich also warned that in the decades to come, Americans would have a life expectancy of only 49 years. Life expectancy today is roughly 79 years.
One of the profound ironies of Ehrlich’s life is that the doomsday scientist himself lived to the ripe old age of 93.
Instead of a population bomb with humans propagating like field mice, and eventually an earth so crowded that we would standing toe to toe, we now have the opposite worry: a population implosion due to very low birth rates in most regions of the world.
Ehrlich’s fantasies were exposed as fraudulent by the late Julian Simon whose book “The Ultimate Resource” came to precisely the opposite conclusions of Ehrlich. Simon predicted that by the year 2000 we would have more food, fewer famines, less pollution, higher incomes, and less scarcity of minerals and energy.
In 1980 Ehrlich and Simon engaged in a famous wager on what would happen to natural resource prices over the next decade. Ehrlich predicted that as scarcity took hold, the prices would rise. Simon, who argued that human ingenuity – the ultimate resource on the planet – would always outrun depletion and thus prices would fall.
Who was right? All five natural resources that Ehrlich chose FELL dramatically in price over that period.
Even AFTER Ehrlich’s predictions were proven to be fraudulent, he won the Macarthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” The New York Times said in announcing his death that his predictions were “premature.” In other words, the death of the planet is still lingering right around the corner.
The real villains in this story of Ehrlich’s wrongheaded thesis were the world leaders and organizations like the United Nations that took him seriously.
The book motivated ghastly and murderous campaigns by governments to bring down birth rates. The U.N. and even the United States government funded millions of forced sterilizations, forced abortions, one-child policies, and even infanticide to hold down birth rates in India, Egypt, China, Africa, and South America. How many millions of babies were not born because of the population bomb.
Paul Ehrlich’s life is a testimony to the harm that can be done by a supposed “scientific consensus” peddling doomsday scenarios meant to scare people into action. Think climate change.