The Tragedy of Paul Ehrlich

I was deeply conflicted when I recently heard about Paul Ehrlich’s passing at the age of 93. Every death is a tragedy, and Ehrlich’s death seemed especially so because Ehrlich has the distinction of having been completely and yet somehow unrepentantly and invulnerably wrong about human potential and the folly–he thought it wisdom–of population control measures. Ehrlich’s memory will serve not as a tribute to someone who made important scientific breakthroughs that helped us better understand the world, but as a cautionary tale about arrogance, error, and hubris. 

In 2021, I wrote this about his most prominent intellectual adversary, Julian Simon:

Simon was a model mind and an outstanding intellectual citizen. He thought through the theory and formulated his hypotheses very carefully. He tested his hypotheses against the data. Importantly, he took real and consequential action based on his beliefs–at great risk to his own reputation, but to the everlasting benefit of the rest of us.

I cannot say the same about Ehrlich, who, despite dire predictions that failed to come true and what should have been a humiliating defeat in a famous bet with Simon, nonetheless remained a popular public figure and an authority on population and the environment. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1998, which, as my friend and coauthor Deirdre McCloskey has explained, should tell us something rather uncomfortable about the MacArthur Foundation.

Ehrlich vaulted into the public consciousness with his 1968 book The Population Bomb, an early classic of environmental alarmism predicting mass starvation. In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich proclaimed that “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

That didn’t happen. Instead, we got the Green Revolution.

Nonetheless, Ehrlich remained convinced that mass starvation was inevitable and was not deterred by his failed predictions. He continued predicting that widespread starvation was right around the corner and proclaiming that population control measures–potentially draconian ones–were necessary.

Eventually, Julian Simon issued a challenge in the pages of Social Science Quarterly. He was willing to bet that over a ten-year period, commodity prices would fall. Ehrlich seized the opportunity to finally humiliate Simon and shut him up: Ehrlich might have gotten the timing wrong, but widespread starvation was still inevitable. They agreed on a portfolio containing $200 each of copper, chromium, nickel, tungsten, and tin, for a total of $1000 in commodities. If inflation-adjusted prices rose, Simon would write a check to Ehrlich for the difference. If prices fell, Ehrlich would write Simon a check for the difference.

Ehrlich had mocked Simon’s resource optimism. On October 11, 1990, however, Ehrlich’s wife, Anne, wrote out a check to Simon for $576.07. There are apparently different explanations for why Ehrlich’s wife signed the check rather than Ehrlich himself, but it seems consistent with Ehrlich’s character that pique led him to refuse to sign the check himself. Of course, there are a lot of other scenarios and a lot of other portfolios where Ehrlich would have won the bet, as the economists Ross B. Emmett and Jesse Grabowski explain–and as Simon himself acknowledged–but over the very long run, Simon explained that increasing abundance rather than increasing scarcity is our likely destiny. This is what Pierre Desrochers, Vincent Geloso, and Joanna Szurmak found in a two-part article in Social Science Quarterly, the journal in which Simon issued his initial challenge. That’s what McCloskey and I believe, as long as we keep our ethical wits about us. 

Perhaps we should take some solace in the fact that the Malthusian/Ehrlichian in Avengers: Endgame is the villain, but mere theoretical and empirical refutation fail to stop Ehrlich. His Malthusian pessimism has been a hardy weed, and it remains so to this day. Why? Ehrlich’s pessimism, which stretches all the way back to Thomas Malthus in 1798, who believed that overpopulation would result in mass starvation. I regularly see people claim that unlimited growth is impossible in a closed system. It seems like a simple matter of unavoidable arithmetic: the numerator is fixed, ultimately, because we have finite resources. Making the denominator bigger by increasing the population means the ratio has to get smaller. Math.

But we don’t live, work, and breathe in a closed system. First, the sun bathes the earth in incredible amounts of energy every day, and it might not be too far off to say that “life” is just a technology for turning solar energy into ideas–including, someday, the ideas we need to make full and effective use of that solar energy. Second, I worry that we’ll run out of ideas about as much as I worry that we’ll run out of different ways to combine sounds and tell stories, from the music of The Prodigy to “The Unending Creativity of the Spider-Verse.”

In the Malthus-Ehrlich view of the world, every new person is just a stomach and a pair of hands. Diminishing marginal returns means the hands can’t keep up, and disaster is inevitable. In Simon's view of the world, which I share with a great many economists and other commentators, each person is a stomach, a pair of hands, and a brain–a creative mind. That creative mind, according to Julian Simon, is the ultimate resource.

The New York Times called his predictions “premature.” The word they needed to use was “wrong.” His alarmist predictions informed fifty years of population and environmental policy, including China’s one-child policy and the demographic cliff we face as population growth slows and may eventually turn into decline. Ehrlich’s ideas had disastrous consequences, and the greatest tragedy of his passing is that he apparently died never having learned from a career of alarmism and sustained error. May his example and his memory serve as a warning to us all.

Art Carden is Associate Professor of Economics at Samford University.