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
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Population explosion was over 25 years ago. Since then global population under 15 is stable, around 1.9 billion. Population is still increasing though, because people live longer, but that’s a bad thing how?
Anyway, no one can produce more than one old fart by failing to die young. That can never be explosive, unlike too many kids.
Never has there been so much surplus food in most countries, but some countries do have dire difficulties. In 1911 the area of India that made up Pakistan had 11 million people, 120 million in the mid nineties and 193 million today.Some counties like Rwanda are going to have an unsustainable population.Rwanda’s population is going up 50% every 16 years.Unless certain counties take drastic measures, then expect famine and mass migration. I am afraid that is is inevitable.
There was some serious population control in the 1930s and 40s by two countries that signed a non aggression pact.
“to reduce its population, China instituting a draconian one-child policy”
That was only after a just as draconian population growth policy, with Mao believing population numbers were a way to increase raw production power. That was quickly shown to be not sustainable at all and the one-child policy was simply a way for the nation to survive (and was not exactly “draconian” in practice, depending on ones definition).
That said, there’s no reason to advocate any number. Some of it is based on the one-dimensional ideological theory that growth is fundamental to progress or sustaining the economy. But many indicators (and plain reason) do show that six billion or more cannot be stable if more than half of them have to live below poverty levels because of the harsh realities of geography, local history and human nature or culture. It’s not hard to imagine humanity will have to find some balance between growth and reduction. Same is already applied to agriculture, game hunt, diplomacy and so on. It made it possible to exist over the ages. Population balancing is just another thing. And it has nothing to do with forceful “coercion” of any individual. The highlights of human development happened through different means.
Yet another example of the fact that EVERYONE that has ever predicted the end of the world has been wrong. They will continue to be wrong until one of them gets it right, but there will be nobody left to say “I told you so” to, so what does it matter? Whether the planet and everything on it dies tomorrow or 3 billion years from tomorrow matters not at all. All that matters is that you have no control over it, and never will. So find something that you CAN change to worry about. Preferably something important, and not trivial emotional reaction BS based on some perceived wrong done to you. Live life and enjoy it instead of focusing like a laser on some crackpot flyspeck of insignificance.
Never had the misfortune to read that particular screed, but in middle school was forced to read the equally deplorable “29th Day”.
I keep wondering why the people who think the world is overpopulated never take responsibility for themselves adding to that problem and taking action to reduce the population by one (or more if they have children). Why aren’t they doing their part to reduce the population by their own life (and those of their children)?
And why does the life they seek to reduce the population of always seem to have non-white skin?
Paul Ehrlich was absolutely right, of course, as was Malthus, but had he left his overly enthusiastic predictions out of the book, perhaps he would have been better regarded today. A human population expanding without limit on a planet with limited space and resources is a formula for disaster.