Premature? You mean wrong? How wrong was he? He was so wrong that [insert Johnny Carson joke]...
And you can read Wattenberg's original 1970 essay here, at the American Enterprise Institute website: "The Nonsense Explosion." Excerpt:
The strong position on population control ultimately comes around to some form of government permission, or licensing, for babies.... ... Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford [writes]: “If we don’t do something dramatic about population and environment, and do it immediately, there’s just no hope that civilization will persist. . . . The world’s most serious population-growth problem is right here in the United States among affluent white Americans. . . .”
What it all adds up to is this: why have a long-range manageable population problem that can be coped with gradually over generations when, with a little extra souped-up scare rhetoric, we can drum up a full-fledged crisis?...
[T]he major domestic problems, generally acknowledged, are the race situation and the (so-called) crisis of the cities... [and] the environment is a real problem....
People care about those problems and they are difficult and expensive to solve, but you can escape from the jam by attributing them all to our having too many people. Then they are solvable by controlling the what private citizens may do:
Let then the Secretary of HEW go forth to the people and say, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country – you shall have two children no more, no less; that is your brave social mission in America."
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154 comments:
This fits nicely with your Melania post--journalists desperately sticking to the approved narrative regardless of facts.
All predictions of the world's end are premature.
one of his proteges john holdren, was a science advisor in the Obama years
his was the elevator music that embittered the nation, over the next two generations,
...so wrong that human societies all around the world now struggle to sustain their populations because they won't voluntarily have babies.
Erlich was the wrongest of wrong possible. And his wrongness caused trillions of dollars of damage. His environmental hysteria contributed to panic, misdirected investments and regulations, and the population control / abortion movement on the left.
The totalitarian left took up his mantle even as it was proving wrong, because...???
The world’s most serious population-growth problem is right here in the United States among affluent white Americans.
That statement was either delusional or a deliberate lie, even in the 1970's when this fool's midwit linear extrapolation posing as science was new and little understood.
1970 population was 203mm
Current population is 340mm
Are we better off or worse off?
John Henry
...you shall have two children no more, no less; that is your brave social mission in America.
See China's FAFO.
"China today is a country where many young people have no siblings. Because the one-child policy lasted so long, their parents also have no siblings..."
"... so they have no aunts, uncles, or cousins, either.
Ehrlich accounted for everything save one thing. Human ingenuity. While population has doubled since 1970, agricultural productivity has increased by 3 to 4 times.
Climate fanatics make the same error.
@John henry on 203M vs. 340M people --
Demographic analyses follow the entire human lifecycle. You've got to move through generational bubbles and gaps to understand the future trend. Erlich clearly did not, and went of half-cocked.
See Population Pyramid and compare Ethiopa to South Korea (Republic of Korea):
https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2026/
The totalitarian left took up his mantle even as it was proving wrong, because...???
The left is always looking for an excuse to control people.
Always wrong, but never uncertain. It'll take China at least 60 years to recover, but some of the developed nations, whose birthrate is sub-replacement and, shall we say, suboptimal demographics - they're in for some pain if they don't change course. Looking at you, USA.
Last time I checked, which was not long ago, Sub-Saharan Africa is still right on target to follow Erlich's predictions.
1/3 of the world’s artificial fertilizer is not being produced right now, and if the war ended today, it would be six weeks minimum to restart the supply chain, who knows with pharmaceuticals, and our billionaires would be very happy with a much smaller world population, heavily influenced by that book as a “how to.”
Yep. Here we go "Africa's population is experiencing rapid growth, driven by high fertility rates and a young population structure. As of 2024, the continent's population is estimated at 1.5 billion, having more than doubled since 2000 and increased fivefold since 1960. The annual growth rate remains among the highest globally, averaging 2.3% over recent decades, with projections indicating continued expansion."
But they're 80-IQ black Muslims, so it should all work out great.
It’s like 1984, our elites read it and say “Don’t threaten me with a good time!”
Not sure if the obit mentioned it, but there was the bet with economist Julian Simon that Ehrlich famously lost badly, over whether commodity prices would increase or decrease over a 10-year period. Simon knew that scarcity actually diminishes over time (as long as government stays out of it) because of technological progress.
The Bet.
“Premature? You mean wrong?”
It’s very premature to say he was wrong. Humans are animals, subject to the same laws of population genetics as the rest of nature. Every species strives to increase in numbers; that is how they got here. individuals who reproduce less are weeded out of the gene pool and replaced by those who reproduce more. Populations grow until they are limited by external factors, usually very unpleasant ones.
When I attended college in the early 70's, Ehrlich's views on the imminent collapse of civilization that will be caused by feckless breeding and resource scarcity were taught as irrefutable gospel. Malthusianism on stilts.
@Jupiter, yes, Africa's birthrate is high but also declining:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/15/5-facts-about-global-fertility-trends/
I wouldn't be surprised by a regional famine or massive resource war in sub-Saharan Africa. I'd actually be surprised if it doesn't happen. Perhaps within a generation or two. Any sort of food/energy disruption or dictatorship...history will repeat...
Borlaug 1, Erlich 0.
Aggie said...
Always wrong, but never uncertain.”
He proved that you could publish gloom and doom predictions very profitably, and never be held accountable when all of your predictions fail to come true. The first Earth Day was held a couple years later. It was accompanied by many gloom and doom predictions, and they didn’t come true, either. This laid the foundation for the Coming Ice Age, then Global Warming, then Climate Change frauds that followed.
so.. when there were about 3 Billion people..
Erlich said that Mass MultiMillion Deaths from Famine were imminent,
and that Our ONLY OPTION was MASSIVE population reductions
He SAID that the famines would be EVERYWHERE by the late '70's
It is NOW, 50 years later..
The Population is OVER eight BILLION
The NUMBER ONE health concern is Obesity
The second largest concern is lack of reproduction
Premature?
you keep using that word..
i no think that word means what you think it does
The population control that must be properly understood and implemented is how to prevent autistic/neurodivergent people from reproducing. Damaged people produce damaged offspring. The damage that autistic parent wrecks onto their own children (due to their multiple and serious incapabilities/disabilities/cognitive deficiencies) is awful, and must be stopped.
it was the eloi klaxon that drove most of the west into the timid stage, on a host of fronts, like so,
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/the-feminists-who-hate-maga-more
Population bomb to the Iran war. Quite a leap Tim in Vermont.
"drove most of the west into the timid stage"
Oh yes, let's go breaking things and smashing countries with "maximum lethality" because we don't want to be "timid," like Keg's Breath says, you know, we shouldn't consider the consequences if plan A fails and we don't have a plan B, because we all know the song, "Ain't got time to wonder why; yippee we're all gonna die!"
"Quite a leap Tim in Vermont."
So you don't see the connection between stopping production of 1/3 of the world's artificial fertilizer and who knows how much of our pharmaceuticals, and world population? That explains a lot.
Last time I checked, which was not long ago, Sub-Saharan Africa is still right on target to follow Erlich's predictions.
If there is ever a major depression, war, or other turmoil that interferes with the West's ability or will to subsidize that part of the world, the human suffering will be unprecedented.
Food aid to Third World subsistence-farming economies is all-or-nothing. Cheap, abundant foodstuffs from factory farms in the West have destroyed the local farm economy in African countries that struggled to feed their populations when they had a tenth of the population they have now. The people of these nations are now as dependent on handouts as any zoo animal. If the grain shipments ever stop coming, hundreds of millions will die of famine.
In that event, there will be many who wonder why we ever helped them at all, knowing the risk that famine would someday return and cause misery and death for vastly more souls than would otherwise have suffered.
Based on experience, I envision Dunning Kruger as analogous to a thermocline in the lake, a lot of the signal doesn't penetrate and just gets bounced back, and what makes communication across this boundary so difficult is that you can't assume that the people below the boundary can make the most obvious connections.
The other complication is that just. like we have disingenuous posters like Kak, come here from the left with just an agenda, and no interest in the pursuit of any deeper truth than power, we have posters who work on troll farms, even if they are distributed, who's purpose is to manufacture consensus for wars.
Ironically, the low birth rate problem is all the rage among academics who were finally realizing Erlich's dream of fewer people. Funny thing when fewer children are born, there are fewer suckers for the higher ed pyramid scheme twenty years later.
Also, by the time of Erlich's missive, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of the US had already been on decline from the 1959 Baby Boom peak of 3.5. It passed 2 in 1973 and was at 1.8 by 1976. There was a flattening at just below 2.5 from 1968-1970. It did hover around 2 from 1988-2008 as the information economy gave a false hope of stable employment.
On the upside, the peak birth cohorts of Millennials hit 35 this year so from now on there are fewer potential mothers under age 35.
The problem is that the social welfare state, higher education, etc. all depend on an ever growing population of young wage slaves to pay the taxes. Oops.
Ehrlich Carson add kinsey to the picture
It is my belief that the failure of economists to reach correct conclusions about the treatment of harmful effects [externalities] cannot be ascribed simply to a few slips in analysis. It stems from basic defects in the current approach to problems of welfare economics.
What is needed is a change of approach. Analysis in terms of divergencies between private and social products concentrates attention on particular deficiencies in the system and tends to nourish the belief that any measure which will remove the deficiency is necessarily desirable. It diverts attention from those other changes in the system which are inevitably associated with the corrective measure, changes which may well produce more harm than the original deficiency. In the preceding sections of this article, we have seen many examples of this. But it is not necessary to approach the problem in this way. Economists who study problems of the firm habitually use an opportunity cost approach and compare the receipts obtained from a given combination of factors with alternative business arrangements. It would seem desirable to use a similar approach when dealing with questions of economic policy and to compare the total product yielded by alternative social arrangements. In this article, the analysis has been confined, as is usual in this part of economics, to comparisons of the value of production, as measured by the market. But it is, of course, desirable that the choice between different social arrangements for the solution of economic problems should be carried out in broader terms than this and that the total effect of these arrangements in all spheres of life should be taken into account. As Frank H. Knight has so often emphasized, problems of welfare economics must ultimately dissolve into a study of aesthetics and morals.
- Ronald Coase, The Problem of Social Cost (1960)
Narciso: "Eloi klaxon" is a marvelous description for the loudmouthed lotus-eaters whose every bite of food is put in their mouths by men they despise.
@Hassayamper: If the grain shipments ever stop coming, hundreds of millions will die of famine.
This puts post-apartheid South Africa and the song "Kill the Boer" in a very different light. This puts the Rhodesia -> Zimbabwe anti-farmer period in a different light.
For the near-term future, "colonial" exploitation by China is paying Africa's bills. They bribe local chieftans to build a road in exchange for mineral/timber/animal resources. For a while the Chinese were farming baby lions as livestock for the quackery of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Lion bones cure diseases I guess.
If China goes away the economic end may be sharp and fast.
I will say it again:
My political education has been a long series of leftist catastrophes that never happen and conservative warnings that usually end up true.
I started out very liberal, but it became embarrassingly unsupportable, first for being wrong, and later for being crazy and wrong.
i get the feeling, that not many of you have Actually READ Erlich.
I have (just like i've read Marx, and Betty Friedan.)
Erlich wasn't saying that things would happen "in the future",
he was saying that they'd happen.. TOMORROW.
If i "predict" Mass MultiMillion Deaths from famine IN THE UNITED STATES, by 1976..
and 50 years later the only people in the country not overweight,
are the ones that are Obese..
There is no way on earth you can say i'm "premature"
Just like Al Gore wasn't "premature" when he said that "25% of Florida" will "soon" be underwater
https://wltreport.com/2025/10/27/flashback-1982-al-gore-predicts-florida-will-soon/
Overpopulation has it's own solution built in. Who wants to volunteer to do their part now, since you missed the opportunity to not be born. It's never too late to do the right (or left) thing.
It's still correct, just not white people. Niger, Chad and Somalia have a fertility rate of 5 to 6. They'll take over the world not because white people aren't reproducing but because the fastest growing races take over. Exponential wins.
Notice herring-bone clouds. Why that regularity? It's an instability across a wind shear. Various wavelengths grow at various speeds. The fastest-growing wavelength takes over the sky, beating out the others.
The other day I recommended the book "Superabundance" by a couple of guys named Marion and Gayle (Tupy and Pooley). You could read the book, but its probably easier to listen to Jordan Peterson's podcast interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iC_hY4qhyk
They thoroughly refute Ehrlich with a whole lot of facts.
"Populations grow until they are limited by external factors, usually very unpleasant ones."
Smilin' Jack is wrong, so wrong that he doesn't even know that's verbatim Malthus, a thesis so discredited it's a knock-knock joke in Economics departments worldwide.
Planned Populationhood (PP) was a premature ejaculation and a wicked solution. h/t National Socialists, Communists, Maoists, Diversitists, Aztecs, Progressives et al.
@rhardin: They'll take over the world
How, from inside their national borders? In relatively little time they'll eat their homelands bare, much like Haiti has done already.
You are suggesting that these populations will be allowed to fill all the fertile lands outside of sub-Saharan Africa? That they'll sucessfully adapt in one generation without support from generous governments? Not with the current attitudes toward immigration...a tiny sliver will be allowed to leave the homelands.
Neither animals nor plants are herringbone clouds. Animals and plants require energy/food to reproduce. Clouds are objects of physics without life.
Was it mandatory to wear brown suits with either a brown or yellow tie in the early 70's? And yellow or brown (or yellow-brown) carpet, wallpaper, and drapes too?
African trad medicine includes white or albino cannabilism. Blood transfusions and ingestion, too? Monkey holes... whores? h/t NAACP progressing a la AIDS.
Verbatim Wikipedia: The Simon–Ehrlich wager was a 1980 scientific wager between economist Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich, betting on a mutually agreed-on measure of natural-resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. The widely followed contest originated in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000", Simon offered to take that bet, or, more realistically, "to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run".
Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. The bet was formalized on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990, as the payoff date. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period.
Erlich learned nothing from that wager because he was enjoying a very comfortable lifestyle thanks to the wealthy idiots of Hollywood, among others. That said, I'm willing to bet that England will cease to exist by 2030, but not because of any neo-Malthusian bullshit, but because of the suicidal policies of the British left.
Maybe it's just a good example of the well-known 'Dopeler Effect', whereby stupid ideas seem a whole lot smarter and slicker when they're coming toward you fast, for the first time, then they appear when they've gone past you and are receding into the distance.
My mother believed Erlich and decided not to have any more kids after me (her second). My folks adopted twice, my sister in 1971 and another brother in 1975. Experts. Ya pay your money and ya take yer chances.
Reasoning by analogy is a short route to fundamental error. You'll hear it in every flat-Earth argument on the web: If I spin a wet ball, the water flies off, therefore Earth isn't a ball and isn't spinning.
"Humans are animals, subject to the same laws of population genetics as the rest of nature."
No, because humans do things that animals do not (at least not to any meaningful degree) like invent new technologies, and write contracts and trade, all of which continually push out the limits of scarce resources. Naive thinkers like Malthus and Ehrlich overlook this. As Adam Smith pointed out 250 years ago: "The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals."
Practically every famine in modern history is the result of war (civil or otherwise), or some other government mischief like "land reform."
"Smilin' Jack is wrong, so wrong that he doesn't even know that's verbatim Malthus, a thesis so discredited it's a knock-knock joke in Economics departments worldwide."
The Malthusian conclusion is correct, on the basis of its assumptions. Thus far, it has failed because, a) there was a major increase in the amount of food that could be produced with the Earth's existing resources, and b) feminism/education//birth control cratered the reproductive rates of the advanced societies.
I don't think that really constitutes "discredited". "Premature" is certainly a possibility. Forever is a long time.
I hated that fraud. I swallowed all his nonsense as a teenager. WHen the massive immigration began in the 80s, I expected him to speak out. Surely moving people from Mexico to the USA would affect the enviroment. And how could the USA stop "Population growth" if it was importing millions of people?
Erlich gave his answer on a TV call in show. The American population (aka White America) needed to reduce its population growth even further to make room for the millions of immigrants.
Bing-Bing. The light went on. Just another Leftwing activist using the figleaf of Enviromentalism to promote their racial agenda.
Premature prognostication is a problem for 50% of men over the age of 13.
@Jupiter -- See the population history and declining resources of Haiti. Yes, they are not far from Malthusian. They were also founded in a slave revolt and became a land of small warlords. They ate all their resources. Also look at Madagascar -- unpopulated until Indonesian sailors found it. Now it's 90% deforested.
Then, consider what these local populations have in common versus the world's economic leaders.
You'll notice lots of Hollywood TV and movies addressed the "Population Explosion" in 70s, and then mysteriously that all went away by 1980. They were upset at Population growth - they were upset at all those average white people having kids. Once they could start Population growth through massive immigration - well, that's different.
Control freaks always have deeply held beliefs that justify controlling people.
Smilin' Jack is wrong. Erlich was wrong because he stated his date -by's. He lost the bet and paid up. That's not premature. And the Malthusian "based on assumptions" never includes the assumption that always occurs which is that humans adapt. Excusing that is like the bad guy every Saturday morning on Scooby Doo. Assume away the meddling kids and he was right - he would have gotten away with it.
We know the sun will consume the Earth at some point long distant. So let's all use that as a reason to implement our own favorite policy choice immediately since eventually we are doomed.
---- if you like Buddy Hackett, there's an hour of Buddy before the Erlich/Wattenburg debate
Very good, especially the material from about 39:00 on. I don't know about the debate, haven't had a chance to look at it, but even that is rarely done on any kind of entertainment show today. As for Buddy, you just didn't know where he was going to take things next. Loved it.
Sure, Jupiter. And socialism has never worked because it's never been properly carried out.
European population grew from 150 million to 365 million between 1800 and 1950--before "feminism" and "birth control." It's now somewhere in the 700 million to 800 million range--feminism and birth control notwithstanding. And European life got a whole lot better at all levels during that time. The "major increase in the amount of food that could be produced" was not some accident of history--it is the inevitable result of technical progress. And it is still happening today-at ever-increasing rates.
The world’s most serious population-growth problem is right here in the United States among affluent white Americans
Following the birth of our second child a Berkeley friend presented us with a copy of Erlich’s book. As aspiring affluent Americans who happened to be white, the least we could do was to have three more children. Recently our first three grandchildren were welcomed into this joyous world. Life is good.
Or the astrophage will consume ths sun (hail mary)
Another Grifter picks the bucket. Stamford is a fucking joke.
Well, boatbuilder, if I understand your claims, they are;
a) Europe's population is growing rapidly because of high fertility of the native population, and
b) That's just fine, because the food supply is also growing rapidly.
a) is, of course, false. The fertility rates of all European nations are well below replacement.
b) If you say so. I don't really know. But it does not seem "inevitable" to me that physical limitations can always be overcome by "technical progress". In fact, it appears to me that the low-hanging fruit has mostly been picked.
Anthropogenic Implosion (AI)? Maybe, baby, a gigawatt for pleasures progress (PP). A Green blight and unreliable energy for the deplorable. That's one less "burden", one climatic change for elite-kind. A religious revival of an ancient order... with voluntary submission. Novel.
The Malthusian conclusion is correct, on the basis of its assumptions.
It's trivially true in the sense that there is a population number at which the energy of insolation (i.e. solar power) for any given period of time, divided by the number of square meters of Earth's surface per person, is less than the quantity of metabolic energy required for the survival of an individual organism over that same period of time.
But there is a lot of ground to cover between Erlich's predictions and that point, rough and rocky ground indeed, and his assumption that it would be traversed in a straight and continuous line was laughable horse shit from the very beginning.
It does seem that there are large regions - the Sahara, the Australian Outback, central Asia - which could be vastly more productive if they could be irrigated. Some technology for desalinating and transporting vast amounts of seawater could probably produce another huge increase in food production.
The imported newcomers who are barely keeping up their end
The bedrock of the Malthusian thesis is that there is not enough to go around. Does anyone want to claim that is false? Maybe I could have a little of yours.
Based on food production that hasnt been born out
@Jupiter: There are vast, vast, vast empty areas that might be cultivated in the Americas and Russia. The anti-growth environmental crowd doesn't want more mining, less wilderness, and more cookie-cutter cities with cookie-cutter people. The well-to-do don't want more economic competition. Nor do many want oil drilling in Alaska (or the oil motherload offshore in Florida).
Still a much larger human population could be supported. That's not even going to the "Do more with less" energy efficiency of Japanese lifestyles, or the (forced) frugal efficiency of India's huge population.
It may not be pleasant, but Earth could support a massive "hive" population.
Distribution and cost might be something else
One could posit that the reduction in native births led to the demand of more newcomers from abroad
“ Last time I checked, which was not long ago, Sub-Saharan Africa is still right on target to follow Erlich's predictions.”
For purely political reasons. They’re too busy hating and killing each other grow food or do pretty much anything else to improve their own lot.
"And you can read Wattenburg's original 1970 essay here, at the American Enterprise Institute website: "The Nonsense Explosion." Excerpt:
'The strong position on population control ultimately comes around to some form of government permission, or licensing, for babies....'
The bigger picture is that it's all about power and control for the cognoscenti, who knows better than the rest of us how we ought to conduct our lives.
"... Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford [writes]: “If we don’t do something dramatic about population and environment, and do it immediately, there’s just no hope that civilization will persist. . . . The world’s most serious population-growth problem is right here in the United States among affluent white Americans. . . .”
The last phrase is not so much about race as it is about controlling affluent people's lifestyles. It's an excuse for redistribution of wealth, sort of a stealthy way to make the case for socialism.
Here's a comment from X that explains the motivation for Karl Marx's ideology:
"Karl Marx gave humanity its most murderous idea: that human suffering stems not from scarcity and the human condition, but from private property itself. This bearded parasite—who never worked a day in his life and lived off Engels' textile fortune—convinced generations that voluntary exchange was exploitation while violent redistribution was justice.
The body count speaks for itself. Stalin's forced collectivization murdered 6 million Ukrainians through engineered famine. Mao's Great Leap Forward killed 45 million through sheer economic illiteracy. Pol Pot slaughtered a quarter of Cambodia's population. And every single time, the intellectuals proclaimed it "wasn't real socialism." The pattern is identical across continents and centuries: seize private property, centrally plan production, watch millions starve.
But the intellectual foundation was always rotten. Marx's labor theory of value—the notion that labor alone creates value—was already debunked by Austrian economists like Böhm-Bawerk before the ink was dry on Das Kapital. Value is subjective, determined by individual preferences in voluntary exchange. Marx simply couldn't grasp that the capitalist performs the crucial function of time preference—sacrificing present consumption for uncertain future returns.
Even "democratic socialism" in Western Europe required massive wealth transfers from productive individuals to bureaucratic parasites, creating permanent dependency classes and stagnating growth. Venezuela had the world's largest oil reserves and still managed to create toilet paper shortages. Cuba turned a Caribbean paradise into a floating prison where doctors flee on rafts.
Every socialist experiment ends the same way: empty shelves, secret police, and intellectuals explaining why the next attempt will be different."
https://x.com/i/status/2032816507210641419
Hassayamper,
You seem a little confused about what the term "subsistence farming" means.
Now in the subsequent 20 years the regimes turned decidely worse mengistu bokassa amin and the like
Smilin' Jack said...
“Premature? You mean wrong?”
It’s very premature to say he was wrong. Humans are animals, subject to the same laws of population genetics as the rest of nature. Every species strives to increase in numbers; that is how they got here. individuals who reproduce less are weeded out of the gene pool and replaced by those who reproduce more. Populations grow until they are limited by external factors, usually very unpleasant ones.
3/16/26, 12:39 PM
...
No just wrong. The prediction said humans will run out of food with millions dying by X years. I mean if someone said we will run out of food within the next ten million years that's meaningless. He had a worldview that was unambiguously proven to be wrong and the world suffered greatly for it.
I remember an older supervisor when I had my first real job - liberal - who became extremely emotional as she cried "WE REFUSED TO HAVE KIDS SO YOU COULD HAVE A BETTER LIFE!" Either I responded or this was the response to my lamenting that western civilization is not reproducing itself but the enemies of western civ - muslims - will replace us in a few generations because they ARE. The future belongs to those who show up or something similar was among my comments. This was 20 Y ago.
BarrySanders20 said...
Smilin' Jack is wrong. Erlich was wrong because he stated his date -by's. He lost the bet and paid up. That's not premature. And the Malthusian "based on assumptions" never includes the assumption that always occurs which is that humans adapt. Excusing that is like the bad guy every Saturday morning on Scooby Doo. Assume away the meddling kids and he was right - he would have gotten away with it.
We know the sun will consume the Earth at some point long distant. So let's all use that as a reason to implement our own favorite policy choice immediately since eventually we are doomed.
3/16/26, 1:57 PM
...
This is the joke about the economists stuck in a 20 foot deep pit. How do we get out of here? Well, says the economist, assume a 30 foot ladder. ...
Jupiter and Boatbuilder - your argument is the argument about the pistachios in the silo. You are trapped in a silo with 1000 pounds of pistachios. You can eat one pound of pistachios a day. How long until you run out? The answer is never. You eat a pistachio, you are in a silo, you drop the shell, and go to the next one. At some point there are too many shells and not enough nuts the difficulty is too great and you eat no more.
This is of course the same fallacy as "peak oil." The more humans, the more likelihood we will invent something amazing. We will never run out of oil. If oil reserves decrease, the price will increase where another energy source will prove to be cheaper.
The more humans, the more ingenuity. We want more humans not less. Well more humans raised in Western civilization's values.
Apropos of that I read something - I'll mix up the details - some Scandinavian country reviewed their immigration policy. They found over 90% of 1st gen muslims were on welfare. Net negative for society. They anticipated second and third generations would assimilate. Nope. Something like 85% of 2nd gen and 80% of third gen on welfare.
We need more people. But we need more educated people, educated in the values of Western Civ.
Jupiter said...
The bedrock of the Malthusian thesis is that there is not enough to go around. Does anyone want to claim that is false? Maybe I could have a little of yours.
3/16/26, 2:24 PM
...
This assumes the pie is fixed and cannot grow. It is the difference between the leftist and the conservative.
A rising pie lifts all boats.
"How wrong was he? He was so wrong that Rachael Carson called him a fraud."
I'm old enough have read "The Population Bomb" in high school. The parallels between Ehrlich and Gore and their ilk are too important to ignore.
Paul Ehrlich is emblematic of what is wrong with the left. Draconian proposals to address a "problem" about which he was spectacularly wrong; yet no acknowledgment nor even, apparently, understanding of his errors.
They are dangerous people.
Always wrong, never in doubt.
Witness the NYT's declaration of "premature".
Whether you are reproducing or not, you still WILL be replaced by someone who is smarter than you, close to half of students in the average American classroom are "special needs." And this is before one of them gets an idea to perpetrate a school shooting. Stop making babies who are developmentally delayed (they are not delayed, delayed means they reach a milestone at a later time, it's incorrect to use this term when the delay is permanent, the milestone is never reached, so the person lives in a delusional reality where he/she sees the world as a hostile place). An increasing number of people in America are being diagnosed with early childhood behavioral problems, such as frequent, intense tantrums, extreme defiance of authority, chronic aggression, and inability to follow simple rules. These early childhood behavioral problems don't go away due to many cognitive deficits and these folks are still behaving the same way as when they were toddlers. This is a big deal. A stupid and mean population doesn't have a good chance at survival. Think Neanderthals.
Erlich - "Here lies the bones of a man rightly called scum" is how his tombstone should read.
Yes but the Times (well i dont have to reiterate do i)
He dies just as China's population starts a predicable decline,
https://www.newsweek.com/2050-population-data-that-could-ruin-china-century-1903597
This population bomb idea is an old favorite of the people extermination as a virtue science pushers. That includes Adolph Hitler, Bill Gates and Thomas Malthus etc. That’s why they want to kill off billions of people in order to save us.
Jupiter said..."The Malthusian conclusion is correct, on the basis of its assumptions"
I wasn't wrong, my assumptions were.
Demographics are destiny. As a Stanford Prof Erlich got rich just by sitting in his house due to the open and immigration he supported. And partly the reason we got 40 million immigrants is because well-meaning stupid people listened to his con-job about "Population Growth".
Almost every leftwing academic is dishonest because their motives are always hidden.
Save the poor from poverty.
Save the world from overpopulation.
Save the whales.
Save the ozone layer.
Save the polar bears.
Save the coastlines.
Save the sick from high healthcare prices.
Save the Gazans from genocide.
Has any of it been saved? Ever?
And I could make a similar list for Republicans.
Save the children from rock n roll.
Save the Grenadians from the commies.
Save the Panamanians from the narco dictator.
Save the Iraqis from the dictator.
Save the Afghanis from the medieval fundamentalists.
Save the Venezuelans from the commies.
Save the Iranians from the medieval fundamentalists.
I guess at least the Grenadians and the Panamanians sorta got saved?
If Paul Erhlich was serious about his convictions he would have shuffled off to Canada to get some of that MAiD action.
The polar bears are doing pretty good.
"This assumes the pie is fixed and cannot grow. It is the difference between the leftist and the conservative."
OK, the pie is growing. So I guess I'll be wanting a little more of yours.
Resources are finitely available and accessible in space and time. Or perhaps just the former is renewable and the latter is an anthropogenic hallucination.
This conversation reminds me of the debate regarding peak oil.
Hubbert Peak Theory, proposed by M. King Hubbert in 1956, posits that oil production follows a bell-shaped curve, peaking when roughly half of the available reserve is consumed, followed by a permanent decline. Hubbert accurately predicted U.S. conventional oil production would peak around 1970, but technological advancements like fracking have since pushed peak timelines later.
Thinking about this today and how continue to eat well:
“O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!”
“how we”
The Ogallala Aquifer is being depleted rapidly, with some areas seeing declines exceeding 1 foot per year. Under business-as-usual scenarios, 70% of the aquifer is projected to be depleted by 2060-2065, or within 40-50 years. Parts of the aquifer are already considered nonrenewable due to slow recharge rates.
The aquifer supports roughly 20% of the annual U.S. agricultural harvest, and its depletion threatens over $20 billion in food and fiber production.
"OK, the pie is growing. So I guess I'll be wanting a little more of yours."
The reason the pie is growing is because we mostly throttle people with attitudes like yours, and reward the ones who help the pie grow. Remarkably, in places where your attitude prevails, the pie doesn't grow.
In other words, the pie doesn't just grow by itself. It grows to the extent we have free markets, rule of law, and can control crime. Not so much where the law of the jungle prevails.
With current over-pumping rates, California’s Central Valley aquifers are facing critical, long-term depletion, particularly as subsidence, caused by groundwater overdraft, threatens infrastructure. While legal mandates require sustainability by the 2040s, scientists warn that many wells could run dry long before then, with little hope of recovery in critically overdrafted basins like the San Joaquin Valley without major, rapid changes to water management.
The Central Valley of California produces approximately 8% of total U.S. agricultural output by value and one-quarter (25%) of the nation's food, including 40% of its fruits, nuts, and other table foods. This immense production occurs on less than 1% of the total farmland in the United States.
Wrong in 1968 and wrong today, but his theory remains fashionable. Quite an accomplishment if you will.
I was going to UCLA and graduated the year before him. Erlich gave his doom and gloom lecture there. Almost everyone saw him for the huckster he was.
You seem a little confused about what the term "subsistence farming" means.
That is a fair criticism.
To be more specific, I meant non-mechanized, non-irrigated farming with no inorganic fertilizer, insecticides, fungicides, or other modern innovations, by very numerous sole-proprietor farmers with relatively small land holdings rather than large agribusinesses, whose families eat a significant fraction of what they produce and sell the surplus directly to consumers in local community markets.
Hubbert was wrong for a long time as waa the fellow who revived his theory back about 20 years
Karl Marx gave humanity its most murderous idea: that human suffering stems not from scarcity and the human condition, but from private property itself. This bearded parasite—who never worked a day in his life and lived off Engels' textile fortune—convinced generations that voluntary exchange was exploitation while violent redistribution was justice.
I'm proud to say that in the days before the filthy socialist scum fenced off Marx's grave in Highgate Cemetery in East London, I urinated on his grave and monument, and spat in the face of his bust that sat atop it.
He's one of the most evil men who ever drew breath, and anyone who subscribes to his ideas is a fool and an enemy who ought not to be granted the rights of an American citizen.
scientists warn that many wells could run dry long before then, with little hope of recovery in critically overdrafted basins like the San Joaquin Valley without major, rapid changes to water management.
We could start by not diverting millions of acre-feet of water to the ocean for the benefit of some six-inch long trash fish.
Karl Marx and Paul Ehrlich MADE us do that!
Hubbert nailed his prediction for free flowing oil. His mathematical model is the foundation of fluid flow is porous media.
What you smug cucks forget is that these incomplete predictions help to point future engineers to solutions that make the doom and gloom go away. It's not automatic progress occurring in a vacuum.
You're prideful of having 20/20 hindsight. That's more pathetic than a participant trophy.
"We could start by not diverting millions of acre-feet of water to the ocean for the benefit of some six-inch long trash fish."
We could, but as long as Democrats have anything to say about it, we won't.
"Was it mandatory to wear a brown suit with either a brown or yellow tie in the early 70's?"
Yes, but only for men, for complicated cultural and economic reasons that need not detain us here.
The environmental releases to the Pacific (mostly for salinity control) is ~10% of the total freshwater used for agriculture.
~2.5M a-f for the environment out of 25M a-f in subsidized water for multinational agribusiness factory farms. Another 2.5M a-f is consumed by Valley municipal and industrial customers.
Cheap water to corporations is socialism we like
Yeah make it up in volume
My prediction was wrong, its reality thats at fault
Howard - re peak oil - see my comment on pistachios and the silo. We will never "run out" of oil. It could be that we transition to an alternative energy source.
It is also like water in Israel (in particular) and the Middle East in general. EVERYONE KNEW that water shortages would be the cause of the next major ME war. When I was a kid and visited Israel, they did not take showers daily bec there was not enough water. We were strongly discouraged from taking showers more than a few minutes long. The Kinneret/Galilee water levels were depleted.
Then the Israelis (being Israelis) created an effective way to sweeten water from the Mediterranean and JUST LIKE THAT water was no longer an issue.
The more western trained people we have the more innovation. And at some point we will colonize other planets.
Erroneous estimate of the ghawar well drove the last erroneous calculus
Jupiter said...
"This assumes the pie is fixed and cannot grow. It is the difference between the leftist and the conservative."
OK, the pie is growing. So I guess I'll be wanting a little more of yours.
3/16/26, 4:35 PM
...
Thank G-d we live in America! You can work harder to make your pie bigger. You can live a life of sloth and we will pay so that you have enough food and shelter to keep soul attached to body but no more. But you don't get mine. And I don't get yours. As Lincoln said, it is unjust for one man to labor and another to enjoy the fruits of that man's labor.
You want more? Work. You don't want to work? Ramen noodles. We are a kind nation, but if you don't want to work you get ramen, not steak. You certainly do not have a claim to my labor except insomuch as the need to keep soul attached to body.
Howard said...
The Ogallala Aquifer is being depleted rapidly, with some areas seeing declines exceeding 1 foot per year. Under business-as-usual scenarios, 70% of the aquifer is projected to be depleted by 2060-2065, or within 40-50 years. Parts of the aquifer are already considered nonrenewable due to slow recharge rates.
The aquifer supports roughly 20% of the annual U.S. agricultural harvest, and its depletion threatens over $20 billion in food and fiber production.
3/16/26, 4:58 PM
...
Fortunately we have the world's largest water reservoir. Functionally unlimited water. It's the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately we have the technology to desalinate and provide as much water as we need.
Unfortunately Democrats/leftists rule CA and will not allow more water as that will just encourage more consumption and we don't want that.
Decline is a choice.
We could also increase our expressway capacity. Build double-decker highways. But the goal of Democrats is to throttle the free use of cars and force people to impractical public transportation. And so traffic is terrible in CA. Again - this is a choice made by the government to make driving miserable.
Decline is a choice.
You certainly do not have a claim to my labor except insomuch as the need to keep soul attached to body.
Fuck that. Positive "rights" are slavery.
Welfare is a privilege, and we were a better country when it was stingy and going on welfare was seen as an embarrassing moral failure.
He does buy every prog trope
For the Central Valley of California. Desal is at a minimum $1,000/a-f. Current average agriculture supply water cost is less than $100/a-f. The corporate socialism subsidized water cost is $18-$35/a-f. Total agriculture water demand is 25M a-f. Total central Valley ag revenue is $50B. Math is hard.
Cucks don't understand scale
Howard said...
For the Central Valley of California. Desal is at a minimum $1,000/a-f. Current average agriculture supply water cost is less than $100/a-f. The corporate socialism subsidized water cost is $18-$35/a-f. Total agriculture water demand is 25M a-f. Total central Valley ag revenue is $50B. Math is hard.
3/16/26, 7:16 PM
...
I have no idea what the cost is. As long as CA CHOOSES not to invest in desalination I would not be surprised if it is expensive. It's like if CA CHOOSES to require a special blend of gasoline, then drives all the refineries to close shop, then instead of dropping the expensive gasoline blend mandate it CHOOSES to have all its gasoline shipped in from Asia ... well gasoline will be expensive.
As long as CA CHOOSES to spend $100B on a train that will never be built and CHOOSES not to invest in desalination, we will have water shortages.
Decline is a CHOICE that CA CHOOSES.
It's not just California. Keith. The corn and soy belt dominated by MAGA Republicans don't manage their groundwater resources either.
Howard - I can only speak about CA chronic water shortages and their decision not to address it by increasing the pie, rather restricting people from using water.
I can speak to that directly. Keith. In the mid-1980s, I worked on four large groundwater recharge projects in California. One was in the Kern River where the recharge was to occur in former oil field brine evaporation ponds. Another one was a relatively small recharge project along the Santa Ana River near Anaheim. The biggest one was a recharge project in Chino, basin of Southern California. The fourth one was the giant recharge zone along the coast of Los Angeles county where treated wastewater was injected into the aquifers to prevent sea water intrusion.
I thought this was the beginning of a great program of replenishing California's groundwater resources. I was naive
All further projects were stopped because the California environmental coalition called groundwater recharge projects growth inducing.
Howard - I agree - CA water shortage is because environmentalists do not want water. The 1980's was a LONG time ago. In regard to my comment about Israel - in the 1980's and IIRC the 1990's water scarcity was known by all to be the cause of the next war. That problem has been solved. The Israelis created a system to desalinate abundantly and inexpensively. The reason we do not have abundant cheap water in CA is because the Greens do not want abundant and cheap water. It's the same reason traffic is terrible. Terrible traffic is the goal.
Of course you could say that we don't have enough energy to drive desalination. Which is true because we do not have nuclear (in any meaningful capacity). Which is also a choice. You might say nuclear is extremely expensive to build. But that - like desalination and traffic - is because of environmentalists gumming up the works. There is no reason desalination needs to be expensive and no reason why nuclear must. It is because of environmentalist red tape and obstruction.
"This population bomb idea is an old favorite of the people extermination as a virtue science pushers. That includes Adolph Hitler, Bill Gates and Thomas Malthus etc."
Given that Erlich as a Jewish Leftist who loved open borders, immigration, and population reduction for White Americans, I doubt that.
Haha. That was a required reading in my 1972 Sociology class.
I think Howard has a point that private corporations growing food to sell for profit are not automatically entitled to public water resources.
Jupiter: Last time I checked, which was not long ago, Sub-Saharan Africa is still right on target to follow Erlich's predictions.
Less so than you think. According to AI: Sub-Saharan Africa has the world's highest total fertility rate (TFR), estimated at approximately 4.3 to 4.6 children per woman in 2023. While the region has seen a decline from 6.5 in the past 30 years, it remains significantly above the global replacement rate of 2.1.
That's a pretty significant decline. Moreover, it is masked by an error so widespread that it is repeated almost everywhere: replacement fertility is 2.1.
First, a little review. Replacement fertility is the number of births the average woman in a given socio-economic milieu required to have one daughter survive to reproductive age.
In modern economies, because mortality is so low from infancy to adulthood, that number is 2.1.
However, that is not the case in sub-Saharan Africa, where replacement fertility is about 3.5. At the current rate of TFR decrease, sub-Saharan Africa will reach replacement fertility in about 15 years.
A far bigger question, though is this: throughout natural history, there has never been an instance where the female of the species has been able to choose her fertility — the entire concept is evolutionarily unprecedented. Women have both the mental capacity, and since 1965, the widespread capability to choose their fertility. So, given that capacity and capability, on average, how many births do women prefer in order to satiate their maternal instincts?
Given the global fertility collapse, it seems that number is far less than two.
For entertainment purposes, rich western societies concoct these fables. When they can’t even believe their own bullshit anymore they make up a new fable and forget that they believed in the last one. So it goes.
Ok, westerners are supposed to stop reproducing at replacement and die out, why? So that immigrants who reproduce at replacement level can move in? We die out and only create a temporary fix, the west will soon be as overcrowded as everywhere else. And why are only white westerners the big problem, academic racism?
Ehrlich was on the advisory board of FAIR, the immigration restriction group, but I guess he couldn't face his wife, relatives, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues without talking up diversity and multiculturalism.
“Women have both the mental capacity, and since 1965, the widespread capability to choose their fertility. So, given that capacity and capability, on average, how many births do women prefer in order to satiate their maternal instincts?”
The problem is that maternal instincts vary. Due to genetics, culture, religion, etc. some women will prefer more births than others. Darwin tells us which kind of women will prevail.
“The more western trained people we have the more innovation. And at some point we will colonize other planets.”
Uh huh. At some point technology is going to reach into that hat and there won’t be a rabbit there.
Smilin' Jack: The problem is that maternal instincts vary. Due to genetics, culture, religion, etc. some women will prefer more births than others. Darwin tells us which kind of women will prevail.
Evolutionarily speaking, it is puzzling how genetic variation in birth preference could exist, since until 1965 it never mattered.
Culture and religion seems to affect timing, not result. E.g: Mormon fertility has plummeted, but from a higher baseline.
“Evolutionarily speaking, it is puzzling how genetic variation in birth preference could exist, since until 1965 it never mattered.”
Variation exists precisely when it doesn’t matter. Humans have several blood types because there is no selective advantage to any one of them. If a disease arose that only affected type A, type A would disappear.
“Culture and religion seems to affect timing, not result.”
The world has lots of Catholics, but no Shakers.
Jesus RCO. Is there ANYTHING bad in the world that’s not because of Jews or is literally everything bad in the world because of Jews? I mean there’s nuts and there’s nuts.
Michael mann had a sad for him
Ehrlich got the declining population that he wanted, at least in all but the Third World countries, and most civilized countries realize that it's a bad thing. It's the same shortsightedness that makes climate "scientists" want to do things to the atmosphere to cool it, not accounting for the fact that we are living in an interglacial period and so-called anthropogenic global warming may be the only thing preventing us from sliding into the next ice age. They try to solve one problem and create another one.
In fact, it appears to me that the low-hanging fruit has mostly been picked.
That's what Malthus thought. That's what Ehrlich preached. The evidence says they were dead wrong.
a) is, of course, false. The fertility rates of all European nations are well below replacement.
Obviously the growth in population from 1800 to today was not the result of long-term fertility rates below replacement.
I think Howard has a point that private corporations growing food to sell for profit are not automatically entitled to public water resources.
I think Howard's "point" is "You cucks are wrong." This seems to be his main point most of the time. He's smarter and more right than everybody else. It's not clear to me who the hell he is talking about. Nobody on this board suggested that it is good policy to subsidize corporate water use (although an argument can be made that it it is).
Hey RC--you know who else was Jewish? Julian Simon and Ben Wattenberg.
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