• Paul Ehrlich’s predictions in The Population Bomb were spectacularly wrong, but it is important to recognize that his warnings about environmental catastrophes should still be taken seriously.
• Ehrlich’s predictions were wrong due to countermeasures and adaptations that acted as a dampening force, slowing down the trend lines before catastrophe hits.
• These countermeasures and adaptations included the Green Revolution, lower fertility rates, and human ingenuity.
• The lesson from Ehrlich’s mistakes is that stabilization of global food supply was achieved via technological innovations by concerned scientists, which were then adopted by concerned governments.
• Paul Ehrlich’s predictions of population and resource scarcity in the late 1960s and 1970s have been echoed by degrowth advocates in the late 2010s and 2020s.
• Degrowth advocates often rely on aggregate measures of resource use and trend extrapolation, which are flawed metrics.
• Environmental catastrophes are a real possibility, and it would be dangerous to ignore the people warning about them.
• Alarmism about environmental catastrophes may be a useful counterweight to human callousness towards non-human life, and may help to keep habitat destruction in the public consciousness.
Published January 5, 2023. Visit Noahpinion to read Noah Smith’s original post.
