As of the past week, Paul R. Ehrlich is dead at age 93.
A prominent Stanford biologist, Ehrlich rose to prominence in 1968 with the publication of his famous (or infamous) book ‘The Population Bomb’.
The book’s essential thesis is that the human race is facing an Armageddon-like civilisational catastrophe due to an unsustainable population increase, which he claimed would lead to mass starvation and mountains of corpses worldwide within a very short timeframe.
In the 1968 book, he calls overpopulation “the ultimate threat to mankind”, warning that if the birth rate was not reduced, “mankind will breed itself into oblivion.” He claimed that overpopulation may even cause prosperous nations like the United States to be “destroyed” by “famine” and “ecocatastrophe” in the following decades.
“At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate,” he emphatically wrote at the time, without a hint of qualifier or cautious speculative hedging.
In a screed bordering on misanthropic, he also claimed that population reduction should be achieved by force if necessary.
“We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail,” he claimed.
He even heavily insinuated that mankind itself was a “cancer”, writing: “We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out.”
He went so far as to urge the United States government to pressure other States to roll out vasectomy campaigns to their populations.
One might be inclined to write these ideas off as the ravings of a wannabe apocalyptic doomsday prophet with delusions of Ragnarok, but Ehrlich’s predictions were taken deadly seriously when they were initially made, and still persist in our culture in various forms to this day.
While he was not the first person to posit the idea that overpopulation was a threat to mankind, he certainly popularised it, and was repeatedly invited onto major television programs such as NBC’s “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson to preach his gospel warning of cataclysmic destruction. The aforementioned book, ‘The Population Bomb’, sold millions of copies and was a smashing commercial success.
There was just one problem: he was wrong. And not just a little bit wrong – very, very wrong. In fact, his radical ideas were the perfect inverse of the truth, and provably so.
Around the time Ehrlich’s book was released, the world’s population stood at 3.5 billion. During that time, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN, the malnourished population of developing countries worldwide stood at 37%.
Since that time, the global population has more than doubled, but world hunger has roughly halved, proving in spectacular fashion that Ehrlich’s ideas were objectively and utterly false.
In science, a theory’s credibility is heavily weighed by its predictive power. Most notably, Ehrlich failed in one very practical, specific, observable prediction in 1980, further debunking his perspective.
In 1980, economist Julian Simon pushed back on Ehrlich’s hypothesis, pointing out that many essential goods had persistently fallen in price in preceding years despite population growth, because human innovation and technological advancement adapted to such pressures. He challenged Ehrlich to select five resources of his choosing which he believed would increase in price over the next decade due to scarcity.
Ehrlich took him up on this challenge – the bet was formally agreed on September 29th 1980, with a set ending date of September 29th 1990.
He lost the bet completely, with all 5 of his chosen resources decreasing in price, despite the world population increasing by 800 million people during the same period.
And yet, despite the clear and inarguable falsehood of his thesis, Ehrlich’s ideas contributed to the persistent and pernicious overpopulation myth, which led directly to the promotion of atrocities like the One Child Policy in China, the sterilisation of the poor in places like India, the promotion of abortion worldwide, pressuring women in third world countries to use State-mandated contraceptives, and more.
His work contributed to a wave of appalling anti-human abuses globally, and continues to damage society to this day with the demographic crisis that most countries now face due to cratering birthrates. Even here in Ireland, I distinctly remember learning about “overpopulation” in geography class, despite it demonstrably being a total and utter falsehood.
Ultimately, few failed theories have done as much damage to the human race as this, and it hasn’t gone away yet.