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Paul Ehrlich’s population dud didn’t stop modern doomsayers

March 20, 2026

SACRAMENTO — Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University’s doom-predicting biologist who recently died at age 93, has received remarkably fitting obituaries. Sample headlines: “Paul Ehrlich was wrong about everything.” “Anti-civilization extremist exposed.” “The professor who wanted mass sterilizations.” “False prophet.” Even sympathetic pieces had a sting: “Paul Ehrlich was wrong — but he still changed the world.” That’s quite a legacy.

The author of “The Population Bomb,” the 1968 book that predicted global famine and ever-increasing scarcity, did change the world. But not for the better. Media and governments embraced his Malthusian gloom and shaped generations of Americans to view humanity as blight. Thomas Malthus was an English economist (1766-1834) who called for reproduction limits because he believed people would outstrip food supplies. Ehrlich was a modern disciple.

Ehrlich’s predictions always seemed off. Free-market economist Julian Simon issued a wager to Ehrlich in 1980: Pick any five commodities and their prices would go down in 10 years. If prices go down, that suggests that they aren’t becoming scarcer. The bet was for $1,000 and, lo and behold, Ehrlich was wrong about them all. That debate influenced my political thinking. If Ehrlich represents environmentalism, I thought, I’ll skip it. My goal is to improve the environment, not scapegoat humanity.

“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,” Ehrlich wrote in his book’s prologue. “At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” I found this line funny given the current obesity epidemic: “It is clear that fewer and fewer people in the future will be obese!” Everyone is wrong about some things, but Ehrlich seemed wrong, as the headline noted, about basically everything.

I’m not dancing on a person’s grave, but highlighting his mistaken presuppositions. And I’m remembering how easily the most-influential organizations would champion a thoroughly misguided narrative. Apparently, humans have some deep-seated tendency to relish apocalyptic predictions, whether of a religious or secular nature. Ehrlich was wrong because he ignored the creative abilities of human beings. The Earth has limited resources, but in a market system human beings creatively find substitutes and develop unforeseen solutions.

There’s an exception — and one that was baked into the Simon-Ehrlich wager. Ehrlich could only choose commodities that were not controlled by the government. All bets are off for politically and bureaucratically controlled products and services for obvious reasons. Gas prices soar as the result of government restrictions and taxes that produce artificial scarcity. Parts of the world have endured famine since Ehrlich’s book was published — but they’re the result of war or public policy. It’s always a government problem, not a limited-resource problem.

Still feeling dour? Consider this information based on World Bank data: The percentage of people living in extreme poverty has fallen from 80% 200 years ago to 9% now. Those numbers have fallen from 44% as recently as 1981. This is cause for celebration and an even more resounding refutation of Ehrlich’s doomsaying than the bet he lost over commodity prices. It’s hard to understand why such data didn’t sufficiently change his acolytes’ thinking.

We can easily point to discouraging trends, but most of those are political. In terms of quality of life — affluence, food quality and production, life expectancies, standard of living almost everywhere — the news is astoundingly good. By long-term standards, every middle-class American lives the life of royalty. We’re not scavenging food from dumpsters.

So why does alarmism continue? I suspect it’s hard for people — including really smart ones — to understand how humans can thrive without heavy-handed direction. (Few essays explain this better than “I, Pencil,” Leonard Read’s entertaining 1958 “autobiography” of that seemingly simple writing implement.) It may seem counterintuitive, but central planning crushes this process — along with the human spirit.

In other words, Doomsayers see a world of declining resources that needs overseers to divvy them up. The rest of us see creative humans able to find ways to, say, dramatically increase agricultural production, discover alternative resources that work better than scarcer ones, or develop amazing labor-saving technological devices. The former naturally assume that everything will get worse, whereas we know it will get better — except in areas where government stifles the creative process.

Most commentators acknowledge Ehrlich’s legacy of failed predictions, but both of the nation’s major political programs — progressivism on the left and nationalist populism on the right — have embraced elements of this zero-sum philosophy. The former are knee-deep into climate-change politics, which is all about shifting power to planners to forestall some cataclysmic scenario that the experts claim is inevitable. And the latter insists that immigrants “take our jobs” without realizing that the economy is dynamic, rather than static.

Perhaps both sides can glean this lesson from Ehrlich’s failures: It’s not a great idea to bet against human ingenuity.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute and a member of the Southern California News Group editorial board. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

Orange County Register

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Paul Ehrlich’s population dud didn’t stop modern doomsayers

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