How fear of overpopulation transmuted to fear of underpopulation.
The road from Paul Ehrlich to Elon Musk
The doomsayer Paul Ehrlich, who died last week at age 93, was the Thomas Malthus of our era – winning widespread attention for declaring population growth to be out of control, which would lead to global starvation followed by the end of civilization.
Exactly as Ehrlich exits, the opposite proposition has come to prominence: Elon Musk contending fertility is dangerously low. “An immediate increase in the birth rate is needed,” Musk says. “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”
This is at one level an example of the issue where there’s a 180-degree swivel, from A is good but B is bad to B is good but A is bad.
At another level both positions reflect the Fallacy of the Uninterrupted Trend. Ehrlich thought population growth curves would never moderate and so we’re doomed. Musk thinks current declines in fertility will never moderate and so we’re doomed.
Photo by Owen Cannon on Unsplash.
The Fallacy of the Uninterrupted Trend: Taking current trend lines and projecting them out far into the future unaltered leads to failed predictions in many subject areas.
Predictions of petroleum exhaustion, common in politics and the world of Experts a generation ago, were grounded in assuming trend lines never change. Instead today oil is in oversupply. The Experts predicting petroleum exhaustion had fallen for the Fallacy of the Uninterrupted Trend.
Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was the number-one nonfiction bestseller of 1968, coming on the heels of a 1967 bestseller, Famine 1975! by William Paddock. Both planted into public discourse the notion there were too many mouths to feed. Without government control of reproduction, mass starvation was inevitable.
That population growth would lead to mass starvation was the contention of Thomas Malthus. There were 1 billion people alive when Malthus said the human population would get too big to feed. Today there are 8.3 billion people and malnutrition rates are the lowest in human history (United Nations stat).
A Stanford University entomologist, Ehrlich went on to attain a celebrity rarely seen for an academic – cover of Time magazine, frequent guest of Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show when bedtime talk had a much larger audience share than now and when Carson was the country’s most influential entertainer.
Carson gushed over Ehrlich and lauded his bleak views. Here is Carson talking to Ehrlich in 1970, at about one hour into the segment:
Ehrlich tells Carson, “There are 3.6 billion people in the world today and we’re adding 70 million a year. That’s too many. Too many because we are getting desperately short of food… we’re very much short of other resources… we’re in deep trouble.”
Too many people. So who, precisely, do we eliminate?
