Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich made his name as the author of “The Population Bomb,” a 1968 book that shaped the way many in his generation thought about demographics. He died on Friday at age 93, having lived long enough to see the world’s population quadruple.
He wrote that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” during the 1970s. The actual number of people who died in famines that decade: Under 4 million. It was under 2 million in the 1980s, and under 1 million in the 2000s, as the world’s population continued to climb.
In fact, famines today occur because of state failure or war, not natural causes or excess population. That’s because farming has become much more efficient. The world’s average farmer can now grow roughly twice as much rice and soybeans, or two-and-a-half times as much wheat or maize, on the same amount of land as he could in 1968.
Ehrlich’s errors aren’t a case of hindsight being 20/20. These advances in crop yields, known as the Green Revolution, were already in progress when Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb.” Norman Borlaug, the Iowa agricultural scientist who led the development and spread of these more efficient crops worldwide, won the Nobel Peace Prize just two years after the book’s publication.
Another indicator was Ehrlich’s bet with economist Julian Simon about the future scarcity of natural resources. In 1980, Ehrlich chose five commodities that he believed would rise in real price over the next decade. All five got cheaper, and Simon collected his winnings in 1990 — in the form of a check signed by Ehrlich’s wife.
Regardless of intellectual score-settling, the good news is that the world’s food supply has steadily increased since 1968. All those billions of people today eat roughly 30 percent more calories per day than people did when “The Population Bomb” was published.
The bad news is that government policies were made with overpopulation fears in mind. China’s one-child policy is the most famous, and the societal wreckage it has left behind is staggering. Forced sterilizations in India and many African countries prevented many millions of lives from being conceived.
These grievous injustices didn’t only occur abroad. Federal government policies in the 1970s encouraged population control.
Ehrlich’s work also distracted many from the significant challenges that humanity does face. Climate change, pollution, disease, poverty, state failure and war are real problems that humans are working to alleviate. Snuffing out lives before they get started means snuffing out unknown potential to make the world a better place.
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