I am sorry to hear of the death of Stanford University Professor of Biology Paul R. Ehrlich at the age of 93, but to read his writings you wonder whether it is an event he might actually want us to celebrate. It does, after all, mean one less mouth to feed. Just another 6.5 billion people to go and we will be down to what in 2018 he stated was the world’s optimum population of between 1.5 to 2 billion.
Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb – written with his wife Anne whose name his publisher famously kept off the front cover – established Ehrlich as the world’s latter-day Malthusian-in-chief. There is one agreeable aspect to holding that position: you can never really be proved absolutely wrong because, reductio ad absurdum, if the world’s population carried on growing indefinitely then we would eventually reach the point at which it would become unsustainable – somewhat before we were all standing shoulder to shoulder. You can go on claiming, as Ehrlich did for the last 50 years of his life, that you are essentially right, but just that your timing might not quite be accurate.
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich declared in The Population Bomb. “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in world death rate.”
Hungry kids in Africa were often brought up in the 1970s but, no, “hundreds of millions” did not die of hunger either then or since. In the event, global life expectancy increased from 55.6 years in 1968 to 73.2 in 2023. The sharpest rise has been in developing countries: in Africa, life expectancy was up from 44.6 years in 1968 to 63.8 years in 2023. It is hard to find comparable figures for global hunger going back half a century, but the UN estimates that 12.7 percent of the global population were malnourished in 2000, falling to 8.2 percent in 2024. Ehrlich, many of whose sentiments were of an anti-capitalist nature, failed completely to see that technology and enterprise would keep food production rising ahead of population.
He also failed to foresee that industrialization would lead to human societies regulating their own population growth – even though by 1968 this was already evident in western countries. The richer the world has become, the lower the birth rate has fallen. So, no, we don’t need his somewhat unpleasant suggestions as to how governments might mitigate the disaster he predicted. He wanted sterilization programs and taxes on large families which would rise with every extra child born to a couple. He also wanted couples to be allowed to choose the sex of their babies (or at least the babies they allowed to be born), so they wouldn’t need to keep on having children in the hope of having a son.
What is especially remarkable about Ehrlich is how he was lionized by the left in spite these fascistic proposals. The Guardian ran a friendly interview in 2018, letting him get away with the claim that actually he was right when plainly he was wrong. Yes, that is the same Guardian which blasted George Osborne for limiting child benefit for a household’s first two children. The left’s approval of Ehrlich exposes another inconsistency in its thinking. What Ehrlich and his think-a-likes say on a global scale is not tolerated when others make a similar point on a national scale. Say that the world is overcrowded and cannot possibly cope with many more people because they will all trample over its resources and you are an enlightened thinker. Say the same about migration to Britain, on the other hand, and you are a fascist. Ehrlich may have died, but we will not have seen the last of the Malthusian left. The idea that humans are like rabbits on a fox-less island, doomed to breed to the point of self-destruction, is bound to survive him.
Comments