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Kevin D. Williamson's tribute to Mr. Erlich, from The Dispatch:

At what point must we be frank about the fact that Paul Ehrlich,
The Population Bomb author who died last week at the age of 93,
was not simply wrong about almost everything he ever wrote or said
or thought, but positively and culpably dishonest?

If ever there were an intellectual grave that deserves pissing on
posthaste, it is Paul Ehrlich's. So let us commence.

Ehrlich was an intellectual fraud, something he had in common with
many of the celebrated pseudoscientists, quacks, and cranks who
became intellectual heroes to our era's progressives, from Sigmund
Freud to Noam Chomsky, Rachel Carson, Margaret Sanger, and Robert
F. Kennedy Jr. until about five minutes ago. (Right-wingers don't
go around reading books by crackpots--they put them into the
Cabinet.) Like Karl Marx, another great prophet of the always-
wrong-but-never-in-doubt school, Ehrlich believed that there is a
kind of science of history and that, consequently, future events
could be predicted with great confidence by those who were willing
to--all together now!--follow the science. And so Ehrlich, whose
academic specialty was the study of butterflies, was famous for
his startling predictions--his hilarious, wrong-headed,
unsupported, book-mongering predictions. For example:

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 in the future will be obese!

And:

In 10 years [1980], all important animal life in the sea will
be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated
because of the stench of dead fish.

And:

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. At this late
date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world
death rate.

And:

If our current rape of the watersheds, our population growth,
and our water use trends continue, in 1984 the United States
will quite literally be dying of thirst.

Ehrlich was also famous for refusing to own up to any of his
errors in a serious way. He would later insist that The Population
Bomb, published in 1968, had been "too optimistic," and the
overpopulation cultists--it is a religious phenomenon--who looked
to him for direction would insist from time to time that he had
been kinda-sorta, if you squint in the right way, vindicated.

That is not how you do the work of a public intellectual in a
responsible way. It is, however, how you sell 3 million books in
short order.

As publicity whores go, Ehrlich was a kinky kind--there was no
public humiliation that he was above. In 1980, Ehrlich made his
now-famous wager with Julian Simon, the libertarian economist and
author of The Ultimate Resource. Ehrlich had said--in his usual
all-hype-all-the-time mode--that "if I were a gambler, I would
take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."
Simon, who was in possession of a functioning nose and hence had a
good idea of what Ehrlich was peddling, offered a wager: $10,000
that the price of "non-government-controlled raw materials
(including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run." Ehrlich
chose a basket of commodities--chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and
tungsten.

He lost on every count. The predictable apologists insisted that
this was a fluke, that things would have worked out differently if
different commodities had been selected or if a different time
frame had been used. And there were versions of the bet in which
Ehrlich would have done better, but the fact was that, in spite of
the biggest decade of population growth in recorded human history,
the price of market-traded commodities in general trended
downward.

Ehrlich eventually paid up.

The outcome was, of course, precisely in accord with Simon's view
expressed in The Ultimate Resource: that human ingenuity and
market incentives would work together to ensure that the material
conditions of the future were more abundant than those of the
past, rather than being overtaxed by a growing population. The
same dynamic explained why Ehrlich had gotten it so wrong about
food abundance and why semi-conspiracy-theory paradigms such as
"peak oil" keep getting it wrong: Ehrlich insisted that he would
have been right if not for Norman Borlaug and the "Green
Revolution" in agriculture, just as the peak-oilers insist that
they would have been right about waning petroleum supplies if not
for hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling--all of which is
true in the same sense that farm yields would be much lower if we
were still plowing the fields with oxen. When goods become scarce,
prices go up, and when prices go up, there are incentives for new
sellers--new firms, new capital, new ideas--to get into the
market. The Malthusians and their 20th-century epigones always get
it wrong because they make straight-line projections that assume
increased demand in the future but no increased supply.

Everything you need to know about Ehrlich can be summed up by
this: He published a memoir three years ago in which he makes no
mention at all of the wager with Julian Simon, by far the most
famous episode in his public life beyond his authorship of the
thoroughly discredited The Population Bomb.

All of us involved in public life make mistakes. In 2012, I
received a telephone call from a press spokesman for Donald Trump
(in retrospect, I assume it was Trump himself), who told me that
the reality-television star intended to run for president and
asked whether I would be interested in interviewing him about his
plans. Do you know what I did? I laughed out loud. I offered to do
the interview, of course--it would have been a hilarious story. Or
so I thought.

I've been wrong about a lot of things. Chances are, I'll be wrong
about something this week. But I have always tried to own up to my
errors, misunderstandings, and occasional public displays of
ignorance.

But hundreds of millions dead in the Western world instead of the
economic boom of the 1980s? England disappearing from the map
because of famine and drought? For Pete's sake--Ehrlich wasn't
even right about obesity, and to the extent that the number of fat
people seems to be on the decline, it is because of the blessings
of modern pharmacology and not because of food scarcity. And no
formerly fat person on Earth seems to have been poisoned by
metabolizing DDT lurking in his fat cells.

Ehrlich's arrogance, dishonesty, and neo-Malthusianism were bound
up with another of his unfortunate tendencies: his racism. The
genesis of The Population Bomb began when Ehrlich made his first
trip to India and decided, first thing, that there were too many
Indians in the world. "I have understood the population explosion
intellectually for a long time," he wrote. "I came to understand
it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago."

I lived in Delhi for a time, too, and it is a city-and-a-half in
all directions, to be sure. It is hot at times, crowded in parts,
and dirty in places, but much the same could be said of any major
world city not located in Switzerland. Is India overpopulated? The
country's population density, at about 484 people per square
kilometer, is significantly lower than that of the Netherlands
(about 545 people per square kilometer), while the population
density of Delhi itself is between that of New York City and
Geneva--pretty high, but not off the charts. Where the Indian
urban masses that so repulsed Ehrlich differed from their American
or Swiss counterparts was not that they were so thickly planted
but that they were poor. Do you know how modern residents of Delhi
differ from the average residents of that esteemed city in the
1960s? They are a hell of a lot less poor, thanks in no small part
to a series of liberal, pro-market economic reforms instituted by
Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh running in the direction
precisely opposite that imagined by such |-tatiste
interventionists, planners, and would-be rationers of humanity as
Paul Ehrlich.

In one of the great ironies of modern intellectual life, the
problem now faced by such formerly teeming Asian nations as Japan
and China--to say nothing of Western Europe and the United States
--is population decline. China, where the "one child" policy
reflected the essence of Ehrlich's thinking as practiced by a
ruthless police state (there may have been as many as 100 million
forced abortions and sterilizations in a single three-year
period), is entering a period of demographic crisis, offering new
subsidies to encourage Chinese people to have more children. Japan
is facing long-term demographic collapse. Most projections have us
about 60 years away from a worldwide decline in human numbers,
which will create all sorts of problems for practically all modern
states with entitlement regimes based on traditional models. Will
that create a catastrophe resulting in the deaths of hundreds of
millions or billions of people? Maybe. But one suspects that even
in a time of ubiquitous and highly effective AI, a shrinking
global labor pool will put upward pressure on wages.

But I am not one for making wild, unsubstantiated predictions--
which is one reason I probably won't leave behind as large an
estate as the late Paul Ehrlich, the arch anti-natalist ("by
compulsion if voluntary methods fail") who insisted that worldwide
disaster was waiting in the wings but lived well into his 90s.
That was long enough to meet his great-grandchildren, who were
born into a world remarkably better than the one Paul Ehrlich
prophesied.
--
jd
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