Paul Ehrlich died recently at the age of 93, best known as a Malthusian in a modern age of growth and then population decline…with no famines, except man-made ones. His best-known book was The Population Bomb, published in 1968, which was already wrong when it was published. It’s fine to attack the man’s ideas, as they were just plain wrong, he was told this when alive, and he had never admitted this. While not the only person with his ideas, he contributed to the suicide of expertise, by claiming authority in the face of his own falsity.

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Media Obituaries

NYT, 15 Mar 2026: Paul R. Ehrlich, Who Alarmed the World With ‘The Population Bomb,’ Dies at 93

His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.

Paul R. Ehrlich, an eminent ecologist and population scientist whose best-selling book, ‘’The Population Bomb,’‘ was celebrated as a prescient warning of a coming age of food shortages and famine but later criticized by conservatives and academic rivals for what they called its sky-is-falling rhetoric, died on Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 93.

His death, at a nursing facility in the retirement community where he lived, was caused by complications of cancer, his daughter, Lisa Marie Daniel, said.

As a young professor of biology at Stanford University in the mid-1960s, Dr. Ehrlich was known for his absorbing lectures on evolution, in which he described what plants and animals faced on a planet stressed by industrial pollution and rapid population growth. He distilled those lectures into an article published in December 1967 in New Scientist magazine.

Six months later, encouraged by David Brower, the executive director of the environmental group the Sierra Club, to write a book on the subject, Dr. Ehrlich published ‘’The Population Bomb.’‘ In 233 pages, he asserted that the planet’s condition began to deteriorate rapidly in the 1950s, when the rate of population growth exceeded the increase in food production -- or, as he put it, when ‘’the stork passed the plow.’‘ He called on couples to limit their families to one or two children.

Witty, knowledgeable and not at all reticent, Dr. Ehrlich gained a huge audience on television, especially on ‘’The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,’‘ which he appeared on roughly 20 times. His forecast of food riots in the United States and of imminent global famines caused by escalating population growth found a worldwide readership.

One of the best-selling nonfiction books about the environment to date, ‘’The Population Bomb’‘ sold three million copies and transformed Dr. Ehrlich, who was 37 at the time, into one of the global environmental movement’s most recognized leaders. His influence motivated international governments to convene conferences on controlling population, and his message was heard in private homes across the industrialized world as couples conceived fewer children.

Dr. Ehrlich expanded on his thesis in ‘’The End of Affluence’‘ (1974), which he wrote with his wife, Anne H. Ehrlich, who wrote or edited 15 books with him. The book forecast a ‘’nutritional disaster’‘ in the 1970s, predicting that ‘’before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity.’‘

Such bold predictions, some of which turned out to be premature or in error, prompted rivals in business and academia to question the validity of his claims. In 1980, Julian Simon, an economist at the University of Maryland, challenged Dr. Ehrlich and two of his colleagues with what Stewart Brand, a founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, called ‘’one of the great revelatory bets.’‘

Convinced that the growing population would make natural resources ever more scarce and thus drive up costs, Dr. Ehrlich accepted Mr. Simon’s challenge, betting that the prices of five key metals would rise in the 1980s. Mr. Simon believed that innovation would drive prices down.

In 1990, Dr. Ehrlich and his colleagues conceded defeat and sent Mr. Simon a check for $576.07 -- an amount that represented the decline in the metals’ prices after accounting for inflation.

WSJ, editorial, 17 Mar 2026: Paul Ehrlich, the Man Who Lost an Infamous Bet

The Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, who died Friday at age 93, made his most important contribution to the world by losing a bet. It helped educate millions that his ideas about scarcity and human ingenuity were wrong.

Readers of a certain age will recall that Ehrlich was one of the most celebrated public intellectuals of his time. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” made him famous in an era of economic and political turmoil that led to public pessimism.

The book’s opening lines capture his zero-sum Malthusian thinking: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” The idea that people having babies was impoverishing nations became an article of faith on the political left and most of the press. Untold horrors were committed by governments against their own citizens in the name of population control—most notably, China’s one-child policy.

The great economist Julian Simon decided to put Ehrlich’s theories to the test. In 1980 he offered to bet on whether the price of five commodities would go down or up over the next 10 years. Ehrlich chose the five metals—chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten—and took the bet.

It was really a wager over human beings and free markets. If Ehrlich was right, and people were devouring the Earth’s resources, then the price of those resources would go up. If Simon was right, human beings would respond to shortages with ingenuity, and prices would, in the long term, go down. In 1990 Simon won the bet and Ehrlich paid up.

First Things, Scott Yenor, 19 Mar 2026: Paul Ehrlich, False Prophet

Paul Ehrlich, noted author of The Population Bomb, died last week. Few people have been so consequentially wrong as Ehrlich. Ironically, his name, translated from the German, means “honest, truthful, sincere.” It is remarkable how this PhD in butterflies and Stanford professor rose to such prominence, capitalizing on a wave of popular pessimism to attack civilization from the left.

Ehrlich’s Population Bomb begins with an arresting line: “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 . . .” Indeed, in the late 1960s, American society seemed to be coming apart. The threat of nuclear war loomed. Mass migration wore away borders. Disease spread. Ehrlich’s Population Bomb more caught the wave of alarmism than created it. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations were already promoting population control across the world, especially in India and East Asia, in the early 1960s.

Many ears heard Ehrlich’s prophecies. He appeared more than twenty times on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. During his 1980 appearance, Ehrlich praised Eastern European countries for reaching Zero Population Growth. Imitators arose too, most notably the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, a book published in 1972. Limits, a cultural marker of sorts, saw several MIT professors use computer models to prove that coming population explosion would lead to resource depletion and declines in agricultural and industrial output. The only bright spot would be the rebirth of humanity after its impending collapse.

….

Skeptics always dogged Ehrlich. Most famous was his bet with Julian Simon, the free-market economist and techno-enthusiast. I read Simon’s The Ultimate Resource as a young man. Like others at the time, he was more worried about the world’s impending labor shortage. Fewer laborers would mean less creativity. With more people, Simon thought, human ingenuity would flourish. There would be no worries about running out of commodities like copper or tungsten. Simon allowed Ehrlich to pick five commodities that he thought would increase in price during the next decade. Each ended up decreasing in price, consistent with Simon’s prediction.

Ehrlich’s predictions cannot be taken seriously today. Life expectancy climbed in most of the world after 1970. Mass famines didn’t materialize. Yet he felt no shame for being so wrong. So maybe “starvation has been less extensive than I (or rather the agriculturalists I consulted) expected,” he said in 2004. But many are still “very hungry.”

Wikipedia Entry

A lecture that Ehrlich gave on the topic of overpopulation at the Commonwealth Club of California was broadcast by radio in April 1967.[22] The success of the lecture caused further publicity, and the suggestion from David Brower the executive director of the environmentalist Sierra Club, and Ian Ballantine of Ballantine Books to write a book concerning the topic. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne H. Ehrlich, collaborated on the book, The Population Bomb, but the publisher insisted that a single author be credited; only Paul’s name appears as an author.[23]

Although Ehrlich was not the first to warn about population issues — concern had been widespread during the 1950s and 1960s — his charismatic and media-savvy methods helped publicize the topic.[13] The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson had Ehrlich on as a guest more than twenty times, with one interview lasting an hour.[24][25]

On Expertise

May 2017: Friday Trumpery: The Murder-Suicide of Expertise

THE SUICIDE OF EXPERTISE

But here are the hallmarks of why “experts” are not being trusted:

* The experts are not all that expert (well-credentialed, but deeply ignorant)

* The experts lack intellectual humility – they hold onto wrong claims far past reasonability as a result, and make overconfident pronouncements

* The experts are intellectually dishonest

* The experts aren’t the people who get hurt by what they get wrong

This has been a long-term problem. This is not new to the Trump era.

Yes, I know this is a “Trumpery” post, but the point is that there have been various “experts” b******g about Trump not listening to expertise… and others saying it’s okay for experts to be deceptive, as long as it’s in the service of bashing Trump (the Ultimate Evil™).

When the “experts” start saying they’re fine with lying or using politics to inform what research subjects are verboten, I really don’t want to hear about people no longer trusted their expertise.

The experts have been killing the value of expertise for some time, they’ve just ramped up their intensity.

THE KNIFE DRIVEN IN BY A KNOW-NOTHING MEDIA

That’s the suicide part, at any rate — the experts kept screwing up, and there wasn’t much of a negative feedback loop to keep them from getting out of hand.

But the thing is, there are usually competing experts. As with the dietary advice, there were researchers who supported conflicting advice.

But how do you find out about what the experts say?

It’s usually via media of some sort, and the grand gatekeepers drove the knife in for reasons similar to that of the suicide of expertise.

* Many media people are deeply ignorant, and can’t tell credible experts from know-nothing phonies

* The media needs eyeballs — so intellectually dishonest as well as overconfident experts make for a better show

* It’s not the media people who get hurt by the sensationalism they peddle

The thing is, being able to play around with words and to spin stories does sell very well — the boring expert who says “There is no nifty risk-free trick to making pensions cheaper. There’s always a trade-off” will be outdone by the bombastic person yelling “THEY WANT US TO DIEEEEEE!”

Savvy people who want their specific message to get out know what to do.

June 2021:

To build trust: admit mistakes

Perhaps some people still trust the Washington Post as a source of information. I don’t know such people.

Look, I am willing to allow for mistakes — we are all human, after all. But when I come across people unwilling to admit to any mistakes, well, I am not going to trust them in the future. I’m not that foolish (or young) any more.

….

I have no problem with admitting I was wrong, and I try to avoid making the same mistake in the future. I made my error in the full view of whoever read my stuff, and I had to correct it in the same place, making clear what had happened.

But now we have people trying to hide their screw-ups. When we remember they screwed up. It was not that long ago, dudes.

Given such behavior, why would we trust such people at all?

….

Just frickin admit error

I’m not disappointed. That would mean I had expectations of better behavior. I can’t say I did.

I’m not really angry. I save my anger for when I need energy to get things done. My energy is not going to do anything about this.

I am annoyed.

If these people just admitted they were wrong in the past, and will try not to make such mistakes in the future, that would go a long way in establishing future credibility.

Predictions

CBO Demographic Outlook: 2026 to 2056

Page of the report - published January 2026

PDF of the report

HTML document

Spreadsheet of the data/projections

Ah, that lovely net immigration. Biden was saving our hash!

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