Reply #34: Poor Paul Ehrlich [View All]

[Nederland]

Even forty years later, he still doesn't know (or won't admit) why he was wrong. Ehrlich would have you believe that the widespread famine he predicted would have occurred if only the pesky Green Revolution hadn't miraculously saved humanity from certain doom. In reality, the Green Revolution had already been in full swing for over 15 years when Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb. Apparently he was just incapable of doing the simple math that would have told him that the famine he was predicting would not happen. Now one could easily forgive someone for making one mistake early on, but unfortunately for Ehrlich he continued to cling to his Malthusian theories of population growth for decades after they had been clearly proven wrong.

The root cause of Ehrlich's error comes from the fact that he is a biologist. As such, he tends to lump all of humanity into the same category, failing to recognize the unlike every other species on the planet, the living conditions, resources, and demographic trends of human beings vary widely. Most importantly, humans are the only species where you see the rate of population growth drop when food resources increase. A quick look at the richest nations of the world reveals that the first world, which produces a majority of the world's food, has birthrates below replacement. This simple observation leads to the inescapable conclusion that famine in the first world simply will never happen. Lots of people in the third world may die of starvation in the future, and people from the first world may be doomed for a variety of other reasons, but the famines that Ehrlich has been predicting for decades now will never occur.