Paul Ehrlich would have wanted you dead. Moreso, he wished you were never born.
Ehrlich hated humanity, and for that, academia and the media loved him.
Born in 1932, Ehrlich came of age during a world war that included nuclear annihilation of two cities, the Holocaust, and countless other horrors. This may explain why this butterfly scientist decided in his 30s to become a professional misanthrope. Also, it paid pretty well.
In a 1967 article in New Scientist, Ehrlich began his public ministry preaching a religion whose central dogma was that humans are bad. The Washington Post reprinted the article on March 10, 1968. Eventually, this became The Population Bomb, which became something of a Bible for baby boomers.
“The battle to feed humanity is over,” Ehrlich wrote. “Sometime between 1970 and 1985, the world will undergo vast famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Our only salvation was population control.
The doctrine immediately struck a chord with the political class. The day after the Washington Post ran the story, then-Sen. Joseph Tydings (D-MD) praised the piece and entered it into the Congressional Record.
Ehrlich instantly became a star and filthy rich. The book sold more than 2 million copies. He was called to testify before congressional committees regularly. Johnny Carson had him on the Tonight Show more than 20 times. He was the boomers’ favorite scientist. As late as 2023, 16 years into an unprecedented baby bust, CBS’s 60 Minutes hosted Ehrlich preaching his antihuman message, without rebuttal.
He won every award imaginable. As essayist Scott Alexander documented: “he won the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Prize ($800,000) in 1990, the Crafoord Prize ($700,000, presented by the King of Sweden) that same year, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012.” Throw in the “Blue Planet” prize ($500,000) and a hundred others.
Likewise, he was revered in the major media throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s — and even into the 2000s.
What made Ehrlich so popular?
He preached what people wanted: A 1960s-scented message of fire and brimstone.
The Population Bomb hit shelves at the cusp of the Sexual Revolution. The anti-natal message seamlessly blended with women’s liberation, birth control, and abortion.
He also had the right enemies, as far as academia and the media were concerned: Ehrlich saw Judaism and Christianity as a root of all evil. “One of the saddest things about Western culture is that it’s based on a Judeo-Christian idea of man dominating nature,” he once said. “You know, the earth was made by God for man to dominate and use.”
The bug scientist supported mass sterilization of humans. The fruits of his labor included China’s one-child policy and India’s forcible sterilization of millions.
Ehrlich’s road to Damascus was a street in India. “One stinking hot night in Delhi,” Ehrlich wrote, he turned against his species. “Streets seemed alive with people,” he bemoaned in The Population Bomb. “People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.”
A street alive with people was Ehrlich’s Gehenna.
This resonated with the hyper-individualistic spirit of the Me Generation. Hell is other people.
He wasn’t much of a prophet, though. All of Ehrlich’s predictions proved wrong. An increased world population didn’t lead to mass starvation. England didn’t cease to exist in the 1980s. The world’s oceans were not rendered lifeless. Yet, Ehrlich never explained his error, never apologized, and never moderated.
“I do not think my language was too apocalyptic in The Population Bomb. My language would be even more apocalyptic today,” he said in 2015. “The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is, to me, exactly the same kind of idea as everybody oughtta be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”
One co-religionist sharing this dogma of misanthropy is Warren Hern, a doctor who has made his living aborting babies late in pregnancy, including viable babies. Hern wrote a book arguing that humans are, in effect, a cancer on the Earth. At the climax of this argument, he quotes The Population Bomb’s reference to “the cancer of population growth.” Ehrlich praised Hern’s book, offering a blurb on the back cover: “A fascinating analysis by the physician scientist who pioneered the idea that humanity is performing like a metastatic skin cancer on our planet. Read it and act!”
Not everyone bought what Ehrlich was selling, though. Economist Julian Simon demanded that Ehrlich put his money where his mouth was. If the world were truly running out of resources, those resources would become more expensive. So the two in 1980 placed a bet on the price direction of five metals, of Ehrlich’s choosing. When it came due in 1990, Simon easily won.
Why was Ehrlich wrong and Simon right?
Ehrlich saw humans as simple stomachs: consumers of finite resources. Simon saw humans as also minds and hands: creators and builders.
One of the humans Ehrlich implicitly wished had never been born was Norman Borlaug, whose discoveries in agriculture allowed him to spur the “Green Revolution,” which made food much more plentiful. This revolution was already underway when Ehrlich started his celebrity world tour of doom. Ehrlich couldn’t see it through the images of hellfire that always danced before his eyes.
To escape from his misanthropy, one need not embrace the Judeo-Christian view of the individual that Ehrlich violently rejected — that every human being is of infinite worth. One could, like Simon, use almost an economic accounting: During Ehrlich’s public life, including his public ministry, extreme poverty was reduced drastically. Hunger in developing countries fell by two-thirds from his book’s publication until today.
Who caused these improvements? It wasn’t space aliens. It wasn’t Lizard People. Ehrlich would never grant that it was Providence. The cause of our improving lot must have been other people.
As an economist might say: The expected value of each new human is positive. The good we do outweighs the bad we do.
PAUL EHLRICH WON THE DEBATE: JUST READ THE COMMENTS
That’s not to say each and every human makes the world a better place. Ehrlich proved that over the past six decades.
And now Ehrlich is dead. Good for him.
Timothy P. Carney is senior political columnist for the Washington Examiner.
