Doom-Mongers Fail to Account for Human Intelligence and Ingenuity

Paul Ehrlich, who died on March 13, aged 93, was the most influential of these prophets in the TV age. A Stanford biologist and author of The Population Bomb, he brought Malthusian pessimism to a mass audience. He warned the world that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over”, that “hundreds of millions” would starve in the 1970s and 1980s, and that “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate” as population growth outstripped food supplies.

His rhetoric was even more lurid in public. Ehrlich said he would take even money that England would not exist by the year 2000. He suggested countries with higher death rates were, in one sense, the fortunate ones. And if voluntary actions proved insufficient, he said coercive population control by government might be necessary. His ideas brought intellectual respectability to immoral mass sterilisation drives and China’s one-child policy. He probably scared hundreds of thousands of ordinary people into having fewer children too.

Yet Ehrlich was wrong. Not marginally wrong, but repeatedly, demonstrably wrong. And the wager he later made with the economist Julian Simon shows why.

If a rising global population and consumption inevitably deplete the planet’s resources, then shouldn’t raw material prices rise sharply over time? In 1980 Simon invited Ehrlich to test that proposition. Ehrlich chose five metals: chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten. The two sides staked $200 on each, to be settled by whether their inflation-adjusted prices in September 1990 stood above or below 1980 levels. Ehrlich would win if real prices increased. If, instead, more people and consumption did not mechanically make resources scarcer, Simon would prevail.

Simon won. All five metals were cheaper by 1990. Ehrlich duly mailed Simon a cheque for $576.07. But the underlying lesson was more important. Ehrlich had seen human beings chiefly as consumers of scarcity. Simon had instead understood something Ehrlich missed: when resources become scarcer and more expensive, people do not just endure it. They use less, search for new supplies, improve extraction, and invent substitutes. That is, human beings supply as well as demand. We produce and innovate, creating abundance.

OK, you might say, but what does that prove? Commodity prices can bounce around with recessions, geopolitics, and other factors within a ten-year window. Well, subsequent analysis by my colleagues Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley found the result robust to longer time periods. More importantly, a similar fate awaited Ehrlich’s other predictions, even as the global population soared above eight billion.

Where Ehrlich forecast starvation, the green revolution in agriculture brought food abundance, and a different problem (obesity). Famine didn’t afflict “hundreds of millions” but less than four million in the 1970s, sub-two million in the 1980s, and under one million in the 1990s. Today, wealthy societies fret about underpopulation, not overpopulation. England still exists.

Yes, humans can affect nature adversely. Pollution is real and habitats can be destroyed. But environmental fatalism was a poor guide to the future because it reduced mankind to appetite but not ingenuity, to stomachs but not minds.

Even as evidence mounted against him, Ehrlich insisted, stubbornly, that he was basically right. In 2018 he still predicted a “shattering collapse of civilisation” as a “near certainty” sooner or later. Such is the emotional appeal of his ideas, some obituaries still deem his predictions “premature” rather than just plain wrong.

But policymakers and the public should heed Ehrlich’s example. We should not let today’s fashionable doom-mongers panic us into rotten policies and misguided private decisions we will regret for decades.