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Cheating on your partner. Huge breach of trust.
and the guilt.
what was happening hit me just like a tidal wave.
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¶ Paul Ehrlich's Dire Population Predictions
On February 9th, 1970, Johnny Carson did something that would be unthinkable for a late-night host today. He gave a full hour of the Tonight Show to a Stanford professor. But Paul Ehrlich, the author of the blockbuster book The Population Bomb, was charismatic, telogenic, I'm absolutely terrifying. Joined by his wife Anne, he told Carson's massive audience that hundreds of millions of people were about to starve to death and that nothing could stop it.
Ehrlich's first appearance on the Tonight Show demonstrates a lot of things, not least how much popular TV has changed. I'm struggling to imagine Carson's eventual successor, Jimmy Fallon, giving an hour to say CRISPR inventor Jennifer Dowdna, let alone without a lip sync battle. but it also shows just how influential Ehrlich was.
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Ehrlich appeared on The Tonight Show more than twenty times. The Population Bomb sold over two million copies and became one of the most popular science books of the twentieth century. His works helped popularize a broader population panic worldview that influenced policymakers in the US and abroad, including coercive family planning policies in countries such as India and China. Ehrlich in his book fundamentally changed the world we live in today.
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And yet Ehrlich, who died recently at ninety three, turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Wrong in ways that have had major consequences for humanity. But I want to dwell on something. It's precisely because he was both so wrong and so influential. That doomsaying remains so seductive and so dangerous.
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The Population Bomb, I suspect, was one of those of the moment books that was more owned than read. But you didn't need to get far into it to grasp Ehrlich's alarmist message. You just needed to read the opening lines. The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the nineteen seventies, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death, in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. And the book was just part of his lifelong campaign.
Early predicted that sixty five million Americans would die of famine between nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty nine. He told a British audience that by the year two thousand, the United Kingdom would be, quote, a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some seventy million hungry people,
He said India, which was home to nearly six hundred million people in nineteen seventy, could never feed two hundred million more people. He said US life expectancy would drop to forty two by nineteen eighty. On Earth Day, nineteen seventy, he declared that, quote, in ten years, all important animal life in the sea
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Every one of these predictions was almost 180 degrees in the wrong direction. In America, as in much of the world, obesity became the true metabolic health crisis, not starvation. The UK, at least the last time I checked, still exists. India is now a major agricultural exporter, and its population has nearly tripled, while hunger has fallen. Marine life is stressed, but very much not extinct.
The bottom line is that instead of mass starvation, the world experienced the greatest expansion of food production in human history. Per capita calorie supply has risen consistently since nineteen sixty one.
Hmm.
Since the population bomb was published, Rates of hunger have dropped dramatically.
¶ Human Ingenuity and the Failed Bet
So what did Ehrlich miss? For one thing, he made a common mistake. He assumed line goes up. The years leading up to the population bomb's publication in 1968 featured the steepest population increases in global history. The trends were so on the nose for example. You could almost forgive Ehrlich for assuming they would inevitably continue. But if Erlot look closer at the data.
It would have revealed that even in the high growth nineteen sixties, The world was already bending toward our comparatively low fertility presence. Europe, Japan, and North America were all seeing their fertility rates fall as societies urbanize. Women were educated and child mortality dropped. Plus, the population bomb was published in nineteen sixty-eight, which was eight years after the birth control pill was introduced.
Ehrlich, and many others of his time, to be fair, appeared to assume that these patterns wouldn't apply as the countries of the global south developed. But they did. As these social and economic trends spread around the world, fertility kept falling from around five children per woman globally when the population bomb was published. To 2.3 today. But the bigger mistake wasn't misreading data, it was failing to account for people. People like Norman Borlog.
Borlaug was an agronomist from rural Iowa who, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, Developed high yielding dwarf wheat varieties that transformed agriculture in countries like Mexico, India, and Pakistan. India, which Ehrlich had written off in racially tinged ways, didn't just avoid famine, it became self-suficient in food production.
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The population bomb was explicit about Ehrlich's worldview. Population growth was the quote cancer that quote must be cut out. He saw people, or at least people in the global south. As little more than mouths to feed, each fighting for shares a static pie. And he dismissed the part the global south could play in finding solutions. Borlog and the Green Revolution researchers, by contrast, saw them as minds to solve problems, including figuring out ways to make that pie bigger.
Ehrlich's fundamentally zero-sum worldview may have gotten him global recognition, and sadly, remains far too prevalent. But it blinded him to the future. And that's why he ended up on the losing end of one of the most famous wagers in academic history. We'll be back after a short break.
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Did I miss it? Julian Simon, an economist at the University of Maryland, believed the opposite of everything Ehrlich believed. Simon's argument was simple. People are the world's most valuable resource. Respond to scarcity by finding new supplies, substitutes, and efficiencies. And that meant that commodity prices, adjusted for inflation, would fall over time. Not rise. In nineteen eighty, Simon challenged Ehrlich to a bet.
Pick any raw materials, any time period longer than a year, and wager on whether prices would go up or down. Ehrlich and two colleagues chose five metals chromium, copper, and bought one thousand worth of them on paper. The bet would be settled in nineteen ninety. During those ten years, the world's population grew by more than 800 million. The largest one decade increase in human history.
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Ehrlich was wrong. All five medals fell in inflation adjusted price. In october nineteen ninety, Ehrlich acknowledged Simon's win with a check for five hundred seventy six dollars and seven cents. What Ehrlich didn't do was revise his views to reflect the facts, which is what makes him more than a cautionary tale about bad predictions. In 2009, he told an interviewer the population bomb was, quote, way too optimistic.
twenty fifteen, he says his language quote, would be even more apocalyptic today. On sixty minutes, in twenty twenty three, at age ninety, he told correspondent Scott Pelley that, quote, the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to. It didn't matter that the world had spent fifty-five years proving him wrong. Ehrlich didn't blink.
And Ehrlich's wrongness had real consequences. He endorsed cutting off food aid to countries he considered hopeless, including India and Egypt. The broader population panic movement. He helped create, influence coercive real world policy. India's forced sterilization campaigns during the nineteen seventies, China's one child policy, and sterilization programs across the developing world.
¶ Doomsaying's Appeal and Policy Lessons
So why did the world listen to him for so long? Partly because we're wired to. Humans process negative information more readily than positive. An evolutionary hangover. that makes Doomsayers inherently more compelling than Optimus. At a research on expert prediction found that quote hedgehog thinkers, people who, like Ehrlich, see everything through the lens of one big idea and fight like hell to hold on to it.
Are simultaneously the worst forecasters, but get the most media attention. They're more confident, more quotable, more dramatic. The hedgehog gets Carson, the fox gets ignored. There's also a structural incentive problem. Predict things will be fine, and you're wrong, you're irresponsible. Predict disaster, and you're right, you're a genius. Predict disaster. And you're wrong, people forget. Or just assume you were a little early.
It was uh notable to me, the subheadline of the New York Times obituary of Ehrlich called his predictions not wrong but quote premature.
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None of this means we should ignore environmental problems. Climate change is real, and Ehrlich was relatively early in flagging it. Biodiversity loss, which is closer to his actual academic expertise, remains legitimately a line. Just because things have been getting better does not automatically That trend will continue, especially if we make perverse and self defeating policy choices. of Ehrlich's life is that assuming doom leads to worse policy than assuming agency.
Right off a country is hopeless. And you justify cutting its food aid. Assume people are the problems. sterilizing them against their will. Julian Simon died in 1998, never approaching Ehrlich's level of public fame. His signature line, quote, The ultimate resource is people, skilled, spirited, and hopeful people, who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit as well as in a spirit of faith. And social concerns.
You probably wouldn't have heard that on the Tonight Show, but it's the formula for a much better world.
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This episode was written by me, Brian Walsh. Production help from Amy Padula and Meredith Hodnott. Editing from Joanna Salotarov with mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Hosts Noam Hassenfeld and Sally Helm are off playing with magnets. And as always, thanks to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show. Bird Pinkerton walked up to the wall in the station and ran her fingers upon the crack. She started wondering whether she was even in the right place when, suddenly,
The wall pushed in. The crack opened up. Talon reached out and grabbed her. If you have any thoughts about our show, Please send us an email or at unexplainable atvox.com. We really love hearing from you, and we read every email. Yes, every day. We'd also love if you could leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It actually does help us find new listeners. You can also support this show and all of Vox's journalism by joining our membership program.
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