Dr. Paul Ralph Ehrlich (1932-2026), who passed away last week at the age of 93, was perhaps the world’s most famous opinionator on the population question since Reverend T.R. Malthus himself. An unabashed apostle of population control and prophet of impending worldwide demographic catastrophe, he preached a secular gospel of “overpopulation” and eco-apocalypse from his perch at Stanford University for over 50 years.
Apart from his wife and lifelong coauthor Anne Ehrlich (with whom he published nearly a dozen books or pamphlets and many hundreds of articles), perhaps no other voice or personality is so closely associated with the postwar moral panic over the “population explosion.”
The Population Bomb, Ehrlich’s electrifying 1968 bestseller, made him an instant celebrity at age 36. Charismatic, self-confident, and funny—seemingly possessed of more zingers than Henny Youngman—he quickly became a television presence as well. So spellbinding that he was invited 20 times on The Tonight Show, Ehrlich proved to be one of Johnny Carson’s most popular guests. Over his long life, Ehrlich was also showered with awards and prizes, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, the U.N. Sasakawa Environment Prize, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Crafoord Prize (established to complement the Nobel Prize and awarded in fields the Nobel does not cover).
No less noteworthy than the fame and fortune he achieved was how shockingly, profoundly, and consistently wrong biologist Ehrlich was in predictions he made about human beings. The Population Bomb opens with this arresting prophecy:
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
All these predictions were not just wrong: They were laugh-out-loud wrong, almost the precise opposite of what would actually occur over the following decades and generations. There were no mass famines in the 1970s, nor have there been any since. Deadly hunger crises in our era are caused by killer governments (Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge; Ethiopia’s Derg; North Korea’s “Dear Leader”), never by Ehrlich’s “population overshoot.”
But that is just a foretaste of how completely and utterly wrong Ehrlich got humanity’s future. In the decades since The Population Bomb, human numbers have more than doubled—from about 3.6 billion in 1968 to around 8.2 billion today. Yet in spite of the scale and tempo of this unprecedented surge, the world is dramatically, incontestably more affluent today. And despite decidedly more rapid population growth in poorer countries over the interim, global per capita GDP was over two-and-a-half times higher in 2024 than in 1968, according to World Bank estimates.
Far from suffering rising death rates, the world is healthier than ever before. By the reckoning of the U.N. Population Division, global life expectancy has leapt since 1968: from under 56 years to over 73 years. Indeed, worldwide life expectancy today is roughly three years higher than was America’s when The Population Bomb came out.
Ehrlich wasn’t great at forecasting the American future either: Among his more memorable howlers was a 1969 conjecture that overuse of pesticides might drive down U.S. life expectancy at birth to just 42 years by 1980. One of the reasons worldwide life expectancy has been rising is that food is becoming steadily more plentiful—so plentiful that overnutrition displaces undernutrition as the globe’s principal dietary problem. By 2021, more women of childbearing age in India were measured as overweight than underweight.
For its part, the marked rise in worldwide caloric availability per capita has been facilitated by dramatic long-term declines in food costs. By 2024, inflation-adjusted prices for corn, rice, and wheat were less than half what they were in 1968. This means food is actually less scarce today than when our planetary population was four and a half billion smaller.
Ehrlich was never able to understand this paradox—or why his constant prognostications were so unfailingly erroneous. But the reason is simple: Professor Ehrlich was a genuine expert in population, yet he studied butterflies. His outstanding work on butterfly population dynamics earned him early tenure at Stanford (where he remains remembered for pathbreaking research at the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve). His failure as a social commentator came from extrapolating insights from lepidoptery onto homo sapiens.
He offered a worldview that “insect-ified” humanity, denying the unique traits of the human species—adaptability, ingenuity, problem-solving—that allowed us to escape the Malthusian trap. Instead, he imposed an assumed unending over-breed/over-die cycle. Denying humans their quintessential humanity is central to Ehrlich’s diagnosis for modern man’s afflictions and his remedy: “population control.”
Although “overpopulation” is a meaningless demographic term, it conveys the impression of a faceless horde heedlessly procreating. Ehrlich described his epiphany in The Population Bomb:
“I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a couple of years ago… We entered a crowded slum area… The streets seemed alive with people… People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging… I was frightened… since that night I’ve known the feel of overpopulation.”
The proper term for that human condition is poverty—but it requires empathy to see it as such. Poverty is solvable; humans have always found ways. Unimaginable to 1960s population alarmists, India today has reduced extreme poverty to less than 1 percent by World Bank standards, with fertility rates in Delhi at just 1.2 births per woman—40 percent below replacement level.
Ehrlich posited that humans, like insects, were incapable of controlling their own fertility and thus needed coercion. In 1968 he proposed a U.S. Department of Population and Environment “with the power to take whatever steps necessary to establish a reasonable population size.” That “reasonable” objective might require “development of mass sterilization agents,” he wrote: “We must have population control at home, hopefully through incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”
While Ehrlich favored coercive birth control in theory, he endorsed it abroad. He cheered forced sterilization in India (“Coercion? Perhaps, but for a good cause”) and approved of China’s One Child Policy to the bitter end. In 1990 he called it “the most successful on record,” though by then he felt compelled to whitewash its abuses: “The degree of voluntarism is a matter of some debate, and there is no doubt some sterilizations were coerced.”
By 2015, when China suspended the policy, Ehrlich was its last defender. At the news, he tweeted: “China to End One-Child Policy, Allowing Families Two Children—GIBBERING INSANITY – THE GROWTH-FOREVER GANG.”
Ehrlich never apologized for his lifelong advocacy of forcible birth control. In a 2018 interview, he claimed, “[what] I’ve always said is that the last thing you want to try is coercion and I’ve never supported coercive policies.” Yet as a scientist, he abandoned rigorous methodology when addressing humans. His writings are littered with falsified predictions about disasters due to “overpopulation,” yet he rarely acknowledged these errors—instead insisting his analyses were sound and had even averted worse outcomes.
When confronted by empirical facts, Ehrlich’s responses were unyielding. In 1980, he lost a $1,000 bet against economist Julian Simon on the price of five metals—a loss he dismissed as “trivial” and blamed Simon for being an “imbecile.”
To the very end, Ehrlich regarded human beings as an infestation on the face of the earth.