Population control advocate Paul Ehrlich passed away March 13 at age 93, marking the end of an astonishing career built on unapologetic error. Ehrlich was a butterfly researcher at Stanford University in the 1960s when he launched himself into the overpopulation debate with a lecture at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in 1967. Encouraged by the response to his address, Ehrlich authored the 1968 book The Population Bomb in which he predicted dire famines that would kill hundreds of millions of people during the 1970s.
But that never happened. Instead, food production and population growth boomed.
In 1969, Ehrlich told the New York Times that because of overpopulation, food production failure, and pollution: “We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.”
Though Ehrlich predicted complete doom for humanity by 1989, we are still here and thriving.
In 1980, Ehrlich famously bet free market economist Julian Simon $1,000 that the prices of five metals – chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten – would increase due to scarcity during the 1980s. But the price of the basket of metals declined by 43 percent. Wrong again, Ehrlich lost what became known as “The Bet.”
Until the end, Ehrlich insisted that the carrying population of the Earth was as low as 1.5 billion people. Global population is now at 8.28 billion people and growing. Ehrlich was more than 6.75 billion people wrong.
Ehrlich’s bizarre leap from studying butterflies to human population and commodity forecasting led him down a career path to celebrity (he appeared on Johnny Carson’s late-night show 20 times) and academic fame (he was elected to be a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences).
But none of Ehrlich’s predictions were ever correct. Worse, he never really acknowledged his own non-stop laughable errors.
In his 2009 article, “The Population Bomb Revisited,” Ehrlich concluded: “The Population Bomb certainly had its flaws, which is to be expected. Science never produces certainty.”
But “certainty” is the goal of science. We were able to get to the moon in 1969 because we could use Newton’s laws to predict where the moon would be so we could aim Apollo 11 to meet it in orbit. That is exquisite certainty developed through science. Our modern world is entirely dependent on much other certainty that true science has produced.
Ehrlich blamed others for his errors, writing: “One of our personal strategies has always been to have our work reviewed carefully by other scientists, and The Population Bomb was no exception. It was vetted by a series of scientists, including some who became top leaders in the scientific enterprise. That is one reason that long ago the fundamental message of The Bomb moved from a somewhat heterodox view to a near consensus view of the scientific community.”
The Population Bomb, however, was not scientific research. It was an alarmist polemic about overpopulation. In the book, Ehrlich even suggested adding contraceptives to drinking water supplies. There was never any consensus on Ehrlich’s views or overpopulation fears. He may have been applauded by other members of the overpopulation cult, but that is hardly a scientific consensus. And science is not done by consensus in the first place.
Critics often call Ehrlich a “Malthusian,” referring to late-18th/early-19th century English economist Thomas Malthus, who also predicted population would outgrow the food supply. Malthus was also incorrect, but not malignantly so. He died in 1834 and did not live long enough to witness the otherwise unforeseeable technological revolution in food production.
Ehrlich was wrong at the start, in the middle, and at the end of his career. Yet he received accolades anyway and was never compelled to acknowledge he was just plain wrong. He repeatedly witnessed his own predictions fail, but political correctness saved him from any sort of accountability.
No, Ehrlich was not a Malthusian. He was just Paul Ehrlich, the population bomb.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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