I don’t usually dance on people’s graves, but I’ll make an exception for a man whose misanthropy and dogged devotion to falsehood knew no bounds.
Paul Ralph Ehrlich had the temerity to live to 93 on a planet he spent his life preaching should be populated by fewer than two billion people.
He should have had the courtesy to live – or rather, die – by example.
Cancer eventually got him last week, on 13 March 2026.
He is survived by his equally superannuated and misanthropic wife, Anne.
Since before I was born (55 years ago tomorrow), the Ehrlichs – both of them – have preached that humanity is doomed.
“I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we’ve had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to,” Paul told 60 Minutes in 2023, having learnt exactly nothing since 1968, when he wrote, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
Instead of moderating his cataclysmic forecasts in the face of overwhelming evidence that he has always been spectacularly wrong, he kept doubling down. He spent his dotage, like his life, claiming that he was more alarmed than he ever was before.
Misanthropic
It might seem cold to speak ill of the dead, but I’ll gladly break that taboo for one of the most misanthropic human beings ever to darken this world.
Ehrlich, in his 1,100 papers, 40-odd books, incessant television appearances, and with a prestigious pulpit at the University of Stanford, was one of the world’s foremost popularisers of a truly harmful idea: that there are too many people on a planet that is rapidly running out of resources.
This misbegotten and misanthropic idea supported a vast movement of environmental exaggeration, which led to over-correction by government policies, which unnecessarily constrained economies. This harmed – and continues to harm – emerging economies in particular.
Ehrlich’s mistaken view gave moral impetus to a massive weight of authoritarian red tape that restricted individual liberty, hobbled markets, limited prosperity growth, and slowed down the race to eliminate extreme poverty from the world.
His thesis became one of the most prominent justifications for socialist policies since Marx first posited the notion of class struggle in the 19th century.
This evil idea caused millions of people to decide not to start families, in the tragic belief that their children would be nothing but a burden upon the world.
Being wrong
Ehrlich spent six decades being spectacularly, consequentially wrong. He was arguably the most influential peddler of false prophecy in the history of modern science.
The planet he spent his career declaring finished outlived him in rude health. The civilisation he spent his life condemning is threatened not by resource scarcity, but by political and bureaucratic power that Ehrlich’s worldview legitimised.
Ehrlich achieved fame with his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, a work of such spectacular falsehood that it deserves pride of place in a museum of intellectual fallacy.
In its opening salvo, he unambiguously predicted mass starvation by the 1970s. Like Thomas Malthus before him, he was wrong. Comprehensively, measurably, ruinously wrong.
Instead of rising, the global incidence of famines has fallen relentlessly since Ehrlich predicted the collapse of civilisations.
Instead of a substantial increase in the world death rate, it fell, from 12 per 1,000 people in 1968 to 8 per 1,000 in 2023. Instead of a declining food supply, the global per capita calorie intake rose by 30% between 1968 and 2023, thanks to modern technologies in agriculture. The proportion of undernourished people in the developing world declined from 37% in 1970 to 8.2% in 2024. Global average life expectancy at birth rose from 56 years in 1968 to 73 years in 2023.
Paul Ehrlich kept calling, but the apocalypse refused to come. Reality turned out to be the exact opposite of his predictions.
Civilisational collapse
Ehrlich was not content with being merely wrong. He was wrong with authority, wrong with charisma, and wrong with devastating consequence. He predicted 65 million Americans would starve and gave fair odds that England would not exist by the year 2000. Both Americans and England, irritatingly, persist.
He had a clear racist streak, too. By his own admission, he acquired his fear of overpopulation in 1966, not in the streets of Paris, London or New York (all of which had populations near eight million), but in the streets of Delhi, India (whose population was only 2.8 million). He minded teeming masses especially if they were brown and poor.
He appeared on television over and over, carrying his message of civilisational collapse to millions of living rooms, becoming the face of anti-human pessimism.
The human cost of his influence was not theoretical. His ideas inspired policies of forced population control in many authoritarian countries.
China’s catastrophic one-child policy, which has left that nation facing a catastrophic and now unavoidable population collapse this century, drew intellectual sustenance from the Malthusian tradition Ehrlich so energetically championed.
Compulsion
His prescription was as troubling as his diagnosis. He argued that “we must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”
The word “compulsion” did not give the liberal establishment pause. It should have.
When confronted with reality – the Green Revolution, agricultural innovation, and the endless supply of human ingenuity he insisted could not save us – Ehrlich simply refused to budge.
Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution cut starvation deaths from 16 million in the 1960s to 1.3 million in the 1970s. Ehrlich’s response to such inconvenient miracles was to redouble his predictions rather than reconsider them.
Repudiation
The most entertaining repudiation of his worldview came courtesy of economist Julian Simon, who in 1980 challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was.
Having agreed between them that price was a suitable proxy for scarcity, Simon asked Ehrlich to choose five resources he thought would become more scarce by 1990.
If a $1,000 basket of Ehrlich’s choice rose in price, Simon undertook to pay Ehrlich the difference. If it declined, Ehrlich had to pay the difference to Simon. (That bet limited Ehrlich’s money at risk to $1,000, while Simon’s exposure was potentially infiinite.)
Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. By 1990, Ehrlich’s basket had fallen by more than 50%, and he (or rather, his wife) sent Simon a cheque for $576.07.
It wouldn’t have mattered which particular resources Ehrlich chose. The Simon Abundance Index is based on 50 basic commodities.
Today, it stands more than 500% higher than it did in 1980. Resources have become not less abundant, but more abundant.
The world’s physical resources might not be finite in principle, but the ultimate resource is humanity’s ingenuity in using them ever more efficiently. That makes resources in practice ever-more abundant, instead of increasingly scarce, as Ehrlich postulated.
Failed predictions
Characteristically, Ehrlich refused to concede what his loss to Simon meant for everything he had built his career on.
In 2015, facing a half-century of failed predictions, Ehrlich stated that if he were writing The Population Bomb again, his language would be “even more apocalyptic.”
A kind reflection upon his life would be that he was a true believer to the last. But he was far too intelligent for that: he deliberately, maliciously, selfishly, maintained the falsehoods that made him famous. He knew where his bread was buttered.
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was cursed to utter true prophecies that no one believed. Ehrlich was the anti-Cassandra: he made false prophecies that came to be widely believed.
And that is precisely the measure of the damage. Ideas have consequences. Ehrlich’s ideas – broadcast across decades, laundered through Stanford’s prestige, amplified by a media that thrives on sensationalism and routinely mistakes alarm for insight – shaped policy, chilled economic growth, justified authoritarianism, and robbed generations of people of optimism about the future – their future.
The billions of human beings lifted out of poverty during Ehrlich’s lifetime, the diseases defeated, the famines averted, the lifespans extended – these achievements happened not because of Ehrlich’s counsel, but in defiance of it.
Humanity’s great story of the last sixty years is one of ingenuity, trade, and growth. Ehrlich spent those sixty years telling us it couldn’t be done and shouldn’t be tried.
Condolences
Ehrlich also leaves behind a daughter, Lisa Marie Ehrlich, who was “shocked and concerned” by her father’s overpopulation thesis at the age of ten. She turns 71 this year.
Condolences are due to her, though I’m not sure whether sympathy over her father’s eventual death or over his fear-mongering life is more appropriate.
The movement sustained by Ehrlich’s confidently wrong predictions survives him too. Like Ehrlich, it is immune to evidence that despite occasional, temporary setbacks, human welfare and resource abundance keeps improving, by any measure you might choose.
Humanity, contrary to Ehrlich’s stubborn wish, continues to thrive, both in number and in quality of life.
[Image: Population Bomb.webp]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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