Essay by THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, PH.D.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most destructive books of the last century, The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich.
The 1968 doomsday bestseller generated hysteria over the future of the world and the Earth’s waning ability to sustain human life, as Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich offered a series of alarming predictions that turned out to be spectacularly wrong, creating the enduring myth of unsustainable population growth.
Ehrlich prophesied that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s (and that 65 million of them would be Americans), that already-overpopulated India was doomed, and that most probably “England will not exist in the year 2000.”
In conclusion, Ehrlich warned that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” meaning “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
If these musings had been received for what they actually were—the wacky theories of a crackpot academic—all would have been well. But The Population Bomb sold some 3 million copies and influenced an entire generation.
Ideas have practical consequences, and Dr. Ehrlich did not leave his followers guessing as to what they ought to be.
In the course of his illustrious career, Ehrlich has defended mass sterilization, sex-selective abortion, and infanticide. In his call for radical population control, Ehrlich has said he would prefer “voluntary methods” but if people were unwilling to cooperate, he was ready to endorse “various forms of coercion.”
To allow women to have as many children as they want, Ehrlich said, is like letting people “throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”
Those who had the coercive power to put Ehrlich’s theories into practice bear witness to just how horrifying they were.
To reduce its population, China instituting a draconian one-child policy, which has now left the country (through sex-selective abortions) with a horrific gender imbalance, with yearly births of some 120 boys born for every 100 girls. As a result, “30 million more men than women will reach adulthood and enter China’s mating market by 2020.”
Many nations—including the United States—began attaching population control measures to aid packages to third-world countries, meaning that the amount of aid received became conditioned by the state’s ability to coercively reduce its own population.
The tragic fact is that as a credentialed scientist—a biologist lecturing at Stanford University—Ehrlich’s proclamation of the end times as well as the means to confront them struck many as the plausible theory of an “expert.”
As Bill McGurn argues in the Wall Street Journal Monday, in his day, Dr. Ehrlich’s “assertion about the limited ‘carrying capacity’ of the Earth was settled science. Never mind that it is rooted in an absurdity: that when a calf is born a country’s wealth rises, but when a baby is born it goes down.”
A few brave souls resisted the urge to jump on the population explosion bandwagon, urging calm and rationality. One was economist Julian L. Simon, who later noted that “whatever the rate of population growth is, historically it has been that the food supply increases at least as fast, if not faster.”
In 1981, Simon published The Ultimate Resource, underscoring man’s ability to adapt to new circumstances and overcome obstacles through ingenuity and creativity. It is the human mind, rather than coal, trees, or iron, that is the ultimate resource—one that suffers no risk of depletion.
Another population expert, Fred Pearce, has more recently noted that birthrates are now below long-term replacement levels nearly everywhere, a trend he examined in his 2010 book, The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future.
The baffling mystery is how Ehrlich—despite his utterly failed forecasts—can continue to be hailed today as a serious scientist with something important to say to the world.
In early 2017, the Vatican invited Dr. Ehrlich to speak at an academic conference titled ‘Biological Extinction,” sponsored jointly by the Pontifical Academy of Science and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
The conference addressed issues of biodiversity, “great extinctions” of history, population and demographics, and Ehrlich was invited to speak on “Causes and Pathways of Biodiversity Losses: Consumption Preferences, Population Numbers, Technology, Ecosystem Productivity.”
The enduring power of alarmist theories such as Ehrlich’s, which somehow survive being exposed as utterly false, should give people pause before embracing similar theories and their practical corollaries, even when based on “settled science.”
In a 2015 article, The New York Times observed that “worrying about an overcrowded planet has fallen off the international agenda” and has now been replaced “by climate change and related concerns.”
While perhaps failing to observe the irony of its own reporting, the Times juxtaposed the thoroughly discredited population explosion theories of the 1970s with the (equally alarmist) global warming predictions of our day.
As scientists themselves are beginning to recognize, doomsday theories—including those surrounding global warming—must learn to factor in the astounding resilience of human intelligence and the ability of human beings to re
Read the full essay at Breitbart
The population bomb is real but has turned out differently than Erlich envisioned. The West is being flooded by third world peoples who are out-breeding their native lands — this will get only worse and probably end in war against the migrations. Famine is Nature’s way of dealing with overpopulation, but was forstalled by the Green Revolution of the 1970’s. Perhaps famine was the better option in terms of the long picture.
Only in areas of high-density and low resources. And frankly I consider your comments about famine being ‘the better option’ the sort common among utterly heartless elites.
The population bomb was never real and the run away population gains that haunt your nightmares is not happening.
It’s a matter of quality over quantity! No one the west has any problem with migration – of people bearing skills that are needed! We are increasingly angry with unfettered migration of hordes of uneducated unskilled welfare recipients from cultures that are openly hostile to us.
“from cultures that are openly hostile to us.”
I think that is the heart of the matter. You can’t get along with people who don’t want to get along. And you shouldn’t invite those types of people into your house if you value your peace and quiet.
Even The New York Times scorched him a couple of years ago with one of its typically great Retro Report mini-documentaries:
If you criticize him, you are anti-science.
As Nasim Taleb says, its about skin the game. People like Erhlich will continue to have long, lucrative careers because they, literally, have nothing to lose if they are wrong.
The rest of us, however…
er…skin IN the game.
It would not be that hard to design an algorithm and bot to detect and flag arm waving predictions that carry no cost to the bomb thrower. It would start by cross checking credentials against the prediction requirements for expertise and continue on checking and cross checking the competency behind the thrower. It could also compile gains to the arm waver against fact checking results.
As for metals market economics Ehrlich was clueless and so were the others he turned to for help in the wager.
Has there ever been a leftist prediction of doom that proved to be even remotely correct? Or one that didn’t have a solution plagued by unintended consequences?
People love to be scared , The war was over so the book gave the sensitive crowd something to fret about .
Just like the dying earth has a fever con game , there is always something in the wings to churn .
People programing through Face Plant and other social media might make for a good campaign .
Religious patriarchy is also a bomb that is bombing out. For your consideration:
An Integral Anthropology for Integral Human Development
http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv14n05page23.html
An Integral Anthropology for an Integral Ecology
http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv14n05page24.html
The baffling mystery is how Ehrlich—despite his utterly failed forecasts—can continue to be hailed today as a serious scientist with something important to say to the world.
Not baffling at all. They WANT to believe. That’s all it takes.
I never knock the common man after seeing a survival program on TV. Six or so men were left on a tropical desert island in the Pacific for several weeks to see if they could survive. The six included a brain surgeon form Manchester. I thought it was a comedy show because they spent days trying to start a fire rubbing sticks together, scouring the island in search of fresh water (and ending up drinking foul mosquito covered stuff and getting sick) plus all had blackish urine for days. None of them noticed that the beach was covered in human rubbish such as sheets of plastic. Making use of the tropical sun for solar stills on the beach plus making lenses out of plastic filled with sea water appeared to be beyond their imaginations. Also, not one thought of removing a lens from the several cameras they had with them to start a fire. My window cleaner would have shamed them if she had been there (As for them knowing how to catch fish……!).
The Left tries to claim it is the Conservatives are anti-science.
But one day, history will record by-name that is was Paul Ehrlich, Mann, Phil Jones, Hansen, Santer, et al, with their alarmist prophesies that were the true anti-science charlatans of this Climate Hustle era.
American conservatives are pro-science (i.e. separation of logical domains, and near-frame philosophy), and progressives are not anti-science, but since classical times, they do have a habit of offering wicked solutions to albeit hard problems.
One of the great ironies of the world is that “ehrlich” in German means “honest, truthful”
I feel sorry for the young women of the late 1960s and early 1970s who got involved with ZPG and had themselves sterilized. I wonder if any of them regret it now?
I don’t regret they did it. People with such weak minds are too likely to raise children with weak minds.
Not always true. Juan Williams is one who follows the crowd, but his two boys don’t. Strange.
I think the timing is about right, For those of us who remember “All in the Family” it is my guess that Ehrlich was responsible for Meathead telling Gloria that he did not want to father her children.
College of Cardinals : “Can we have a re-do?”
People who call for radical population control never seem to set an example to us over-breeders by forming a queue outside euthanasia clinics in Switzerland.
Oh, you saw that, too? Historically, it’s the ‘good for thee, but not for me’ line.
The ironic part is that due to GSM this educated NAZI’S predictions may, unfortunately may be correct. This statement is not intended to be an endorsement of his Far Leftist beliefs, merely an opion. This opinion is based on the possibility (if not probability) that in such a short time as may come to pass, that human intelligence (as well as resources) may not be able to match the pace which is required to insure a large part of the population to survive. Look at who is investing millions into alternative means of food production. All these Techno billionaires who are investing in this, are not doing so because they are nice people. They see a huge profit margin. If you think they care whether you can afford the price they demand for essential vegetables,think again. They have never done anything without an alterior motive.
Whether it be profit or p.r. (so you wouldn’t mind paying their exorbitant prices) the base line for these types of individual is greed and the need for public worship.
So unfortunately I see a possibility that this lunatics ravings may come true. Sad commentary on mankind’s true nature. At least I admit that if in a dire situation, I would have no Qualms in killing someone in order to survive. Done it before, will do it again if required.
I guess you’ve never had a garden, have you, Joe? Seed companies all over the place, many of them offering heirloom seeds as well as resistant hybrids.
Techno billionaires? Gee, they don’t even do their own laundry. Give me a break! When was the last time one of them drove himself anywhere? Such a dismal, dystopic attitude!
In regard to “alternate food production”:
1 – who do you think will be tending that stuff? Not the billionaires, certainly.
2 – Remember, soylent green is people!!!
I find this puts things in a different perspective. It says nothing about resources, but quite a bit about the perception of Earth being “over populated”. Every human on the planet will fit in Jacksonville, FL, with 18 inches between them. Jacksonville (geographically, one of the largest cities in the U.S.) is approx. 841 square miles. This is approx. 23.5 billion square feet, which works out to approx. 3.5 square feet per person (for a population of 7 billion).
Here’s a sobering (and ultimately amusing) sequence of reasoning for you.
If the Earth’s population today is 7,500,000,000 or so, and is increasing about 1.16% per year
and the Universe has over 10⁸³ nucleons
and it takes some 3×10²⁵ nucleons to make up an average body, then
ln(10⁸³ / (3×10²⁵ × 7,500,000,000)) ≈ 222.9 – 81.4 → 141.5 (remember this)
141.5 / ln( 1.0116 ) = 12,270 years.
So therefore, if mankind continues to increase from today until twelve thousand years in the future at the present rate, then we will consume all the matter of the universe. As people. LOL
Just saying.
Math is fun.
GoatGuy
LOL…that was great!
What’s profound but never discussed is the vast swath of relationships destroyed by the poison injected into the public by Ehrlich. I lost my very best friend because he read that crap and then turned into insane crusader. I suspect that poison did widespread damage.
The key to remember about output from people like Ehrlich is that the particulars are irrelevant. What matters is that his books and the ideas contained within were deliberately-designed, military-grade weapons of psychological warfare, with tremendous power to cause mass casualties.
Brain-chemical warfare.
Would a safe space be a solution? Had your friend not fallen for this nonsense, sooner or later some other crap would get him. That’s how Das Kapital or Mein Kampf works – they are pseudo-science written for the vulnerable.
Kaliforniakook’s story about Chris Patti is a very common situation and has often serious consequences for many people. In 1989 a brilliant defence attorney called Pat Finucane was murdered by Loyalist terrorists in his home in front of his young family with the connivance, collusion and assistance of senior figures in both the British secret service and the RUC (the previous name for Northern Ireland’s Police Force) Special Branch. Mr Finucane had been particularly successful in the defence of Republican terrorist suspects, although he represented clients from all sides of the sectarian divide. Subsequent inquiries established that one of the main reasons for Special Branch pushing so hard for his murder was a conflation of the solicitor with his client base.
Actually, your post shows the sterility of “conservative thought”, defined as the ability to ignore the reality in favor of favorite ideology.
The population bomb exploded. Just not evenly. Consequences are on your television screen, if you care to watch it, disguised as a religious war in the Middle East. There will be more of the same in more places.
so you don’t know anything about the mongal wars and Genghis Khan
MF says the wars in the Middle East are about overpopulation. Try again.
mf shows the inability of the left to think at all.
First off he declares that since he disagrees with the author, the author must be conservative.
Then he declares that the author ignores reality and proceeds with pronouncements that have no connection with any reality known to science.
There is not and never has been a population bomb, and the wars caused by Muslims have to do with their being Muslim, not with their being crowded. Which most of them aren’t.
mf shows his/her/its complete ignorance of history of the middle east. religious wars have been ongoing there for centuries before Ehrlich was even born and will likely continue for centuries after we are all dust. It has nothing to do with population size and everything to do with population beliefs.
Off course Paul Ehrlich is an ekstremist.
But how many of the religious extremists who comment here (Christian/Moslem), would like to live in the vast slumareas of the third world ?
No runnning water, no sanitation, no power ?
Interesting you say it that way…and yes, it’s obvious to anyone who reads it that you do not have high regard for anyone of faith and that’s ok because we still love you…most Christians would not want to go to a slum, but would rather do their part through donations. Not saying that’s bad. It actually means a great deal to those without to have the money or food or clothes. That’s what I do is donate and I am trying my best to do what God wants me to do.
However, a Christian “extremist” as you put it, would and does gladly go and live, and often die, in slums all over the world. Mother Theresa is a famous one but you don’t hear about the thousands and thousands that do it. Many don’t come back but most do survive, Not just slums, but into places like China where they risk imprisonment. A Christian Extremist is a powerful, amazing, God-filled soul who loves everyone and who would literally take the coat off his back and give it to you, and then his shirt if you asked for that too.
Compare that to a Muslim Extremist.
We extremist Christians can be seen to be directly responsible for great swaths of alleviation of problems and poverty across the globe. Across centuries.
You are brainwashed by anti-Christian Marxist messages to say such ridiculous stuff.
Atheistic philosophies are responsible for oppression and death across the globe. This is all a matter of historical record.
In the United States, Christian-based charity going overseas is, each year, greater than U.S. government foreign aid. We extremist Christians are on the ground doing real things to help out the problems in Haiti, rather than raping the people and hijacking resources, as the U.N. forces have been doing.
And yet again my extremist (we believe the Bible is true) church is sending scores of people on summer mission trips all over the globe. How is it going down at the Ethical Society? Or is it the Unitarian Church?
This all a matter of record. Try again.
To TheLastDemocrat: Amen, brother.
What does being an extremist, religious or otherwise have to do with living in slums?
Ask yourself a question, assuming your brain is functional enough to do so.
Why do people choose to live in slums?
When you can answer that question, you just might have taken the first step on the road to wisdom.
Leftists hacks throughout history conjured up fake projected catastrophes to both extort money from taxpayers and increase State power and control to “fix” these fantasies: Population bomb, Ozone Hole, DDT scare, New Anthropogenic Ice Age (1970’s), GMO scare, New Mass Extinction Event, Polar Bear extinction, Everything Causes Cancer, Robber-Baron Scare, Black Lives Matter, Capitalism is Evil, Pollution is Getting Worse and Worse, Raw Material Depletion, Killer Bees, All Coral Reefs Disappearing, and now, The Mother Of All Leftist Scams: The Gloooobal Waaaaarming scare (the biggest and most expensive Leftist hoax in human history).
Amazingly, citizens continue to fall for these Leftist hoaxes and the “solutions” to these mythical catastrophes have actually cost 100+ million lives (deaths under Communism) and $100’s of trillions.
Invariably, Leftists’ “solutions” are more detrimental than the fake catastrophes they were designed to fix…
As long as Leftists remain in power, the more lives and treasure will be sacrificed.
“It is the human mind…” that is the resource. Looking even further into the question of demand for resources. I’ve made the point that we are not demanding zinc. We are demanding barn rooves, culverts, batteries,
… non corrosive ducts…1) Plus, metals have been recycled because of their value since human ingenuity created them. As the process has become more efficient, mining is turning to be a “topping up” activity. It’s safe to say nearly all the gold mined in the Gold Coast and traded across the Sahara in pre medieval times is still with us. 2) I predicted and argued during the debates that arose after the Club of Rome came out with their linear and ignorant petri-dish thinking about resources, that copper reserves in 2000 would be not less than they were at the time. An orebody is an inventory and you only have to drill (its an expensive exercise) off reserves enough ahead for planning purposes. And surprise, surprise, new technologies will lead to more and more ore being found. 3) Miniaturization results in less and less resources needed per unit of product. The first computer I saw in 1967 took up an entire airconditioned room at the university and it didn’t have the computing power of a shirt pocket calculator of a generation later. Hey, bitcoin is a virtual replacement of currency and we have the world’s library at at our fingertips, which means even our ingenuity is expanding at a rapid rate.
Gary
brilliant, thank you.
Just to go off the plantation a bit……….
We all recognize that Ehrlich’s hypothesis has been proven wrong. But so have hundreds of other hypotheses on all kinds of issues. Are we supposed to not present ideas, no matter how radical, because someday they may be proven wrong?
Under those circumstances we would still be living in caves.
Give Ehrlich his due: he came up with a hypothesis, and was proven wrong. That’s called science.
William
Fair point however, to continue to beat the drum decades later without, to my knowledge, any type of retraction, and being courted by celebrities, politicians, and the media because of his infamy is a bit hard to stomach.
And forgive me for asking but was it as you say, just a hypothesis he expressed, or was his book considered robust science at the time?
If not, I could come up with some theories that are out there, with no evidence other than my own opinion.
Sure. But when you believe your ideas so surely that you believe in overthrowing government-by-the-people, and taking away the freedoms of individuals to live their lives as they see fit, we have a problem.
Ehrlich, in Ecoscience, is on record throwing out all kinds of totalitarian ideas such as putting birth control in the drinking water, and conducting mass sterilization.
“We” have actually had great runs at involuntary mass sterilization here in the U.S. These fell out of favor right after we figured out what Hilter was doing, but the desire to control everyone through eugenics lingers on . Here in the U.S., the final mass-sterilization projects were given up only in the 1970s.
Propose what you want.
He keeps pushing the same solutions even after the disasters he predicted have proven to be imaginary.
William, the problem is that it was easy to see, even at the time that Ehrlich’s hypothesis was wrong.
Very, very wrong.
The problem is pushing wrong ideas in order to force people to do things they would not normally do on their own. That is evil.
Yes, all true, and I do not disagree with any of the comments.
But my point was that the easiest way to prove/disprove a hypothesis is to expose it to sunlight. Unfortunately, exposure of Ehrlich’s hypothesis to sunlight seems to have acted as fertilizer, and his lunacy seems to have found fertile ground.
As my hero Jordan Peterson (may his sainted name be heard forever) says: “We have an obligation to speak, and to speak the truth. If we do not, evil will flourish”.
There is always one. Michael Mann is one, Al Gore another. Fake “Sky is Falling” science promoted as propaganda to support their phoney careers and/or delusional beliefs thatmake no allowam nce for the adapive capabilities of human society, in their short pointless lifetimes, at the cost of the mass of people.
We can be as many as our many supporting technologies can sustainably support, more is pointless and self regulating, but not a frozen status quo, because technology changes what is possible, how to do more with less of natural planetary resources
For an Erlich antidote, watch the later Hans Rosling explain mankind’s and nature’s adaptive response, where technology meets pragmatic human reality. When children stop dying, mothers stop having them, quite quickly. When health care saves them, even before the prosperity adequate energy supplies deliver. Why extremists don’t like vaccinations, it is their bizarre wish people should die from natural diseases. Preferably not them because their god protects them (and all the vaccinated people).
https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-population/
QUESTION: Most of these obsessive delusions find most support in the USA. Why? Is it the backward religiosity hence gullibility of its poorly educated masses who are thus easily manipulated by their “all the education, health and justice you can afford” elites, or simply a culture of excessive wealth and privilege that is rich enough to support cynical Snake Oil salesmen like Erlich, Mann and Gore, et al.? Also read Ronald Bailey’s’s book “The End of Doom” where the cult and approach of phoney doomsayers is spelled out at length..
Being religious equates to being gullible.
It’s nice that you chose to wear your bigotry on your sleeve so that everyone can see it.
It is ironic that when I graduated from graduate school, I thought I knew it all and sneered at those who held religious beliefs as being ignorant peasants.
Now, after a lifetime of continuous learning in science and engineering, I am embarrassed to look back at my arrogant stupidity.
What we have learned in science since I graduated proves to me beyond a shadow of doubt the existence of God as the creator of our universe, and all in it.
As to where he is, what he is, how he does it, etc, etc. It seems I will have wait for the inevitable before I get those answers.
I believe in what can be independently verified by full disclosure scientific method. Those who are religious ipso facto don’t, and are easily deceived by the supposed words a of some fictional god, told to them as fact by a human written in a book when there was no way to understand things rationally, n NOT the case today, yet the gullible still believe these incredible stories that lack any actual support, even the credibility of everyday life experience. I think that qualifies as gullibility, except wher the individual is not educated to reserach and think for themselves.
Religion is run by people who wish to control the actions and beliefs of other people, not gods. Distrusting the faith of those who require no proof for their beliefs and describing what they do literally is not bigotry. It’s basic common sense AKA, evidence based vs. delusional faith.
PS: It’s also hard to relate the Vostok ice cores to an Earth 10,000 years old where Dinosoars mixed with humans. Carbon dating must be the work of the devil, etc. The way human society became developed was by making its management and culture secular. What humans now know is the antithesis of religion.
Humanism does all that is required w/o believing a lot old fairy stories written by ignorant (not daft though) old men centuries ago to maintain control over their peoples, which, I would suggest, has no value in a technologically sophisticated society.
One Wall St financier commented recently about ToysrUs and its bankruptcy. The store picked a bad time to rack-up $5 billion in corporate debt. There were 450,000 fewer births in the US in 2015 than in 2007. In the US and most of the developed and developing world, young people are just not having children. The children’s toys industry is just one victim. As the global population gets older and older (the median age of the globe is 30.5, in 1970 it was 24.5), the allocation of resources will also change. From real estate to food production, to consumer goods, markets will eventually react.
Has anyone wondered how our global economy will react with a stagnant or declining population?