Death of a Charlatan
Over the weekend, one of recent memory’s worst human beings dropped dead, and we can’t summon up much regret over his passing.
Paul R. Ehrlich, an eminent ecologist and population scientist whose best-selling book, “The Population Bomb,” was celebrated as a prescient warning of a coming age of food shortages and famine but later criticized by conservatives and academic rivals for what they called its sky-is-falling rhetoric, died on Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 93.
His death, at a nursing facility in the retirement community where he lived, was caused by complications of cancer, his daughter, Lisa Marie Daniel, said.
That was how the New York Times’ obituary began. It would later characterize Ehrlich’s prognostications as “premature.”
Reason magazine did a bit better job of fleshing out Ehrlich’s legacy:
Paul Ehrlich, the leading false prophet of inevitable environmental doom and author of the infamous The Population Bomb, has died at age 93. Why infamous? Consider the prologue to the 1968 edition:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate….We can no longer afford to merely treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out.
His solution? “We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail,” he argued.
Instead of a population collapse due to mass starvation, the world population grew from 3.5 billion in 1968 to 8.3 billion today. Instead of a substantial increase in the world death rate, it fell from 12 per 1,000 people in 1968 to 8 per 1,000 people in 2023. Farmers deploying modern tech have boosted the number of daily calories per person by more than a third since the 1960s. Consequently, rather than millions starving, the proportion of undernourished people in developing countries declined from 37 percent in 1969–71 to 8.2 percent in 2024. Global average life expectancy at birth rose from 57 years in 1968 to 73 years in 2023.
Nearly 60 years later, overpopulation fears have now been superseded in some quarters by depopulation worries. In over half of all countries where more than two-thirds of the world’s population lives, the fertility level is already below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. The United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2024 report projects that the global population will likely peak at just over 10 billion at around 2080 and begin falling. More moderate scenarios projecting rapid economic development project that the world population could peak at 9.2 billion or so around the middle of this century and fall back to under 8 billion by 2100.
Communist China was one country that notoriously adopted compulsory population control measures limiting families to just one child. Current fertility trends suggest that China’s population will fall from 1.4 billion to less than half of that by 2100.
Ehrlich seemingly never encountered a prediction of doom that he failed to embrace. For example, he was all-in on the projections of imminent economic collapse from nonrenewable resource depletion as argued in the Club of Rome’s 1972 book The Limits to Growth. In fact, Ehrlich was so confident that he bet University of Maryland cornucopian economist Julian Simon that a $1,000 basket of five commodity metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) selected by Ehrlich would increase in real prices between 1980 and 1990. If the combined inflation-adjusted prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. In October 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07. The price of the basket of metals chosen by Ehrlich and his cohorts had fallen by more than 50 percent.
I don’t want to be so impolite as to say it was fitting that Ehrlich died of cancer, given that he characterized humanity as cancer. Rather, I’ll just note the irony.
The truth of the matter is that Paul Ehrlich was a crank and a charlatan whose credibility should never have been established in the first place, much less preserved for decades after all his most fundamental predictions and assessments proved themselves fabulously wrong. Particularly after his disastrous and disqualifying bet with Simon.
After all, here’s a quick rundown of some of Ehrlich’s other contentions:
• He said 65 million Americans would die of starvation or malnourishment in the 1970s, necessitating food rationing by 1980, and that the problem would get worse in the 1980s. By the end of the decade, childhood obesity began to surpass caloric deficits and food insecurity in America. Also, Ehrlich predicted Americans would face water rationing by 1974 and be “dying of thirst” by 1984, and that those born after WWII “wouldn’t live past 50.” None of that occurred; U.S. food and water supplies expanded, air/water quality improved dramatically, and life expectancy hit record highs (around 79 years).
• Ehrlich argued India “couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980” and in 1967 called for cutting off all food aid as “hopeless,” as India was beyond saving. Some eight million Indian women were sterilized as a response to the panic he stoked in that country. India’s population nevertheless more than doubled, and the “Green Revolution” brought on by high-yield crops and the introduction of fertilizers made the country not only self-sufficient but a net exporter of food. Per capita caloric intake has risen significantly in India with no nationwide famine since Ehrlich’s apocalyptic warblings.
• In a 1970 Earth Day speech, Ehrlich warned: “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” Marine ecosystems have faced pressures, to be sure, due to a myriad of causes, mostly unrelated to anything Ehrlich presented, but nevertheless no mass extinction or coastal evacuations have happened on the scale he discussed. In fact, at least in America, coastal property is far more valuable now, and population distribution has skewed far more to coastal areas than was the case, for example, 100 years ago.
• He projected 200,000 Americans dying in a single year (e.g., 1973) from “smog disasters” in Los Angeles and New York, with hundreds of thousands more deaths from pollution overall. Air quality improved due to regulations and technology, and Ehrlich proved utterly, ridiculously wrong.
• When the first round of his doomsaying forecasts amounted to a complete swing and miss, Ehrlich doubled down. For example, Ehrlich repeatedly warned that rapid species loss — especially pollinators — would trigger widespread agricultural failure and human food/security collapse “in coming decades.” Yes, biodiversity loss is a real thing to an extent, but no there has been no global food system breakdown or mass human crisis that would prove out any part of Ehrlich’s prediction. Crop yields continuously rise through technology and adaptation, and pollinator challenges have been addressed locally without the predicted catastrophe.
• In 2008 interviews and subsequent statements into the 2010s and 2020s, Ehrlich continued prophesying an “unhappy increase in the death rate” and implied major die-offs or famines from ecological limits, while insisting the original Population Bomb warnings had understated the crisis. Except the global crude death rate declined from about 9 per 1,000 in the mid-1990s to around 7.5 per 1,000 by the early 2020s; hunger prevalence and famine deaths (outside conflict zones) fell further, contradicting the predicted upward trend.
• In his 2004 book One With Nineveh, Ehrlich argued that modern civilization faced the same fate as ancient empires (Sumer, Maya, etc.) due to overpopulation combined with consumption — predicting resource scarcity, famines, wars, and breakdown “soon” without radical policy changes. Well? We’re waiting.
Virtually nothing this man has said panned out. He has been wrong in every particular. And yet there is arguably no more influential academic as it relates to public policy than Paul Ehrlich.
Almost everything today’s Democrat Party pushes for derives from Ehrlich’s worldview. They’re fully engaged in trying to reslice the pie rather than growing it, they’re engaged in attempts at mass immigration rather than promoting domestic fertility as a means of keeping the welfare state going…
…Oh, and by the way, that’s more an Ehrlich initiative than you think.
Paul Ehrlich in 1970: “The FCC should see to it that large families are always treated in negative light on television.”
If that doesn’t work, then the government should “legislate the size of the family” and “throw you in jail if you have too many” kids.pic.twitter.com/646gThk9WC
— Shawn Regan (@Shawn_Regan) January 5, 2023
Ehrlich has been treated as eminent all over the West despite the buffoonery of his junk science.
Why?
It’s very simple — he gave academic cover to things that corrupt, misanthropic politicians wanted to do.
The Left throughout the West has despised the free market democratic society that modern America pioneered, for the simple reason that such a society devalues the pursuit of political power, and it can’t sell the alternative — particularly after the failure of communism in the 20th century. But with Ehrlich’s Manichean fantasies put forward as the warnings of a genius, they had something to sell.
Pride goeth before the fall, in other words.
You might think liberty works, but it’ll all go wrong. You’ll see. You’d better give us power over your lives and let us reslice that pie, or else we’ll all starve.
None of them ever believed any of this. Ehrlich was a useful idiot, a facile clown. He was the court jester of the anti-Western Left, and because of that he was given prominence and place to continue spouting lunacies, no matter how badly wrong his predictions went.
He was a selfish, misanthropic, utterly vain nincompoop whose contribution to science was to help to destroy it on the modern campus. And people even more evil than Ehrlich used him for completely unscientific purposes.
I won’t say it’s good that he’s dead, because the damage he did is already done — and it won’t go away with his death.
What I can say is this: It was never that we had too many people in the world, but that we had too many Paul Ehrlichs. Maybe we can begin getting a handle on that problem now.
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