Millions of People Died Because of Paul Ehrlich’s False Predictions
He’s like a reverse Cassandra –Cassandra made true prophecies but no one would listen to her. Ehrlich makes false prophecies and everyone listens to him.”
“Like Karl Marx, another great prophet of the always-wrong-but-never-in-doubt school, Ehrlich believed that there is a kind of science of history and that, consequently, future events could be predicted with great confidence by those who were willing to—all together now!—follow the science. And so Ehrlich, whose academic specialty was the study of butterflies, was famous for his startling predictions—his hilarious, wrong-headed, unsupported, book-mongering predictions.”
“People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.” From Ehrlich’s blockbuster—and spectacularly wrong—1968 book, “The Population Bomb.”
“Only the wrong survive.” Scott Johnson.
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Ehrlich passed away last Friday at 93, old enough to outlast almost all of his most vociferous critics and long enough to prove all of his most outlandish predictions of global doom and gloom embarrassingly wrong.
I wrote about Ehrlich several times in the early 1980s for NRL News, essentially recycling the brilliant insights of Jacqeline R. Kasun, Ph.D., and Julian Simon. Among many, these two contributed some of the most thorough academic rebuttals of Ehrlich’s over-population alarmism.
But—again as scholars who are far more versed than I am in debunking Ehrlich have written—his outlandish predictions had real consequences. They gave sustenance to the campaigns of forced abortion and an academic luster to involuntary sterilization.
Indeed, as an editorial in the Washington Post observed,
“a later book ponders the practicality of adding ‘sterilants’ to basic foods and drinking water—as well as cultural and even financial pressure on parents and would-be parents not to reproduce.”
Just as elections have real consequences, so, too, do awful ideas, especially those offered for the “good” of mankind. H.L. Mencken, the caustic journalist and cultural critic, once observed, “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.”
I have no reason to believe Ehrlich, in spite of his contempt for “People, people, people, people,” had any desire to rule. Maybe lord over the rift-raft but not be some sort of potentate.
By the way, the reader response to the WaPo editorial was absolutely brutal. Ostensibly, a defense of Ehrlich, it was more score-settling for the respondents’ hatred of Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post, than anything else.
“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the motto of The Washington Post, adopted in 2017 just in time to go after President Donald Trump without mercy. I’d wager a pretty penny that Bezos’ hostile critics, shortsighted as this attitude so clearly is, want the Washington Post to die in darkness.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. He frequently writes Today’s News and Views — an online opinion column on pro-life issues.
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