Paul Ehrlich died this past Friday at the age of 93. He represents another illustration of my slightly hyperbolic proposition that “only the wrong survive.” Noah Rothman takes up Ehrlich’s “disastrous legacy” in a good column behind NR’s paywall.
Ehrlich spent a long career peddling doom commencing with publication of The Population Bomb in 1968. The book and the career made him a rich man.
Students of ancient history may recall Ehrlich’s bet with Julian Simon on Ehrlich’s population-bomb theme of resource depletion. (Rothman omits any mention of the bet.) Ehrlich lost the bet. See “How Julian Simon Won a $1,000 Bet with Population Bomb Author Paul Ehrlich” and “Julian Simon Was Right: A Half‐Century of Population Growth, Increasing Prosperity, and Falling Commodity Prices.” It is also the subject of Paul Sabin’s book The Bet (Yale University Press, 2013).
CBS’s 60 Minutes featured Ehrlich in a credulous segment in 2023. I posted video of the segment and wrote about it in “The extinction next time.” The 60 Minutes segment also omitted any mention of the Ehrlich-Simon bet.
The 60 Minutes segment was nevertheless testimony to the fact that we are still here despite “the population bomb.” Resource depletion (or the extinction of “wild plants and animals”) may represent a threat of a kind, but it’s got nothing on the likes of Ehrlich et al. and their proposed solutions.
Steve Hayward used Sabin’s book as a text in his spring 2014 environment class at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Steve reported that, while many students recognized the fundamental flaws of the 1970s-era Malthusianism at the heart of Ehrlich’s shtick, they nevertheless held fast to Ehrlich’s doomsaying because it comported with their environmental romanticism.
Steve added that he had squared off with Ehrlich twice, once at the New School in New York in 2006 and once on Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge in 2003. I have posted the Uncommon Knowledge video below. Steve wrote on Power Line: “[I]f you have the time, you’ll see that I manage to wring some grudging concessions from Ehrlich.”
