Comment by api
1 year ago
Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this wrong and still have credibility.
He came to the US Air Force Academy every year to give the incoming freshman class his lecture.
This was mandatory and went on for years.
I distinctly remember he sat in a folding chair next to an overhead projector and used what looked like 20 year old laminate slides (this was in the early 2000s) to go through his pitch.
Is he still doing that at other schools? He must be too old at this point.
The modern-day Malthus, except so much worse, because he had the example of Malthus but chose to ignore the lesson there
how is Paul Ehrlich linked to the original post?
what is he wrong about?
Paul Ehrlich was the most visible figure in the midcentury fear of overpopulation. He claimed that by now we'd have seen starvation so profound around the world (100,000,000s dead of starvation) that large portions of the third world would collapse completely and that the only mechanism to prevent this starvation was extreme population control measures placed by the west on the rest of the world (including things like partitioning India and just letting some regions starve completely to death with no aid). He believed that the sustainable population for the planet was one billion.
He was completely wrong. I think it is a great example to use in these modern discussions. Just 50 years ago we were seeing highly influential people say "we are going to breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights." Today, we are starting to see highly influential people say "we are going to not-breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights."
India got there on overpopulation. Total fertility rate around 6 in 1965. India does not have enough water for its population.[1] China would have hit similar problems if not for their one-child policy. China managed to avoid the overshoot when medicine starts to work but the economy hasn't developed yet. India didn't.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_scarcity_in_India
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Unfortunately a lot of people are now saying we need extreme curtailing of rights -- largely womens' rights -- because of underpopulation. The answer to every panic is always curtailing of rights. Scary thing may happen therefore we need big alpha ape to fix it for us by bashing people on head with big rock. Grunt, grunt.
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See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
Most never get held to account for their wrong predictions. But he seems a particularly egregious case.