In the subhead of its obituary of the world’s most celebrated doomsayer Paul Ehrlich, The New York Times referred to his predictions as “premature.” Oy, Gevalt! So, like, maybe he was actually just a bit ahead of his time? No, actually the butterfly specialist became both rich and famous by scaring the pants and skirts off the public despite being correct less often than the proverbial stopped clock. Consider such assertions as:
· Mass starvation in the 1970s and 1980s — In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, he predicted that "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death" in the 1970s–1980s due to population outstripping food supply. This included scenarios of widespread global famines and even specific claims like 65 million Americans starving in the 1980s.
· "Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come — and by the end, I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity," he said in a 1970 CBS broadcast.
· Oceans becoming "dead" or all important sea life extinct by ~1985–1990 — He stated that "all important animal life in the sea will be extinct" by the mid-1980s (or similar phrasing in various interviews/statements around 1970), with oceans as "dead as Lake Erie" in less than a decade.
· England ceasing to exist by 2000 — In 1970 he stated he would “take even money” that England would no longer exist as a functioning society by the year 2000 due to resource and population pressures. Despite former Prince Andrew’s best efforts, it’s apparently still there.
· Life expectancy in the U.S. dropping to 42 years by 1980 — In 1969 he stated, “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.” Claiming the same year that by 1980 the United States would see life expectancy drop to 42 years because of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would plummet to 22.6 million.
Something that actually gets a bit too much play is the famous 1980 bet with economist Julian Simon. Ehrlich wagered that prices of key metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, tungsten) would rise over the next decade due to depletion. Prices actually fell (adjusted for inflation), and Ehrlich lost the bet.
The problem is that the year was 1980, the peak of a massive increase in prices of commodities that was an explicit effect of a weak dollar brought to us by Presidents Nixon and Carter. If the bet had been struck in 1970 and ended in 1980, Ehrlich would have fared much better. During that decade, oil prices tripled, and the prices of almost all minerals spiked. But Simon was right that as resources become scarcer we find better ways of recovering them, or else we find superior substitutes.
If you want even more bizarre false predictions, here are 18. To his credit, no research reveals that Ehrlich predicted a zombie apocalypse nor a shortage of brains for consumption.
Ehrlich is often labeled a Malthusian or neo-Malthusian after Thomas Robert Malthus (1766 – 1834) a highly influential English economist, cleric, and scholar. He came up with the absolutely baseless formula that population grows exponentially (like 2, 4, 8), while food supply grows arithmetically (like 2, 4, 6).
Yes, and it’s Tuesday therefore it will rain pickled herring.
Yet just a few years later Malthus, misinformed but not wicked, began revising the formula and its implications. Ehrlich, meanwhile, just ignored when his deadlines came and went to come up with New and Improved Doomsaying. He shifted the goalposts, moving from "mass starvation" to "climate catastrophe" or "biodiversity loss." The underlying "Ehrlichism" remains the same: a belief that human progress is a zero-sum game played against a fragile nature.
My introduction to Ehrlich was very early, and makes a telling anecdote. It was in a TV documentary (I believe) that made one of my little brothers cry. That was essentially the point; to make us gnash and wail and tear our hair over the inevitable. Or conversely engage in horrific forced behavior such as mandatory sterilizations.
Ehrlich’s pronunciations treated "resources" as static piles of stuff hidden in the ground. In reality, a resource is only a resource because of human knowledge. Oil was often considered that ruined farmland until Canadian scientist Abraham Gesner converted it to kerosene that proved great for oil lamps (ensuring that whales weren’t hunted to extinction). Then came the internal combustion engine, and the rest as they say … Sand was essentially dirt and a co-star in Frankie and Annette movies until we learned to turn it into silicon chips.
Yet as Simon, a personal friend and lovely human being, argued in his book The Ultimate Resource (1981), the human imagination is the only limit to growth. When a resource becomes scarce, its price rises. That price spike acts as a signal for people to find more of it, use it more efficiently, or invent something better to replace it entirely. You don’t restock the refrigerator if it’s full. This is the feedback loop Ehrlich’s biological models could never account for.
If Ehrlich had merely been a harmless eccentric with a bad track record, his legacy would be a punchline. But his rhetoric had consequences. Beyond scaring the crap out of my brother. By framing human beings as a "cancer" on the planet—a term he literally used—he provided the intellectual cover for draconian population control measures.
From forced sterilizations in India to the brutal enforcement of China’s "One Child Policy," the "overpopulation" panic fueled by Ehrlich led to systemic human rights abuses. When you convince the world that it is a sinking lifeboat, people start looking for whom to throw overboard.
History has shown the opposite. As we became more numerous and more prosperous, we became cleaner and more efficient. The "population bomb" didn't explode; it fizzled into a demographic transition where birth rates are now plummeting in almost every developed nation.
Paul Ehrlich wasn't "premature." He was fundamentally mistaken about the nature of our species. We are not fruit flies in a jar. We are the architects of the jar, and we’ve proven repeatedly that we can make the jar bigger, better, and more bountiful.
