Paul Erlich and the Willful Ignorance of History

We look at Malthus, Erlich and Human prosperity in this episode.  

Transcript

Paul Erlich and the Willful Ignorance of History

March 2026

And here is a litany of the same thought, and every one of these people are WRONG:

“Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today

Jacques Yves Cousteau

“‎Using his burgeoning intelligence, this most successful of all mammals has exploited the environment to produce food for an ever increasing population. Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it's time we controlled the population to allow the survival of the environment.”
 David Attenborough

“Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead.”
 Herman E. Daly, Steady-State Economics: The Economics of Biophysical Equilibrium and Moral Growth

And finally

“Our object must be to bring our territory into harmony with the numbers of our population.”
 Adolf Hitler

Yes folks – Hitler’s concept of Lebensraum was rooted that a growing German population needed more land and resources for his master race and that the way to go about that was taking it from someone else.  

I sort of come here to in Daly’s words, bury Malthus but I really and truly wish to bury Paul Erlich’s beliefs.  

In 1798, a seminal work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, by English economist, cleric, and scholar Thomas Malthus, was published.  The core of the essay postulated that where the population grows geometrically (exponentially) the food supply grows arithmetically, leading to a "struggle for existence" where poverty, famine, and disease (checks) are inevitable. Unless that is, population growth is controlled through delayed marriage or abstinence. Note Malthus goals was to educate the populace and then give them a choice. As we shall see, his successors are not so permissive. In 1798 the world's population was approaching an astonishing billion people, and Malthus despaired of feeding such a multitude.

Malthus began by stating, "It is an obvious truth, which has been taken notice of by many writers, that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence." And in his estimation, the population was going to increase at a far greater rate than food production. "I said that when population, when unchecked, increased in a geometrical ratio, and subsistence for man in an arithmetical ratio."  Malthus was fairly certain on both counts: "In the next twenty-five years, it is impossible to suppose that the produce could be quadrupled. It would be contrary to all our knowledge of the qualities of land. The very utmost that we can conceive is that the increase in the second twenty-five years might equal the present produce." 

What followed, almost immediately, was the British Agricultural Revolution, an unprecedented increase in the agricultural production in Britain arising from increases in labor and land productivity between the mid-17th (or earlier) and late 19th centuries. Innovations included Norfolk four-course crop rotation: fodder crops, particularly turnips and clover, replaced leaving the land fallow.  In terms of farm machinery, the adaptation of the Chinese heavy, mould-board iron plough so that it could be pulled with fewer oxen or horses, the seed drill, selective breeding, and enclosure: the removal of common rights to establish exclusive ownership of lands. 

Just 22 years before Malthus's work, a much more helpful work, the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, also garnered adherents.  The development of a national market free of tariffs, tolls, and customs barriers followed.  Finally, transportation infrastructure, such as improved roads, canals, and, later, railways, made the now more abundant crops easier to transport.  

In America, the McCormick Reaper (1831), the John Deere steel plow (1837), and the Grain drill and elevator (1842) added to the innovations.

What Malthus missed (and Smith did not) was that an increased population meant people would pay more for food.  Enterprising minds, freed by capitalism, could then pursue ways to produce more food to meet market demand.  The net effect was that not only was more food produced through innovation and imagination, but that, in terms of greater supply, overall prices would come down.  

This was not universal, as the Irish Potato famine would demonstrate, but by 1898, or 100 years after Malthus, the world's population would reach 1.6 billion, or 60% greater than Malthus's worst nightmare, and would continue to grow to this day.  What Malthus did not factor in was human ingenuity.  

He seemed to have ignored the Agricultural Revolution beginning around 14,000 BC when homo sapiens domesticated plants for their needs.  The Sumerians, between 2900 and 2600 BC, figured out that instead of plowing fields themselves, how about using a double Oxen yoke?  Civilizations used specialized irrigation techniques as diverse as those of the Chinese, the Arabs, and Southwest Native Americans.  The padded horse collar, introduced in the 10th century, enabled horses to be employed and, with their speed, to plow more of the field.  This innovation was a cornerstone of the Medieval Agricultural Revolution, as horses could plow approximately 50% faster than oxen and had greater endurance for longer workdays.

So Malthus missed all of that, but consider the time frames involved.  For the 18th-century man, these innovations took place over millennia.  If Malthus were transported 4,500 years into the past and observed Sumerian farming, he would have recognized many of their techniques.  If, however, he were transported 100 years into the future and began to see even proto-steam-powered tractors, he would think he was not in a different time but on a different planet.  

So, it is easy to pile on Malthus for his bad predictions, and I am somewhat reluctant to heap too much opprobrium.  After all, I predicted that Donald Trump would not get to the 2016 primary, that James Talarico would be a national force, that Timothy Chalamet would win best actor, and that the Baltimore Ravens would reach the Super Bowl this year.  The ghost of Nostradamus routinely laughs at my vanity.  Yes, Malthus got it wrong, but consider the context of his times.  The Industrial Revolution and capitalism were still new on the scene when he wrote his essay.  What was not new to Malthus, and had been the experience of humans for thousands of years, was, despite some of the innovations I have noted, periodic famine.  

Paul Erlich, who died this week, deserves no such consideration.  He was more the grifter than the scientist. More of a doomsayer than a reasoned scholar and researcher.  In Erlich's day, the world population was approaching 3 billion, and he said, echoing Malthus, that the Earth could not sustain such a number.  

Erlich's claim to fame was the 1968 publication of the subtly titled Population Bomb.  Even a quick contrast between Malthus, the reasoned, principled essayist, and Erlich, the incendiary self-promoter, is incisive.  Erlich declared, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over."

Here is another gem, "The day may come when the obese people of the world must give up diets, since metabolizing their fat deposits will lead to DDT poisoning. But on the bright side, it is clear that fewer and fewer people will be obese in the future!” This is the kind of mad crap we see on the Internet or if we hear someone uttering such rubbish at a dinner party, try to steer the conversation away from the crazy person.  

The United States has an interesting, new-on-the-scene historical problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 40% of the American population is overweight, and 25% are obese.  Type 2 diabetes is another issue stemming from obesity.  And market estimates for GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are roughly $50 billion in 2026, with projections exceeding $150 billion by 2030–2035. 

Compassionate people try to gentle the conspiracist to seek therapy, we do not model government policies based on their rantings.  It was in the area of sterilization, often forced, where odium should fall on Erlich's head.  Malthus talks of the need for food, but also the accompanying concept that humans are amorous creatures, "First, that food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state."

Erlich has a different take. He suggests adding, without population knowledge, sterilization agents to food and drinking water.  But not to worry, there's an antidote, "Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size," but alas, "criminal inadequacy of biomedical research in this area."

Erlich's views escaped the pages of his book, with China actually implementing his vision.  China's one-child policy (1979–2015) and India's forced sterilizations during its "Emergency" (1975–77), a period when that country's civil liberties were suspended. The one-child policy saw over 300 million women fitted with intrauterine devices modified to be irremovable without surgery, over 100 million permanent sterilizations, and over 300 million abortions. Many of these procedures were coerced. India's Emergency similarly saw 11 million sterilizations, many of them forced. The extent of the human-rights nightmare that can result from overpopulation hysteria is difficult to fathom.

Erlich's idiocy was so evident that economist Julian Simon asked Erlich for the ultimate test of one’s theory, the chance to lose money.  The Simon–Ehrlich wager in 1980 bet upon a mutually agreed-on measure of natural-resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. The widely followed contest originated in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000", Simon offered to take that bet, or, more realistically, "to stake $10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run.” 

Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager that the inflation-adjusted price would decrease rather than increase. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. The bet was formalized on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990, as the payoff date. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period.  

Yet, despite the horrific consequences of his policy prescriptions and the best, Erlich remained unrepentant and ignorant.  Talking to writer Mara Hvistendahl in 2012, Ehrlich continued to defend hypothetical mass involuntary sterilization as "a great idea."

On 60 Minutes, in 2023, he declared that "to maintain our lifestyles we would need five more Earths, not certain where they are going to come from."  In 50 years, he had learned nothing.  The fact that 60 Minutes would feature a segment on him says far more about a show whose reputation was never well-earned than about a successful confidence trickster such as Erlich.  

The concept of humans being the issue has gone beyond agriculture. The entire climate change business model is predicated on the failed projections of Malthus and Erlich.  The belief that human-made climate change is becoming the existential crisis of our time does not pass two smell tests—the first in how the movement never embraced nuclear power.  If the Earth were truly going to end in five, 10, or 15 years, then the only truly sustainable energy to keep us from returning to pre-Malthus days was nuclear.  And more recently, poster child Greta Thunberg has left the movement for the currently more fashionable one of Anti-Israel, pro-Palestinianism.  Again, if Thunberg really believed all that she has claimed over the past 10 years, why worry about a regional conflict involving a few million people when all 8 billion of our lives are at stake?  

In fact, we could be facing something quite the opposite of Erlich's concerns.  The United States' entitlement structure is dependent on producing enough young people to continue to pay into the system to support the seniors.  For example, in 1935, the year Social Security was created, the US had 93% of its population below the eligibility age of 65.  Today, that number is 82%.  Part of this has been the incredible advances in life expectancy since the 1930s.  

It is one of those historical ironies that Erlich, the man who prophesied doom, lived to 93.  But another part of it is declining birthrates.  US birth rates have dropped to record lows, with a 2024 fertility rate of approximately 1.6 children per woman, falling below the 2.1 "replacement level" needed for population stability. This has short-term implications for entitlements but also longer-term issues.  And China, along with India, is a target of Erlich and the implementer of his rhetoric?  

China is facing a severe demographic crisis characterized by the former one-child policy, a rapidly aging population, and a shrinking workforce, with over 323 million people aged 60 or older (23% of the population) as of 2025. This shift, driven by low fertility and increased life expectancy, threatens to deplete pension funds, strain elderly care, and slow economic growth. Malthus and Ehrlich are about to get their wish.  Now I believe, as with an aging population, we can innovate ourselves out of this impending situation.  But if anything proves the flawed nature of the population-as-issue argument, it is the decline in births.  

There is also something very 2026 about Erlich.  Erlich was certainly not the first to sensationalize an issue.  Upton Sinclair did not entitle his book about the meatpacking industry as a “a treatise on domestic agricultural practices.” Nope, he called it The Jungle, alright! But Erlich took it a both a step further and unlike Sinclair who was uncovering some really nasty stuff, his hyperbole has proven to be both wrong and enduring.  In fact, without the bombast, he would probably be forgotten as some niche crank.  

Reading Malthus's work, then Erlich's, is like going from Scientific American to the National Enquirer.  It is similar to first watching theoretical physicist Richard Feynman's theories of space travel and then going to Candace Owens' diatribe about how demon-possessed people are making decisions.  Both may be wrong (Feynman is probably not wrong), but one is a good-faith attempt at addressing an issue, and the other is destructive alarmism meant to generate the ultimate coin of the realm: attention. Simple game: The subject is tariffs.  One person speaks with facts, figures and historical context, but another says Tariffs will send the economy into deep depression and another states it will eliminate the income tax.  Who will most people listen to: the reasonable argument or the two hyperbolic ones?  

I find Erlich depressing, not just because his falsehoods led to horrific policies, though that is enough, and not just because after 50 years of idiocy, he is still noted, but rather it was his style that is mimicked today. The environmental left, similar to communism, keeps waiting for his breathless predictions to come true.  

But it is the populist right that reflects both Erlich's method and his lack of scientific rigor. What starts as a way to sell books, or in the case of the new populists, monetize clicks and subs, turns into something where people get hurt.   These are Erlich’s legacies.