How a Stanford lepidopterist convinced the world to fear the breeding habits of the poor. Again.
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How a Stanford lepidopterist convinced the world to fear the breeding habits of the poor. Again.
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Michael: Peter.
Peter: Michael.
Michael: Are you familiar with a book called The Population Bomb?
Peter: I have heard of this book. I have not heard anything else.
[If Books Could Kill theme]
Peter: I'm aware that there was a book from like the mid-century-ish that predicted overpopulation across the globe.
Michael: Yes, The Population Bomb came out in 1968. It's written by Paul Ehrlich, who's a professor at Stanford, and it eventually sells two million copies.
Peter: My initial gut instinct. There's an academic talking about overpopulation. We are at most 10 minutes away from talking about eugenics and 20 minutes away from talking about genocide. I don't know of any other way this can go.
Michael: It might take us slightly longer to get there, but that is absolutely where we're going.
Peter: Oh, God. Okay.
Michael: So, we need to give a bit of background, because as opposed to a lot of the other books that we've covered on this show, this isn't proposing a new idea. This isn't like, "Ooh, 10,000 hours to play chess," or whatever.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: This is basically crystallizing an idea that had been bouncing around the culture for literally centuries. This is one of the oldest ideas.
Peter: Right.
Michael: As far as I can tell, Thomas Malthus is the first person to officially propose the idea that the Earth just has a limit to how much population it can hold. We're not going to have an Earth with 100 billion people on it.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: Population growth is exponential. Woman has three babies, they have three babies, they have three babies, whereas food production is linear. It's extremely difficult to double crop production and then double it again and double it again. So, eventually you're just going to have a mismatch between those two lines, and that means there just aren't enough resources for everybody to eat enough.
Peter: Look, I've heard enough. It's time to do population control on poor people. [Michael laughs] That's all there is to it.
Michael: This is kind of the thing is this idea is extremely tempting to people with the worst imaginable politics. This becomes a really important idea in eugenics before World War II. After the Second World War, you can't really say eugenics openly anymore, but you can talk about family planning and you can talk about, "Ah, you know, there might just not be enough to go around." So, we need to start asking some tough questions about who's going to get what we already have.
Peter: Right. If only poor people could exercise the good judgment that we do, things would be fine. But since they cannot, we need to talk about our options.
Michael: Exactly.
Peter: Our incredibly violent options.
Michael: This is a huge problem and I'm willing for other people to make some sacrifices is [Peter laughs] basically the way that it gets framed. Okay, so I'm going to send you a Time Magazine cover from Peak Population Fears. This is actually before Paul Ehrlich's book comes out, but this stuff was already a huge societal anxiety that he was basically reanimating. So, you're going to love this.
Peter: Oh, no. [laughs] Oh, my God.
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: Oh, my God.
Michael: Sometimes the racism in these old-time covers is like a little dog whistle. This one, it's like an air raid siren.
Peter: This is just images of women of color in their babies.
Michael: Yeah. There's like a topless African lady breastfeeding the kids. There's, I guess, Chinese lady with her son. She looks sad. All these images of sad, squalid conditions.
Peter: Well, no, there's actually one beautiful white family that-
Michael: Yes.
Peter: -where the [laughs] child is holding a giant loaf of bread.
Michael: [laughs] Our abundance.
Peter: The white family is fine. [laughs]
Michael: Exactly. It's like, "Oh, the white lady is fine, but look at all these hungry babies and the rest of the world," basically.
Peter: To say the least and the banner says that population explosion.
Michael: Basically, this is where were in the 1960s that this was pretty widely circulated already. But what Paul Ehrlich did was he merged the overpopulation anxieties with the environmentalist movement. He was the first person to really make the case that to save the planet, we have to start looking at the number of people on it.
Peter: Right. It feeds into this lefty environmentalist idea that people are the problem.
Michael: Exactly, yes. So, Paul Ehrlich is an entomologist. He's like an insect researcher.
Peter: Ooh, boy.
Michael: I cannot stress enough how no training in this he has.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: This is not his field of-- He doesn't do demographics, he doesn't do populations. He's literally a butterfly researcher.
Peter: Oh, shit.
Michael: So, Paul Ehrlich comes to this through the Sierra Club. He starts attending meetings in the Bay Area. He actually wrote the book with his wife, Anne, but the publisher thought it wouldn't sell as well if it had a woman's name on the cover, so they took her off.
[laughter]
Michael: He's been in the public space of this for basically the last like 40 years.
Peter: Oh, man, it's getting so bleak so fast.
Michael: [laughs] We're five minutes in, we haven't even gotten to the book yet.
[laughter]
Michael: So, okay, I'm going to send you the prologue. Basically, this sets the tone and gives you a sense of the kind of person Paul Ehrlich is.
Peter: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Oh, so, he means over like, we lost the battle to feed all the human being. [laughs]
Michael: It's done. It's locked in.
Peter: Oh, my God. "At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to 'stretch' the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production and providing for more equitable distribution of whatever food is available. But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control. It cannot be overemphasized however that no changes in behavior or technology can save us unless we achieve control over the size of the human population. The birth rate must be brought into balance with the death rate, or mankind will breed itself into oblivion. We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth. The cancer itself must be cut out."
Michael: The cancer? The cancer must be cut out.
Peter: Oh, my God. Oof. "Bringing the death rate and the birth rate into balance is like--" When I hear those words, I don't know how you're not immediately thinking about mass murder.
Michael: This is his whole argument is about the fact that there's only two ways to achieve population stability, which is to raise the death rate or to drop the birth rate. His overall argument is basically, "Look, guys, we have no choice. Either we have to ensure mass death. We have to raise the death rate, or we need to bring down the birth rate. So, by bringing down the birth rate, we're not actually being bad people. What we're doing is we're saving the lives of everyone we would have to kill otherwise." He gives you these two completely fake options, either mass death or population like deranged population control policies that we will get to. It's like, "If those are your only two options, then, yeah, you're going to choose the birth stuff." But those aren't actually [Peter laughs] in any way the only two options.
Peter: My years of studying butterflies have [Michael laughs] made me realize that the human race is faced with an ultimatum.
Michael: All right, so do you want to hear his case for this?
Peter: Yeah, let's go. Maybe I'll be convinced.
Michael: I feel like this is going to be a running theme of this podcast. He starts the book by talking about how he got radicalized on this issue when he went on a trip to India. He went on a cab ride through New Delhi.
Peter: Oh, my God, he's doing Thomas Friedman.
Michael: I know.
Peter: He's doing a Thomas Friedman
Peter: He says, "My wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel in ancient taxi. The seats were hopping with fleas. The only functional gear was third. As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area. The temperature was well over a hundred, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window begging. People defecating and urinating, people clinging to buses, people hurting animals. People, people, people, people."
Peter: He's just witnessing poverty in another culture in a form he's maybe not accustomed to and saying, "Oh, my God, we have a global problem."
Michael: Exactly. This is like white dude staring out of the window of a cab disease.
Peter: Right.
Michael: He's universalizing all of this. Also, he has no understanding of the specific dynamics of India at that time. In further debunkings that we will get into, people point out that, first of all, at the time, New Delhi only had a population of 2.5 million people. [Peter laughs] Paris had a population of 8 million at the time.
Peter: Right.
Michael: This has nothing to do with the number of people. It's about the infrastructure that's available, the levels of poverty, et cetera. Also, India was just coming out of the India-Pakistan war at the time. He also goes to these remote areas in Kashmir where there's all this, what he calls environmental damage. But it's the aftermath of a war. It's the aftermath of like a man-made conflict that he is then describing as like, "Well, there's just too many people."
Peter: What year is that when he's in New Delhi?
Michael: I think it was 1966 when he was there.
Peter: Okay. I was thinking how long after a famine that the British intentionally caused--[crosstalk]
Michael: Yes. Right.
Peter: The answer is about 20 years.
Michael: This is basically the first prong of his argument. The argument of the entire book is, he has three main arguments. The first is just that like there's too many people in the world. There's nothing really to debunk here. I'm sure you've seen these things too, where they talk about the doubling times of humanity up until the year 1600 or something, the doubling time was like every thousand years, then it doubled every 200 years, and then it doubled every 35 years. The doubling times of humanity are getting shorter and shorter.
Peter: Right.
Michael: This is one of my favorite parts of the book. It's now every 35 years, it's doubling. He says, "If growth continues at that rate for 900 years, there will be about 60 million billion people on the face of the Earth. That is about 100 persons for every square yard of the Earth's surface, land and sea."
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: Then he says, "It would take only about 50 years to populate Venus, Mercury, Mars, the moon, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn to the same population density as Earth."
Peter: All right. You don't understand his work with butterflies, Michael.
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: You've got to really dig in to understand. I do like that he's proactively thinking about solutions. He's like, "Even if we populate the moons of Jupiter, we still have a problem." So, don't even fucking talk to me. Don't fucking talk to me [Michael laughs] about populating the moons of Jupiter. I know you're going to say it, but don't say it.
Michael: I'm one step ahead of you, punk. Yeah.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: He says, "With that many people, this teeming mass of humanity, the body heat of all the people would exceed the melting point of iron."
Peter: It's another big problem. Yeah. [laughs]
Michael: Paul?
Peter: I love the image of a world where we're all physically jammed together to the point where we can't move and also, it's getting really hot and people are still having sex.
Michael: Exactly.
Peter: Like Someone [crosstalk] people over from you, they're fucking, and you're like, "Guys, are you not learning anything? I'm boiling alive over here."
Michael: "Guys, we're smelting iron right now."
Peter: Look, you know how there are honeybees that can kill intruders in the hive by rubbing themselves together and burning them up. That would be happening to all of humanity at once-
Michael: Exactly.
Peter: -in his mind before anyone does anything or anything else goes wrong. Incredible.
Michael: Basically, this is the vision that he's setting out. Then, of course, he says that, "Population growth is the fastest in poor countries." After he's painted you this vision, he says like, "Okay, for the world, we're doubling every 35 years. But in Kenya, it's 23 years, in Nigeria, it's 27 years, and Costa Rica, 19 years." So, of course, he immediately goes to the poorest parts of the world and he's like, "Well, they're even worse and they're the ones that are driving this."
Peter: Yeah, I guess, if I had to brainstorm about who in particular is the problem, I guess, I would say them over there.
Michael: [laughs] He also says that overpopulation is a problem in rich countries, specifically the United States. He's like, "Overpopulation is a problem for us too." He has statistics about the baby boom. There have been this little spike of people having babies after World War II. And then this is very telling. "In wealthy countries," he says, "overpopulation does not normally mean too many people for the area of a country, but too many people in relation to the necessities and amenities of life. Overpopulation occurs when numbers threaten values."
Peter: Oh, God.
Michael: He's basically saying, "In the developing world, it's population, it's raw numbers. Nigeria is doubling its population." Fine. In rich countries, what he means by overpopulation is that too many people would threaten the standard of life, which is a completely different claim.
Peter: Right. The vibes are off, right?
Michael: Yes.
Peter: There's a lot of people around and it's really throwing the vibes off.
Michael: He complains a lot about traffic in this book. Traffic and parking and stuff.
Peter: I love this because the interstates have been up and running for five years in this situation and he's already complaining.
Michael: It's also really telling to me that he's writing this in the late 1960s, which is peak like white flight times. He also has this whole thing about urbanization and about how the real problem is people are crowding into cities. And he just repeats white flight like crime is rising and social unrest, and you can't even go to a restaurant without waiting in line anymore, which is all just crypto racist like, "Oh, they're all filling up with people. I don't like looking at," or, "I don't like sharing space with."
Peter: We're looking at, again, a bifurcated complaint. One, we're going to reproduce so much that we all hit a literal boiling point and explode.
Michael: Yes.
Peter: Two, there's fucking poor people everywhere, man.
Michael: I know.
Peter: He's like, "First of all, we can't go to Venus. Second of all, traffic, it's unbelievable these days."
Michael: [laughs] I know. He talks about how you can't even take weekend trips to Yosemite anymore, because it takes too long to get out of the city. I'm like, "Paul, [Peter laughs] this is what you're complaining about in your book about how we're all going to die? Okay." I think this is a very depressing detour that the environmental movement took in America in the 1970s. There's a really telling sentence in this section where he's talking about urbanization and how cities are so bad. And he says, "Adding more people to an area increases the damage done by each individual."
Peter: Is that right?
Michael: It's exactly the opposite.
Peter: Yeah. [laughs]
Michael: The more people in a city, the more you all share resources. So, one meter of a power line serves many more people in a city. One meter of water infrastructure. People tend to live in smaller spaces when they live in cities, so they don't heat and cool a larger area, like a bunch of empty rooms all year. You don't drive if you live in a city. You can look up the carbon footprint of people in suburbs versus people in cities. It's three to four times higher. The thing that is bad is sprawl.
Peter: Right.
Michael: Literally, the more people live in skyscrapers, the more nature you can preserve.
Peter: Maybe it's because he's talking about an implied alternative, not where there's more sprawl, but where there are fewer people, right?
Michael: Yes.
Peter: That's the world he's asking you to envision implicitly. Imagine not that half of New York was out in the suburbs, but that half of New York was not there at all.
Michael: Right, exactly. The vision he's laying out is one where there's just far fewer people on the planet. When he's writing this, the global population is around 2.5 billion. At one point, he just throws out that one billion is enough, [Peter laughs] because we're already over this fake limit that he's set up. The priority now has to be on reducing the number of people, not improving the living standards of people who are already here.
Peter: Any treats received by poor people will simply be turned into more babies.
Michael: Right. [laughs] That brings us to the next argument, which is that we're not producing enough food for all of this reproduction. He basically says that, "Rich countries started transferring food to poor countries pretty soon after World War II," Food Aid Programs, et cetera. "Already, countries like India aren't producing enough for their populations." I want to be very clear with this, because he says throughout the book, actually, a lot of stuff that I agree with, and a lot of stuff that is like normal left-wing stuff. One thing he says in this section is he says, "The United States has supported an unhappy status quo throughout the Third World. We've backed a series of dictators and oligarchs in numerous countries under a phony banner of anti-communism. By open and covert action, we have prevented land reform and other socio-political changes which are needed before reasonable agricultural development can occur."
Peter: Beast Ehrlich. Preach, brother.
Michael: I know. [laughs]
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: Paul Ehrlich, we stand eco-fascist king. I think it's important to note that this book is very much coming from the left. This is not a guy who identifies as a conservative. He's someone who's been really active in the environmental movement. There's lots of stuff in this book about how corporations are bad and how US imperialism is bad. There's actually a lot of stuff here that is true and right and agreeable, but he's just using it to come to the most deranged conclusions and not realizing the crypto fascist agenda that he's actually proposing and trying to convince you of.
Peter: Oh, God. It's horseshoe theory.
Michael: 100%. It's like the original horseshoe book. Yeah.
Peter: [chuckles]
Michael: Right after he says like, "Oh, we've been mean to the Third World and we've installed dictatorships," et cetera. He then talks about how because there's not enough food, there's going to start to be all these mass starvation events. He then says, "Can we guess what effect this growing disparity will have on our shipmates in poor countries? Will they starve gracefully without rocking the boat or will they attempt to overwhelm us in order to get what they consider to be their fair share?
Peter: Oh, God.
Michael: We are going to have to face some extremely difficult but unavoidable decisions. By how much and at what environmental risk, should we increase-
Peter: Oh, no.
Michael: -our domestic food production in an attempt to feed the starving? How will we react when asked to balance the lives of a million Latin Americans against say, a 30 cent per pound rise in the average price of beef? Will we be willing to slaughter our dogs and cats in order to divert pet food protein to these starving masses in Asia?"
Peter: What? [laughs]
Michael: I know. This is the other thing where he's setting up like, "Oh, I guess, you want to kill all the dogs and cats, huh?" And you're like, "What, Paul?"
Peter: I love that he's envisioned a situation where we are staving off global hunger by shipping cat meat abroad.
Michael: Exactly. [laughs]
Peter: [laughs] Do you know what would happen before we get to that point, Paul?
Michael: I know. Walk me through the steps, Paul. How do we get to me killing my cat and sending it to Cambodia, please?
Peter: Presumably, at the government's direction-
Michael: Obviously.
Peter: -a Fed is knocking on your door like hand over patches.
Michael: The first two arguments are like, there's too many people, there's not enough food. His third argument for this is that too many people are already destroying the environment. So, easily, a third of the book is just him filibustering about environmental damage. He talks about polluted rivers, he talks a lot of stuff about pesticides, he talks about there's this long running campaign in Arizona to try to kill fire ants and they were going to dust 20 million square acres of Arizona with this pesticide, and then people sued, and blah, blah. It's like, "Okay, but what does this have to do with population, Paul?"
Peter: Yeah, he wants you to infer that because pesticides are bad, we need to do something about population control rather than perhaps the very specific subset of people who are doing the pesticide.
Michael: These are not problems in the developing world, either. He's talking about all these pesticides that are being overused in America and it's like, "Well, we can just not do that in America then. That really doesn't have anything to do with what's going on in the rest of the world." He never really justifies why this is inevitable if there's more people.
Peter: Right. Look, I get it. If I were ever to write a book, I guarantee you a good chunk of it is just going to be me talking about shit I feel like talking about.
Michael: Okay. So, another thing that I feel has been lost at the time, because this is a famous book and famous books like, nobody ever reads famous books. They just get the Reader's Digest version. At least, a quarter of this book is taken up with fictional scenarios. [Peter laughs] So, he writes novelistic descriptions from the future. So, one of the scenarios starts with Margaret Andrews had very few choices in her life since Richard was killed in the riots.
Peter: Oh, my fucking God.
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: Oh, my fucking God.
Michael: It's like, "What are you doing, dude?" And then he spends 25 pages walking through this thing where there's a global pandemic.
Peter: What an idiot. That'll never happen.
Michael: I know. [laughs] All right, Paul's like one for two on that. Fine.
Peter: Yeah. [laughs]
Michael: Okay. But then he does this fucked up bait and switch. The final scenario, he's walking us through these two nightmarish scenarios of everything going wrong. The third scenario is looking back from the future on what we did right. It's describing all these UN convenings of the countries coming together and everyone loves it. He has a fake quote from the future premier of China saying like, "Russia and America are our friends, because they gave us all this food, and tractors, and pesticides starting in the 1960s. Thanks, America."
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: It's all this kumbaya shit. I'm reading this and I'm like, "Okay, so, maybe it's not so bad. It sounded quite reactionary and terrible." But like, "Okay. He's proposing more participatory systems where poor countries and rich countries can come together."
Peter: A more cooperative world.
Michael: Yeah. Maybe Paul's not so bad. And then we get to the next chapter where he talks about his actual proposals.
Peter: Oh, God.
Michael: So, of course, because he's bifurcating this problem without actually admitting that that's what he's doing, he starts off by talking about how we need to reduce population growth in the US. He floats the idea but doesn't totally commit to it of adding sterilants to the water supply.
Peter: Oh.
Michael: The thing is, he's too chicken shit to actually propose it. He says, "Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of [Peter laughs] compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve birth control."
Peter: Oh, man, he's doing a Trump. Many people are saying it for-
Michael: Exactly.
Peter: -sterilizing the entire population. [laughs]
Michael: And then I fucking love this. He's like, "But that would never work, obviously." He debunks it like, "Well, that's not a real plan." He says, all of his objections to the plan are on technical grounds.
Peter: Right. Well-meaning, the plan to sterilize a human being in the country is logistically infeasible.
Michael: Exactly. He's like, "Well, we don't have a substance that could sterilize both men and women." He's also worried that it might affect the drinking water of livestock.
Peter: Let's make sure that our livestock are getting the good water that doesn't sterilize you while the human beings drink from the murder water.
[laughter]
Michael: It's the most deranged thing where he proposes this fully genocidal idea, right?
Peter: Right.
Michael: [crosstalk] -like, "Let's sterilize everybody" and he's like, "It would never work." He's like, "Well, there's probably other reasons not to do it, actually." I can think of a few.
Peter: I'm imagining just longingly looking at a cow drinking water across a field and being like, "Oh, he's getting the good stuff. Yeah."
Michael: [laughs] Buying cow water at 7-Eleven.
[laughter]
Peter: The black market for the sterilization free water.
Michael: Then, because he's too chicken shit to actually commit to the obvious conclusions of his own idea, he basically spends the rest of the chapter talking about America, his proposals for America are all super, low grade easy stuff. He's like, "Oh, we should cut welfare benefits for people who have more than three kids," which is an unbelievably bad idea, but it's a pretty bog-standard Republican idea. He even names that this has been proposed in a bill that you lose your child tax credits after three kids."
Peter: Look, three kids, that's to the left of the modern Republican Party.
Michael: He wants responsibility prizes for couples that are married for five years but don't have kids.
Peter: Oh, my God.
Michael: Dudes that have vasectomies after they have two kids would also get a responsibility prize.
Peter: Little pat on the back from Paul.
Michael: Also, he also doesn't have the courage of his convictions here because as a gay guy, where's my prize?
Peter: That's right. Pay up.
Michael: Every time I open Grindr, [onomatopoeia] $75.
Peter: [laughs] Yeah. Sending your Venmo request to the government with just like three question marks after a long night.
[laughter]
Michael: It's normal stuff. He also says like, "There should be higher taxes on corporations. We should make corporations clean up their pollution spills." Again, a bunch of filibustery environmental stuff, which is like, "Yeah, we should do all that."
Peter: I love that he has, in the prescriptive phase, gotten weirdly neoliberal with these little ticky tack solutions. He's like, "What if we incentivized certain people to engage in less sexual activity or whatever?" When the diagnosis was, we're all going to reproduce so much that we literally explode."
Michael: Yes. [laughs]
Peter: The mismatch is fucking wild.
Michael: You're like, "What about a gas tax, Paul?" He's like, "Hey, let's not get carried away. Let's not do anything drastic in America, all right? Tone it down." Okay. Then we get to the section where he talks about what we need to do internationally. So, he uses the metaphor of triage, like hospital triage. Do you know how this works?
Peter: I'm really embarrassed to say no, but that's the truth.
Michael: It's a term that I've heard, and a term that I have used, and I definitely only learned what it is this week.
Peter: That makes me feel better.
Michael: The idea is when there's a big earthquake or some major event and there's hundreds of people coming into the ER, hospitals do this thing where you split people into three groups. There's people who are going to die regardless of what you do for them, like really grievous injuries. There's people who are going to live regardless of what you do for them, like people who have a sprained ankle or something. There's people who they will live if they get treatment and they will die if they don't get treatment. And so, when a hospital goes to triage mode, they focus exclusively on those people and anyone else just doesn't get seen. That's the idea. It's a way of prioritizing.
Peter: Right.
Michael: The first step of this plan for the world is splitting countries into these categories.
Peter: Oh, no.
Michael: I know. So, there's basically countries that are fine, and then there's countries that are going to have starvation so profound that they're not going to be able to make it because their populations are growing too fast, also, nothing we can do for them. And then there's a group in the middle of countries that we need to actually help. So, all of our international efforts now should be at identifying countries in those three categories.
Peter: That's going to be a high stakes UN vote, I'll tell you that.
Michael: [laughs] I know. And then, he's not specific about who decides which countries are in these categories.
Peter: Right.
Michael: Even in a triage, like a hospital situation, it's a huge judgment call like, "Is this person going to die with this injury or not?" It's even more complicated when it comes to countries. He's not clear about that. He specifically rejects the idea of using the UN to do this, because he's like, "The UN has the poor countries are members of the UN and they might not like this."
Peter: [laughs] Unfortunately, the countries will be voting in their own interests and we cannot have that.
Michael: [laughs] I know. Unfortunately, they don't like when we decide their fate. So, we need to set up a club of the other. He's like, "Oh, we need to get a club with Australia, the UK, Germany, whatever."
Peter: Yeah. Just naming some countries off the top of my head.
Michael: [laughs] For example-- [crosstalk]
Peter: US, UK. Germany, France, Australia. I'm just randomly selecting from my mind space.
Michael: This program, after we split the countries into three groups, the first thing is, all this propaganda in foreign countries. So, he wants to send TVs to rural areas of poor countries to tell them not to have babies. He says, "TV programs could explain the rehabilitation plan for each area. They would introduce the poor country populations to such things as the need for agricultural innovations and public health measures. The programs would use the prospect of increased affluence as a major incentive for gaining cooperation. It seems unlikely that the threat of future starvation would have much impact." [laughs]
Peter: Oh, God. what the fuck?
Michael: So, it's like, "Have you tried being less poor? We should tell people in poor countries that they should try not being poor anymore."
Peter: Can I go to Nigeria and start talking about grindset? Let's talk about hustle, folks. Let's talk about waking up, rising and grinding-
Michael: I know.
Peter: -every day.
Michael: We're shipping Live Laugh Love posters to all homes in the developing world.
Peter: Yeah. The shipping TVs thing is phenomenal, because you know that his first thought was like, "Well, we need to send propaganda." And he's like, "Okay, what's propaganda?" It's like, "Stuff you do on TV." "Okay, well, they might not have TVs." So, let's ship on the TVs first. Perfect.
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: Beautiful mind shit. This guy is just a dynamic problem solver.
Michael: Also, electricity famously available in rural areas of developing countries in the 1960s.
Peter: [chuckles] Sending utility companies to Africa.
Michael: Yeah, exactly. Perfect. He also has this whole dumb thing where he wants to send better, more productive crops to these populations. So, alongside the propaganda, you send them more productive seeds. But then, he clearly understands that this is totally deranged because he says, "Improved strains of various crops developed elsewhere might not grow satisfactorily or might be unacceptable to the local people as food." Yeah, Paul, you can't just send people in rural China like, "Here's this crop that you have no history with, you don't know how to grow, you don't know how to prepare."
Peter: Well, yeah, but if they watch the television show that explains how to grow it.
Michael: [laughs]
Peter: It's so funny to me that he immediately devolves into this dorm room level shit, when he's trying to solve the problem.
[laughter]
Michael: I've been saving the most deranged shit. Toward the end of this chapter, he says, "The bedrock requirement of the program would have to be population control, necessarily including migration control to prevent swamping of aided areas by the less fortunate. This problem might be sidestepped by using the area concept rather than strictly political units. Thus, if migration could be controlled, some sections of India might be aided and others nots."
Peter: The honest way to talk about this stuff would be to say, "Look, you and I, the reader, need to make hard choices about what our future looks like and what we're going to do to ensure that the globe is habitable in the next 50 years." But the way he's talking about it is like, "You and I are going to need to knock our heads together and think about which Indians deserve to die, [crosstalk] [Michael laughs] which deserves to live."
Michael: I know. Also, he doesn't seem to understand the profundity of what he's proposing here. It's like, so, Paul, you are proposing that a foreign country, the United States split India into new political units according to who we think deserves to live or die. And then we are also setting up migration controls within another country to keep people from moving from one part of their own country to another.
Peter: [laughs] To be fair, at this point, they're only 50 years out from the west chopping up the Middle East as it deemed fit.
Michael: That's the thing. It's consistent, at least.
Peter: [chuckles] It's the 60s and maybe back then they looked at the Middle East and they were like, "That wasn't so bad."
Michael: Yeah, that went well. All those straight lines on a map is a really good sign. Let's do that more.
Peter: [laughs] Right.
Michael: How many countries restrict the internal movement of their own populations? It's very few, and they're not countries that we're in a lot of clubs with.
Peter: Yeah. If someone brought this to you to any given population, the only thing you can do is immediately prepare for war.
Michael: Yes.
Peter: It's the logical thing to do.
Michael: I am fascinated by this that someone who considers himself a liberal, someone who knows enough about world politics to be like, "Yeah, we've installed some dictators and that's bad. Everyone deserves freedom and equality," is somehow talking himself into this. This is worse than colonialism, right?
Peter: Do you know how hard it is to make the world order worse than it currently is?
Michael: [laughs] Paul's like, "Hold my beer. Let's do this."
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: It's just like, you read this book and you just like, "That thing about, oh, we might have to throw in some migration controls and some areas of India and others," and you're like, "These are not footnotes, Paul. These are really, really, huge things that you're proposing that are totally unprecedented and awful," and you're somehow talking yourself into like, "Well, we all got to make sacrifices. You guys can't visit your family, if they live across a fake line and I'm not going to get my child tax credit, if I have a third kid. [Peter laughs] We're all in this together." Also notice that in America, if you're proposing rewards, you get a check if you don't have kids.
Peter: Yeah, right.
Michael: In India, it's like you get a fucking fence between you and your neighbors.
Peter: Yeah. I wonder how much of it is purely selfish versus knowing that you can't pitch actual sacrifice to America in a book, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: You're not going to sell a book that's like, "We all need to purposefully make our lives significantly worse or else there will be consequences." What you can do is say, "What if we tinkered with the neoliberal order a bit stateside, and over there, we instituted a brutal global regime of oppression in order to save us and save our way of life?" That's a book you can sell.
Michael: Well, this is what's fascinating to me. He's willing to make these, we need to make hard choices, bitter pill to swallow types of recommendations for other people. When it comes to America, anything that has even the potential to inconvenience him or anyone he knows, he's like, "Oh, it would never work here. We could never do it."
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: He has a forward by this guy that works at the Sierra Club and he says, "People are recognizing that we cannot forever continue to multiply and subdue the Earth without losing our standard of life and the natural beauty that must be part of it." He's putting these aesthetic concerns front and center. For him, it's about his standard of life. It's about him getting to visit fucking Yosemite on the weekends. It's so telling that he keeps mentioning these little inconveniences of daily life as a middle-aged guy in the Bay Area in the 1960s, because it's like, this is what he's actually interested in. His life has gotten more annoying and cities are getting more crowded, harder to park, and he's blown this up into this national issue. That's what's driving all of this.
Peter: Right. That's the heart of reactionary politics. You can see it in modern discourse too, where they can dress it up in rhetoric that is often expressly left wing, if not just gesturing toward left wing ideals. When you start peeling back the onion, what you start to find is petty grievance, grievance that amounts to, "I want to continue to live my life in the exact same way I was living it before completely unfettered." That's what I see here is the dressing up of these weird reactionary complaints about daily life in cities and shit like that as this global issue. Imagine what your life will be like if we continue to let the population to expand. What he wants you to envision is a world where things are slightly more annoying, right?
Michael: Right. [laughs]
Peter: That, to me, is why. I think you're right, he's deploying a lot of left-wing rhetoric, but this is not just reactionary in places. This is fundamentally reactionary.
Michael: Super. Yeah.
Peter: This is like the essence of reaction.
Michael: Exactly. Also, I'm so stuck on this phrase. He says, "We can't continue to multiply without losing our standard of living and natural beauty." It's like, "But what about the standard of living for people who live in India?"
Peter: Right.
Michael: You want them to eat different food, totally change their way of life. Also, parts of India are pretty beautiful too.
Peter: Yep.
Michael: There's natural beauty outside of the United States, my dude.
Peter: Look, if I have to pay 30% more for diapers and 2 billion people on the other side of the planet have to die for me to continue to go on really nice drives, we're in this together.
Michael: So, that's the book. Also, he does some forced sterilization stuff.
Peter: Yeah, naturally.
Michael: He says, "We should send helicopters and trained medical professionals." The funny thing is, that's so fucking odious, but it's the fourth most odious thing in the book. By the time he gets the forced sterilization, you're like, "Oh, okay, we've already covered supranational institutions."
Peter: [laughs] Did this lead to any actual genocides? I'm going to be so mad.
Michael: Oh, dude, this led to-- You can never draw a straight line between a book and an outcome. But forced sterilization policies were very common. India had a decade long program. This also led to the one child policy in China.
Peter: Oh, Jesus Christ.
Michael: You can't say this book completely, but the panic overpopulation.
Peter: Right.
Michael: There was a point where Bangladesh was spending 60% of its own public health budget on population control efforts.
Peter: What the fuck?
Michael: A lot of poor countries got roped into this, because first of all, they have inequalities in poor countries. A lot of poor countries were run by really nasty dictators at the time and they loved this shit, because they're like, "This is the way that I can crack down on minority populations." There was a forced sterilization program in Peru by Fujimori that sterilized 290,000 women, 270,000 of which were indigenous women. It's like, what a great way to find this population that threatens your power that you don't like anyway and you're like, "Oh, let's just make sure they can't have babies anymore." The US there's actually quite a bit of debate of how much the US knew. But the US didn't really step in to stop this and didn't step in to make sure this wasn't happening. The World Health Organization was really big on population control.
A lot of times countries would tie their food aid and their financial aid to population control measures. You can't get the shipment of food unless you put in place these policies. And so, it ends up having these effects where we're imposing ideology on these poor countries, but it's never called that. It's never like, "Oh, we're actually going to make you do this." It's like, "Well, this is actually just the best thing. Science says that this is good for you. So, we just think you should do the good thing."
Michael: The discourse about aid to other countries that you'll see coming from the right, where they'll say, we should be helping people at home before we ship out money to other countries. Not that they actually believe that, but even if you take it at face value, it's like, "You know, we're not really trying to help them. You know that money is being used to secure US interests across the globe. I promise you were not giving it to them for free in any meaningful sense."
Michael: Oh, my God. Have you ever heard of zero population growth?
Peter: No.
Michael: This is another really gross thing. The book comes out in 1968 and basically makes no splash at all. Nobody gives a shit until 1970, when the author, Paul Ehrlich is on The Tonight Show.
Peter: Oh, okay.
Michael: After his appearance on The Tonight Show, the book ends up selling two million copies and Johnny Carson has Paul Ehrlich on 20 more times.
Peter: [laughs]
Michael: Paul Ehrlich on one of these The Tonight Show appearances mentions that like, "Oh, we need a grassroots effort to control population." He starts or somebody starts this thing called zero population growth that became a really big movement on college campuses in the 1970s. This is the least twistiest twist ever. It ends up becoming really reactionary. So, within a couple of years, they're calling for the US to reduce immigration by 90% [Peter laughs] for growing population, unfortunately.
Peter: Yeah, of course.
Michael: Then it breaks off this Immigration Control Committee something, something of this group breaks off and becomes FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which is infamous right-wing-
Peter: [laughs] Oh, my God.
Michael: -nightmare organization.
Peter: Oh, my God. One of the most-- How would I put it? Well, let's just say one of the most visible anti-Muslim organizations in the country.
Michael: Exactly. So, that grows out immediately. That's a little tumor that grows inside of ZPG and then breaks off and becomes its own reactionary movement. So, it's like, "Yeah. Paul. This was really, really predictable," and of course, right-wing millionaires.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: The guy who runs the company, the Dixie Cups, he's like a right-wing asshole and-
Peter: Oh, I could not-- [crosstalk]
Michael: -he put a bunch of full-page ads in The New York Times saying like, "We have to control--" He loved Paul Ehrlich.
Peter: This guy whose fucking tiny cups are littering the bottom of our ocean-
Michael: Exactly.
Peter: -is full of complaints about overpopulation.
Michael: All right. So, it's now 2022. None of the things that he predicted have happened. Birth rates were already flat and falling in Asia, by the time he wrote this. They now say the next doubling time for the human population is going to be 100 to 175 years.
Peter: We will not reach the melting point of iron in our lifetimes.
Michael: Unfortunately, not. That would have been cool to see having sex while melting.
Peter: Twitter would have been fucking crazy that week, I'll tell you that.
Michael: [laughs] So, birth rates have flattened out basically, because economic growth. And then also, crop yields have outpaced population growth every single year. Something that he never gets into in his book that drives me nuts is that he never acknowledges the fact that we even knew then that famines are political. There's no such thing as famine that is caused by not enough rainfall. Kansas has years where there's not enough rainfall for crops and people do not starve in Kansas. It's about trade and consumption and political systems.
Peter: Right. It's not 1300s, right?
Michael: Right.
Peter: The world is connected enough that if there is massive starvation in one place, it is at least to some degree, because another place is not sending them food.
Michael: Exactly. Also, if you look at the numbers, the charts are really stark. When he was writing his book between 12 and 15 million people every year died in famines, and now it's 75,000 people a year.
Peter: That's a month of COVID in America.
Michael: Exactly. Oh, no. [laughs]
Peter: The reason that he's saying this will happen is just an overall global shortage of food, right?
Michael: Yes.
Peter: That's extremely different from localized shortages of food.
Michael: So, Paul Ehrlich is still alive.
Peter: Oh, shit.
Michael: He's been proven wrong on all of the central claims of his book and he just won't backtrack. He wrote a book in 1990 called The Population Explosion.
Peter: Hell yeah.
Michael: In 2018, he was interviewed and they're like, "Do you regret anything?" He's like, "Yes. I didn't make dire enough predictions. It's really bad out there."
Peter: This is how you know he's a conservative.
Michael: [laughs] I know.
Peter: [crosstalk] just proven wrong and people are like, "So, obviously, you're wrong." And he's like, "Don't agree, buddy. Don't agree."
Michael: Don't agree. You know what?
Peter: To remind our listeners, he predicted hundreds of millions of deaths in the 1970s and 1980s.
Michael: Yeah. At one point, he predicted major famines in the United States as well.
Peter: I imagine his current defense is something like, "Look, the exact numbers were off, but the vibes were right."
Michael: Because nobody reads these fucking books that go-
Peter: Of course.
Michael: -viral back in the day. He says, "Oh, well, look, I didn't really make any predictions in that book. All I was saying is that the Earth has a limit to how many people it can feed." That's his line now. And it's like, "No, dude, you said that a billion was the number of people that the Earth should have. You said that we had exceeded the limit."
Peter: Right.
Michael: The fact that there is a limit is totally banal. Nobody disagrees with that.
Peter: Right. [laughs]
Michael: So, I want to end with a quote about the reason why this idea keeps coming up, because as soon as you start googling around like type in "overpopulation," you start finding exactly these arguments getting resurrected again as climate change stuff. You find this in Jeffrey Sachs's book The End of Poverty. You find it in Gates Foundation documents. There was an interview last fall with Jane Goodall, where she was like, "It might be time to start asking some tough questions about overpopulation."
Peter: Oh, Jesus.
Michael: This idea will not die. I found a really fascinating article called Barbarian hordes: the overpopulation scapegoat in international development discourse that basically tracks every single resurgence of this idea, and basically tries to talk about it as like a psychological phenomenon. Why do we keep returning to this argument? It says, "The specter of overpopulation functions as a scapegoat. It focuses attention on the ways in which the subject of development, widely imagined as animalistic barbarian hordes subvert their own development potential by breeding out of control. In doing so, they threaten the ability of more sensible developed populations to attain enjoyment in a world of rapidly diminishing natural resources. The resilience of this frame in the face of copious contradictory evidence suggests that its persistence defies purely rational evaluation operating at a deeper psychodynamic register."
Peter: I think that's right. I have come to understand reactionary impulses more as psychological phenomena rather than purely ideological manifestations. To me, all of this runs very parallel to how conservatives talk about poor people in the United States. Plenty of liberals, frankly, talk about poor people in the United States, where they are naturally searching for reasons to blame poor people for their own situation. You need to put it on them in some way, so that the moral onus is off you.
Michael: Right. One of the things that bugs me so much about this discourse coming up again is always packaged as it's time to ask tough questions about overpopulation. It's the least tough question imaginable, because it doesn't actually challenge anybody in power. If the actual problem as Paul Ehrlich says in his book a million times is DuPont pouring chemicals into rivers, then the question is, why are we allowing a company to do that? If the problem is carbon pouring into the atmosphere, why are we doing that? It's not actually a tough question to ask. Are poor people having too many babies? Are people who aren't me responsible for their own conditions? That's not a tough question. That's a really easy question and that's why we keep asking it.
Peter: Right. There's no moral judgment of the west inherent in it. The irony is that the policy solution proposed by Ehrlich, it's much more onerous, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Peter: On one hand, it's like, "Well, what do we want to do? Do we want to pass a regulation saying DuPont can't pour those chemicals in the pond?" No. Let's seize sovereignty from South Asian countries all at once, divvy them up, and tell them exactly when and where they can breathe.
Michael: It's time to do the easy stuff.
Peter: The real tragedy here is that at the time this book came out, there wasn't a hit piece apparatus, because [Michael laughs] if this came out now, there'd be some New Yorker piece called, "The butterfly dip shit." [Michael laughs] If someone brought this up at a party, they were like, "Hey, have you heard about this Ehrlich guy's book?" You'd be like, "You mean the butterfly dip shit?" [Michael laughs] What can you say to that? The conversation is over.
Michael: [laughs]
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