In December 2022, Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes reported that nations of the world were uniting “to save nature from mass extinction.” Scientists agreed that time was running out, said Pelley, who spoke to zoologist Paul Ehrlich.
“Humanity is not sustainable,” said Ehrlich, who died last week at age 93. “To maintain our lifestyle (yours and mine, basically) for the entire planet, you’d need five more Earths.”
That Ehrlich told Pelley humanity was doomed was no surprise. For more than half a century, Ehrlich had been predicting mass extinction, the theme of his 1968 book The Population Bomb, which declared humans an existential threat requiring urgent intervention.
“The cancer of population growth must be cut out,” wrote Ehrlich, adding that “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
I recall being assigned Ehrlich’s book as an undergrad in the late 1990s. By that time, Ehrlich had become a kind of star as far as public intellectuals go, even though the central premise of his book had been objectively destroyed.
In his book, Ehrlich had predicted that death rates would surge. This did not happen. On the contrary, the global death rate plummeted, falling from 17 deaths per 1,000 people in 1960 to seven in 2019. Life expectancy rose by more than 30%.
Following his death, The New York Times reported that Ehrlich was “premature” in his dire predictions. But this is false. Most of Ehrlich’s predictions were outright wrong.
For example, while promoting his book in the United Kingdom shortly after its publication, Ehrlich said it was likely “that England will not exist in the year 2000.” England’s still here.
In 1980, Ehrlich famously accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon to test his predictions on resource scarcity. The bet concluded 10 years later, when Ehrlich cut Simon a check for $576.07.
One could easily cite a dozen more failed Ehrlich predictions. Being wrong is not a crime, of course. What was stunning was that Ehrlich proved utterly incapable of admitting his mistakes.
“Remarkable thing about Paul Ehrlich,” wrote Matthew Yglesias, “is not just how wrong he was but that he was totally unphased [sic] and unchastened by his wrongness.”
Yglesias isn’t exaggerating. In 2022, in response to criticism following his 60 Minutes interview, Ehrlich, much like Dr. Anthony Fauci, compared himself to science.
“If I’m always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB,” he tweeted, “and I’ve gotten virtually every scientific honor.”
To use science in this shameless fashion highlights why Ehrlich failed as a scientist.
Famed physicist Richard Feynman understood that to be effective, a scientist must check their own biases at the door.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself,” Feynman said, “and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Feynman was wise enough to grasp how easily humans, even scientists, deceive themselves. For this reason, he stressed the need to rigorously test one’s own ideas, as Albert Einstein did when he relentlessly probed the limits of his theory of relativity. One could say that Ehrlich would have benefited from some of Feynman’s intellectual humility, but it was his rejection of science and embrace of doomsday dogmas that made him a celebrity.
Ehrlich was less of a scientist than a media star. He appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson no fewer than 25 times, and numerous others. His views went unchallenged. This is a travesty, because Ehrlich’s ideology, viewing humans as a “cancer,” had real-world consequences.
A perusal of obituary comments shows his ideas found fertile ground in the degrowth movement. Some Americans report choosing not to have children after reading his book. But at least they had a choice.
Others were not so lucky. Ehrlich’s dogmas also inspired forced sterilization campaigns.
In India alone, an estimated 6 million men were sterilized in a single year in the 1970s, after the government suspended civil liberties, allowing police to round up candidates for surgery. That was “15 times the number of people sterilised by the Nazis,” the BBC later reported.
The roots of India’s program can be traced to a chapter of The Population Bomb in which Ehrlich suggested sterilizing “all Indian males with three or more children,” with the U.S. military providing “helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments.”
“Coercion?” Ehrlich asked. “Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause.”
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These are evil views.
Yet sadly, corporate media and journalists like Pelley continued to give Ehrlich a platform for his toxic ideology without scrutinizing his “scientific” claims or bringing light to these atrocities.
