Paul R. Ehrlich, Who Alarmed the World With ‘The Population Bomb,’ Dies at 93

Ehrlich was a "just enough of me, way too many of you" person. New York City wasn't crowded, but Mexico City was.

He shouldn't be remembered as an academic or sociologist, but as a crank and a eugenicist. He wasn't any more credible than people who used phrenology to claim that Blacks were genetically destined to be criminals.

>and the abortion of female fetuses. Because nothing says "stable society" like a bunch of young men who know they'll never be able to find a woman to date.

He was a monster like Malthus.

Can we go back to 3.5 billion people?

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There are a lot of reasons for declining birth rates: transition away from an agrarian economy where the whole family works the farm, plummeting child mortality over the last century, cost of living, people starting families later than they used to, etc. "This generation saw how bad population growth is and a meaningful percentage of the population has decided to have fewer kids for that reason" probably doesn't rank in the top-10 for explanations why birth rates have declined. There's no part of Ehrlich's or Malthus' nonsense that was correct. They weren't "still kinda right, just wrong about the timing". Their predictions weren't just wrong - they were so far away from the right answer that they clearly announced to the world that they don't understand anything about human civilization, our history or our behavior. Ehrlich in particular showed that he truly doesn't have the ability to understand anything about how the world works when he made "The Bet". No matter how many times he got proved wrong, he'd come back with more dire predictions and claim that things are worse than ever - despite 100% of the evidence pointing to the opposite being true. Look, there are reasons to be pessimistic and worried: climate change, microplastics, rise of fascism, etc. Overpopulation shouldn't be in your top-50.

IR8 rice was only introduced in 1966 and had several major issues mostly around taste. IR36 rice, which resolved a the taste issues was not invented until the 1970s. It was these rice varieties which it possible for rice to feed exploding Asian populations.

To be fair to Malthus, it would be extremely hard for him to know about all the technological innovations possible to support growing populations

You sound just like him. What nation has gone completely extinct?

His solutions weren't aimed at reducing consumption in rich nations, it was based on sacrificing poor nations to hunger and disease while forcefully preventing them from accessing the hoarded resources in richer nations.

Would it, Thanos? If America had half the population, there would be a lot less environmental damage from the US, absolutely. However, there are MANY problems with this simplistic view: 1. How do you get to halve the population of the US? I guess this isn't important for a pure hypothetical, but it's the main issue I have with the simple statements like this. You cannot simply wish half a population away, and if you try, it's an atrocity. 2. Would the world be better if the US was half its size? Who would the dominant powers of the world be? Do you think they would be better for the world, under those circumstances? I think that it's impossible to predict: you would be taking a huge risk. Halving the US's population would probably cripple its science output (very important to our understanding of environmental issues). 3. Environmentally speaking, while the US is ruinous, compare to countries like India and China. There are reasons why they are more disruptive, environmentally -- they are still developing economies, for example -- but their huge populations means that the problems they represent are greater still. China, at the very least, is having huge social and economic problems due its previous attempts at population control, which just doesn't work.

That'd be a good point about his work, if it had mentioned anything on political instability and capitalism being responsible for food insecurity. But it didn't. He insisted we wouldn't have the ability to grow enough food for everyone, that isn't the case—there is a slew of other problems causing starvation .

That’s not a population problem, that’s an economic/political problem about letting wealth disparity explode to the point that 1% of the population owns more wealth than 90% of the population. Raise taxes, increase transfers, push for full employment (i.e. Social Democracy).

Morever, he seemed to think that the public would keep popping out kids versus stabilizing.

I'm 69. Yeah, It didn't affect me directly but I worried about it. I didn't dwell on it but always considered it a time bomb and conflicts elsewhere in the world had a way of effecting us her in North America. Resource depletion is still a major concern but thankfully innovation has helped considerably (advanced farming, desalination, fracking, renewable energy, etc). Our infrastructure is fragile though. Look at this relatively small conflict in Iran. Desalination plants have been bombed. In some of those countries 80% of their water comes for desalination. Also, closing the strait may very well trigger a global recession. All just from one conflict. MAD was similar but we expected countries to behave in their own self-interest and not pull the trigger. Even direct conventional conflict between nuclear powers was a no-no for fear of escalation.

There are always malthusians. They always ignore technological mitigations, even if those already exist. (edit: Or fall back on the idea that nothing can scale to literal infinity, which is uncontested but also not a useful metric for anything IRL.)

Yeah, thank goodness there is no more war and unrest and resources are evenly divided amongst our manageable population! That guy was so wrong. What a dunce!