Ehrlich's Life Is Over, But Our Work to Combat His Evil Ideas Continues

Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, died earlier this week at the age of 93 from cancer. His cause of death is somewhat fitting, since, in that very book, he wrote: "A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people…We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer." 

Among twentieth century elites who were not actual political leaders or literal criminals, Ehrlich may have done the most evil to his fellow man. He was an entomologist by training, not a demographer, and his view of humans often seems to carry the tone of a scientist surveying his bugs. In the opening pages of The Population Bomb, after paragraphs complaining about how filthy and dirty he found India and Indian people to be on a visit, he confidently asserted that hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation in the 1970s (in reality, less than 4 million did, fewer than in virtually any preceding decade, and in the 1980s famine drops declined still more).

On the basis of this fear, he wrote, 

We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control. 

The “cutting out” of that cancer, for Ehrlich, included extreme actions advocated for in the book itself and subsequent interviews: canceling food aid to starving countries, dumping sterilizing agents into the American water supply, and adding punishing extra taxes on children’s products like cribs and diapers, and even taxing large families at higher rates.

Ehrlich’s evil ideas had plenty of listeners. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy both flirted with recommendations to use foreign aid money to promote birth control as a way to reduce population growth and head off future communist revolutions, but both ultimately decided against that approach. President Johnson began to issue foreign aid for birth control, but Nixon, in the wake of Ehrlich’s blockbuster appeals, adopted the birth control strategy wholeheartedly. Foreign aid for birth control was given high priority, and the Nixon administration promoted it vociferously in speeches to Congress, creation of research commissions, and ultimately a formal national security strategy that treated population control in poor countries as a key element of fighting communism and preserving U.S. access to resources. By 1976 under President Ford, the National Security Council was actually doing what Ehrlich suggested: denying food aid to countries until those countries implemented policies to sterilize more women or deprioritize welfare benefits for big families. Untold numbers of people around the world, especially children, died as a result of these policies, many millions of women were sterilized or had forced abortions, and possibly tens or hundreds of millions of children were simply never born.

Ehrlich wasn’t the only influence on these policies, of course; a more proximate influence was likely the Club of Rome, a club of intellectual and political elites who promoted population control at elite conferences and meetings around the world. But this channel ultimately leads back to Ehrlich: his 1968 book helped lay the popular groundwork for the Club of Rome’s more highbrow 1972 opus, Limits of Growth.

Foreign aid was not President Nixon’s only part to play in channeling Ehrlich’s ideas from the popular press to humanitarian catastrophes. When Nixon opened relations with China (and facilitated the exchanges of ideas that may have pushed China to adopt birth control policies such as their “Later, Longer, Fewer” plan), it created opportunities for Chinese officials to travel abroad and be exposed to new ideas. One influential Chinese official, a scientist named Song Jian, attended a conference in Helsinki and encountered the overpopulation models popularized by Ehrlich and his compatriots. When he returned home, he brought those ideas with him, and persuaded party leaders to shift from their Nixon-inspired contraceptive promotion policy to the more clearly Ehrlich policy of mass forced abortion and sterilization. These ideas didn’t stop in China: Ehrlich also approved of India’s campaign of mass coercive sterilization in the 1980s, and as late as the 1990s, U.S. taxpayer dollars were paying for the Peruvian government to forcibly sterilize the wives and sisters and daughters of communist insurgents, inspired by Ehrlich’s ideas.

Ehrlich was wrong to forecast the doom of mankind because he did not account for its creativity. But he was correct to forecast that stormy weather was ahead, through which the ark of our species would only pass with difficulty.

Of course, it’s easy to think this might all be hindsight bias. Many people shared Ehrlich’s fears, and he couldn’t have known the future! But Ehrlich ignored the facts of his own time. The Green Revolution in agriculture was launching crop yields to unprecedented heights by the late 1940s and especially the early 1960s, and its leading proponent, Norman Borlaug, received the Nobel prize in 1970—just two years after Ehrlich’s book came out. When Ehrlich was complaining about the teeming masses of Indians, Indian fertility had already been declining for half a decade, and U.N. reports of the day already showed this. As long ago as the early 1800s, Thomas Malthus argued on the basis of empirical evidence available to him at that time that higher incomes tended to be linked to lower fertility (though his theory of why this was the case was mostly incorrect). Ehrlich ignored the facts of the day in order to promote an apocalyptic message, not because the facts supported it, but because he was a misanthrope who despised humanity. Perhaps that’s why he called economic growth lifting people out of poverty a “disease.”

Ehrlich didn’t just routinely compare humans to cancers—he opposed solutions, including many of the innovations of the Green Revolution, which ended up preventing his nightmarish imaginings from becoming reality. When asked about the possibility of abundant green energy sources, Ehrlich said, “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” It’s not just that Ehrlich was a false prophet of doom: he was an opponent of actual humanitarian solutions. In 2009, decades after he had lost public bets on his forecasts, and decades after all his core predictions had turned out to be false, he insisted that his original book had been too optimistic. He refused to ever confront the facts, because, for Ehrlich, it was never about the facts. He simply believed humanity was a cancer that needed to be cured.

It is unfair to blame all the evils of the overpopulation movement on Ehrlich. Other actors, like the Club of Rome, had their part to play; and, in fact, Ehrlich was really tapping into a kind of general zeitgeist. Global population growth rates really were at or above their highest levels in the history of the human species, and it would have taken some imagination to think of how humanity might cope with that strain (though people like Julian Simon or Norman Borlaug did in fact argue that humanity could get through it!).

But while pronatalists like myself see Ehrlich and overpopulation doomers as practically world-historic villains, it’s important not to over-learn the lesson. Ehrlich was not wrong that rapid population growth in poor countries could create humanitarian strains—and so the world made enormous investments in increasing agricultural production and improving food aid. Nixonians were not wrong that a large cohort of poor young men could create revolutions, and so American foreign policy in the latter twentieth century was preoccupied with preventing communist revolution in one country after another. Moreover, there were genuinely dramatic cultural revolutions even where political regimes were stable: large shares of the population of Western countries are now of African or Asian descent, as explosive population growth in these countries alongside relative stagnation in European populations created optimal conditions for mass migration.

Ehrlich was wrong to forecast the doom of mankind because he did not account for its creativity. But he was correct to forecast that stormy weather was ahead, through which the ark of our species would only pass with difficulty. Past generations rose to the challenges they faced and expanded food aid, innovated new technologies, extended free markets to new countries, and thus boosted global incomes, and waged a worldwide Cold War to preserve freedom and democracy. The Greatest and Baby Boomer generations deserve to feel some shame for believing Ehrlich’s serpentine whisperings but also deserve credit for shouldering the burdens necessary to make those words into lies.

Whether the present generation will rise to the challenge of falling fertility is an open question, not an inevitability. Had there not been a cohort of people who refused to be at peace with Ehrlich’s prognostications, then Ehrlich’s doomsaying would have been soothsaying. Whether people today have what it takes to confront our present moment is still being determined. The need of the world today is not better seeds or more extensive food aid: it is better treatment for infertility-causing conditions, productivity improvements in residential construction, and expanded public support for young families. Today, we do not face massive “youth bulges” creating domestic instability and communist insurgencies; instead, we face radically divergent rates of demographic declines creating optimal moments for some countries to engage in aggressive warfare. 

The urge to dance on Ehrlich’s grave is, in the final analysis, a mistake: he was a misanthrope, but perhaps one who, alongside his responsibility for genocidal actions by governments around the world, also motivated people of better character to greater deeds on behalf of humanity than they might otherwise have done. Pronatalists today should heed the lessons of the past: howling about civilizational doom may motivate the worst kinds of policymakers to adopt evil policies in our name, but putting our hand to the plow and doing the work of tackling the consequences of abrupt demographic decline as they arise is not optional.

Lyman Stone is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

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