Ridley: Ehrlich's anti-human legacy

By Matt Ridley.

"The butterfly biologist turned rock-star eco-pessimist, Paul Ehrlich has died at the age of 93. That in itself is remarkable because in 1970 he forecast that within the coming decade “100-200 million people per year will be starving to death” and “by 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people”. Furthermore, by 1980 the life expectancy of the average American would have fallen 42 years as a result of cancer caused by pesticides.

Yet he not only lived more than 50 years longer than 42; he lived to be one of more than 8 billion people in a world where global life expectancy has increased at the average rate of seven hours per day since he forecast it would collapse. Meanwhile, famine has all but gone extinct, with death rates from mass starvation down to a tiny fraction of what they were in the 1960s. Here are the astounding numbers: in the 1960s, 29.7 million people out of a population of 3 billion died in famines that killed more than 100,000 people each. In the 2010s, 1.1 million out of a population of more than 8 billion died in such episodes: a decline of 99% in the death rate.

In short, Ehrlich was wrong. Not, as the New York Times said in its obituary this week, “premature”, but radically, completely, spectacularly wrong. He was wrong as soon as he put pen to paper and went on being wrong for decades afterwards. He shot to fame with a best-selling book in 1968, The Population Bomb, whose prologue dismissed all hope for humankind: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. 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 the world death rate.”

Yet something did prevent that. Even as he wrote these words, the world’s population growth rate was falling. New strains of wheat and rice developed by agronomists like Norman Borlaug were starting to transform the productivity of agriculture and India was on the way to banishing famine and becoming a food exporter within a few short years. The amount of food available has increased faster than population on every continent over the last 60 years even as the land area devoted to farming has begun to fall. As so often with environmental pessimism, Ehrlich’s warning was already out of date when it was made.

For the rest of his life Ehrlich remained adamant that he was not so much wrong as…right. In 2008 he was still predicting “an unhappy increase in the death rate”. In 2023 he tweeted plaintively: “If I’m always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB and I’ve gotten virtually every scientific honor. Sure I’ve made some mistakes, but no basic ones.” He was indeed laden with honors when he died: including a MacArthur “genius” award in 1990 and honorary membership of London’s Royal Society in 2012 - despite forecasting in 1970 that “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

Getting things wrong is clearly very rewarding. But his words had consequences. For many people, the misanthropy and cruelty of his political recommendations were less forgivable than his failed forecasts. His book began with an evening in Delhi when he found the press of people overwhelming. “People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating.” The answer to his culture shock, he argued, was coerced, compulsory population control. “The operation will demand many brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense.”

Food aid to India should be made conditional on forcible sterilisation of all those who had three or more children: “coercion in a good cause”. Ehrlich was “astounded” that libertarians objected when the American government took up his suggestion. In 1975 Indira Gandhi was refused World Bank loans unless she began sterilising people. Her son Sanjay obliged, making permits, licences, rations and even housing applications conditional on sterilisation. Eight million people were sterilised. Yet one of the greatest causes of the falling birth rate in the world over the past half century has been kindness, not cruelty: the prevention of child mortality. When mothers can be confident of their children surviving, they plan smaller families.

For Americans, too, Ehrlich recommended coercion and control. In an interview in 1970 he said that television programs should be ordered by the federal government to show large families always in a “negative light”. Commercials should relentlessly shame such people. If that did not work, the government should give women a “bonus for not having babies” or “change the tax structure” to punish the fertile, and if necessary, “legislate the size of the family” and “throw you in jail if you have too many” children.

Immensely influential, Ehrlich set the dirigiste tone for the nascent environmental movement, which saw people as the problem, economic growth as a crime and coercion as necessary. As Ehrlich’s attention switched to the running out of resources in the late 1970s, the economist Julian Simon called his bluff. In 1980 he offered Ehrlich a bet: that the price of a $1,000 basket of five metals (to be chosen by Ehrlich) would fall in real terms by 1990 because human ingenuity meant the world was getting better at finding such resources. The loser was to pay the difference in the price of the basket.

Ehrlich rushed to accept Simon’s “astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in” though he later dissembled that he had been “goaded” into the bet. He chose chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten, with $200 invested in each. But when 1990 came round it was Ehrlich who owed Simon $576.07, all five having fallen in price. Ehrlich would have lost even without taking inflation into account. Grudgingly he made his wife write out the check, before delivering a speech in which he said of Simon, “the one thing we’ll never run out of is imbeciles”.

On my bookshelf stands the Julian Simon award, which I won in 2012 and which is made of the five metals. Simon, who was just three months older than Ehrlich, died at the age of 66 in 1998, far too young. He was never a celebrity."