The Population Dud

Speaker 2

and Phil Magnus think on.

Speaker 1

He was 93 years old, nine three. And I know it's rude to speak ill of the dead, but I think we could have a healthy criticism of the dead. So Phil, is there another human being who has been more wrong for so long than Paul Ehrlich?

Speaker 2

He certainly ranks up there at the top of them. ⁓ He was famous for back in 1960s and 70s. He came under the scene as this academic who was predicting there's going to be a population-driven apocalypse of mass starvation, shortages, all sorts of problems worldwide because ⁓ human population was growing at such a pace that it exceeded the Earth's ability to sustain it. So was really popular in the environmental movement. And he basically spent his entire career making all these predictions that the catastrophe was just around the corner, was about to happen. And then the date would come and he'd have to update his prediction and push it further down the road. But actually quite the opposite occurs in that same period. There's not mass impoverishment or starvation. Rather we find technological innovation brings access to food. to unprecedented levels in human history, more people are lifted out of poverty in this era than at any point in human history. And we're currently at a state where starvation is relatively rare compared to what it was even just a generation or two ago.

Speaker 1

I wonder how many editions of the population bomb have been printed. Is it one of those books that has never gone out of print?

Speaker 2

You know, the first one came up in, I think it was 1968 is when he first makes this prediction. And, ⁓ you know, I noticed Paul Ehrlich was still in the news. It was like a year or two ago. He kind of resurfaced. He crawled out of ⁓ a hole somewhere to... make some of the same apocalyptic environmental predictions that he had been peddling since the 1960s. And my first reaction was, ⁓ I didn't know Paul Ehrlich was still around. This was a year two ago before he passed away, just a week or so ago. But it's kind of a... moving goalpost that has defined his entire career. And the only thing that I can think of that's similar to it. So Paul Samuelson, the famous Keynesian economist, started publishing textbooks in the late 1940s and early 1950s that had a very interventionist take on the economy. And one of the most famous parts of the textbook is he had this chart that showed the Soviet Union's economic growth. And it was always predicted about 10 years from whenever the book came out to overtake the United States. And Samuelson wasn't pro-Soviet, but he was certainly in awe of the economic planning that was coming into the Soviet Union. And the early editions of this, 10 or 15 years from now, the Soviet Union will overtake the United States. And then the new edition comes out a few years after that, and the timeline has been pushed forward. And then the timeline has been pushed forward again. And this thing went through like a dozen different editions between the 1940s and the end of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union overtaking the U.S. was always just around the corner. Well, Erlich does the same thing with the population bomb. The population implosion is always just around the corner and never seems to be...

Speaker 1

Realized imagine having such high hopes for such horror. It's almost like I wonder the example you just gave it. It kind of sounds like a super villain in a way where I wonder if there any, you know, kind of machinations happening, you know, but, know, behind closed doors, it's like, okay, I need to figure out a way to make sure that there's mass starvation that that that people are eliminated. It just, it seems like the, I don't know, the narrative to what would be like a I don't know, a Twilight Zone episode or Out of Limits.

Speaker 2

Right, right. Yeah, people are drawn to apocalyptic thinking. And I would consider Ehrlich ⁓ an exemplar of this, possibly the original, at least in the modern era. Although he harkens back to an older strain of economics. This was the Thomas Malthus prediction from the 1790s. Malthus is ⁓ this British economist, and he basically makes the argument that while ⁓ food and resources, they grow in basically a straight arithmetic line is basically playing out. Whereas population grows exponentially, it means that population will exceed what the arithmetic will be able to sustain in basic necessities production. And Malthus is predicting, well, this is why humanity falls into famines and recurring ⁓ bouts of poverty and starvation. It's called the Malthusian Trap. Well, turns out Malthus was off on his predictions, but he also didn't fully account for other intervening factors, the major one being technological innovation. But you see this theme playing out several times through history, and Ehrlich is one of the modern popularizers of it because of the late 1960s. It's the start of the modern environmental movement. This is a classic apocalyptic prediction that shows, well, here's why we need to take all these proactive environmental policy steps now in order to avert catastrophe of the future, which is coming because of this overpopulation. And he's like, I've done the math. This is just around the corner. We have to act now or else 20 years from now, there won't be a future. It's kind of the recurring theme here. And yet, as the prediction never comes true, goalposts moves further and further down the road. We see the same thing in other areas of environmentalism. We've seen it in climate change. Remember, there was supposed to be no polar ice caps by like 2020 or something. All supposed to have melted away, and yet they're still there for some reason.

Speaker 1

To my chagrin, I am a man who hates, hates the polar ice caps. I want them melted, I want them gone, and yet they keep coming back.

Speaker 2

I it that Northwest Passage we could get on think of all the commerce we could get through there. Wow.

Speaker 1

How about we, we talk about some of Ehrlich's predictions that failed and, ⁓ the big one I think was mass starvation. So Ehrlich predicted that hundreds of millions would starve in the 1970s, specifically claiming something like 65 million Americans would die of famine between 1980 and 1989. And look as a, as a boy who was born in 1982, if there's one prediction that I'm really happy with that it didn't come through, it's, it's this one. ⁓

Speaker 2

And again, he doesn't account for technology and innovation. And that's been the major story of food stuff throughout human history, but certainly in the past 200 years, the great enrichment era is as human society has industrialized, we've also advanced our technology in food production. And that's everything from figuring out better ways to rotate crops to make better use of land. One of the major ones is They bred disease-resistant strains of Seed ⁓ that, you you had the potato blight in the 19th century. was the infamous ⁓ disease that sweeps Europe and then ⁓ obliterates the food stock in Ireland in particular. And people starve to death, basically. because of what is now a treatable disease. We have better seeds and better plant stock that no longer succumbs to this. We also have improved the yield. There are new fertilization techniques, new cultivation techniques that put better land into better uses over time. And as a result of all these different innovations that have occurred, we've vastly expanded the output capacity. of basic agriculture, even to the point that there are several times in the mid-20th century in the United States where farmers produced too much food because it was over-subsidized by the federal government. We still do this today with corn. We make way too much corn relative to the amount that's consumed for food or other agricultural uses. So what do they do? They convert it into ethanol, and then they mandate you buy it and put it in your gasoline.

Speaker 1

go from making these predictions for masturbation and you turn around and there's an epidemic of obesity in the United States. Like I don't think Paul Ehrlich would ever guess to have seen shows like My 600 Pound Life, but the man lived to 93. He was able to see shows like My 600 Pound Life. And I feel like that that's what's that's what's really off putting about figures like Ehrlich is Part of me I want to put myself in there in the historical context when they're making these predictions and say like For example, if you had somebody living through World War one or World War two, right? could see people being like Mike Mike, know my god the world is going to hell I don't know if we're ever going to get out of this but then there's a point where the wars end and now There's no more war. So let's let's move forward for Ehrlich to make these early predictions And like you say, keep moving the goalposts rather than just saying, Hey, I was wrong. I do wonder what kind of mentality you would need to be that kind of person.

Speaker 2

that mentality is shared by the New York Times because in their obituary for them, they took some flack over this justifiably, they wouldn't say that Ehrlich was this guy that just made an entire career of erroneous predictions. They said his predictions were premature. They hadn't come true yet. They might still in the future is kind of the claim here. And you're sitting here reading this, it's like, okay, well, the Times is complicit in moving the goalposts. All these media cheerleaders are complicit in moving the goalposts. And I think there are two things going on here. The first is they do look across history and they see all these catastrophes. There are famines and natural disasters and periods of starvation, but they misdiagnose them. They always want to attribute this to the wealthier being too greedy and the poor are starving because we aren't doing enough to take care of the poor, when in reality it's often bad government policies that cause ⁓ or exacerbate these disasters. So I always point out, we know the history of the Irish potato famine. It's this horrible disease that obliterates the crop. And of course, that's not going to be good when it happens. But the question is, what do you do about it afterward? Well, the problem that existed at the time is Great Britain had horrendously protectionist tariff laws, trade policies, that impeded the importation of food. in grain items in particular. They're called the corn laws. They were trying to protect British farmers, British landowners from competition from the United States and other countries abroad that can make grain items much more efficiently because we actually have a growing season unlike Britain that is dark and gloomy for 320 days out of the year or something like that. So because of these policies, that were in place, there was no market mechanism to address the famine as it breaks out. It's not greed that's driving the famine, other than greedy politicians that are connected to the tariff system. ⁓ Rather, it's the government policy itself that is exacerbating it. You look across history, see, they make that mistake. And then the second thing they do is kind of this aspirational ⁓ vision of the world. ⁓ They have this idea that ⁓ their core theory about something in the environment is right. And they don't need to really prove that it's right, other than it's going to manifest in the future in some way that they are constantly making these predictions about. And again, you see this across the environmental movement. ⁓ We know with the climate change people, they do the same thing. Ehrlich did an entire career of this. Another one that people may remember in the ⁓ 1990s and 2000s, there was this thing called peak oil theory. And ⁓ what was peak oil theory? Well, it said that oil underneath the earth's is finite. It's a non-renewable resource and We have artificially accelerated our consumption of oil over the past 200 years of the Industrial Revolution to a point that we're depleting the natural resources of the earth. It means we're going to run out. And when we run out, it's going to be sudden and catastrophic. And there will be ⁓ just this rapid decline after the peak. And all of human life as we know it today will be upended because suddenly there won't be any oil left. It's like this. We'll go into an irreversible, oil depletion phase. And this was popular until probably around the late 2000s, early 2010s. And then they did a complete 180. They realized the prediction was not coming true. So they moved from Well, we have to preserve the oil for the future to, well actually the real crisis is global warming and global warming is caused by too much oil consumption. And we have too much oil, we have to actually sequester it in the ground and prevent anyone from ever accessing it because that'll turn into carbon dioxide and it'll melt the ice caps and then we'll be another type of apocalypse.

Speaker 1

Another one, Erlich. predicted was environmental and resource collapse. ⁓ So in the 70s, he predicted that all major sea life would be extinct within a decade. And that resources like copper and tin would become prohibitively scarce. Now on the sea life thing, one of the issues I know that are hitting like fisheries is illegal, basically Chinese fishing boats going around just sucking up everything. mean, whatever can fit in a net, they're hauling it in. So I wonder if Ehrlich was like, if I could just hold on. a few more days maybe China will have taken every single fish.

Speaker 2

my prediction will finally come true. And again, it's a solution that he has, he has this radical environmentalist solution, and it's in search of a justification for it. So he sees fisheries, but when you go around looking for your own justification for the end that you want, you often misdiagnose what's happening here. And the real issue with China vacuuming up all the fish or anything, it's a lack of property rights. It's a lack of a defined set of fishing rights in the global commons of the ocean. And we know this from many instances across history when you don't have parameters or property rights over something that's just there for everyone to take, well, it tends to be abused. You establish property rights, they become a rationing mechanism.

Speaker 1

One of the concerns that a lot of people are having now, it seems like, that there's not enough people on the planet. There are not enough people making babies, in particular in Western countries. Is that a reverse Ehrlich? Is that the new doom and gloom kind of thing, that there aren't enough people here?

Speaker 2

Well, it's weirdly, it's the same mentality that there's this apocalypse on the horizon and therefore we need to do something to plan our way out of it. The apocalypse of too much population, well, we have to plan our way out of it. And historically that was, well, we need the government to step in and incentivize birth control or the more extreme and infamous version is the one child policy that China had. They were overpopulated. They were growing too fast. They're like, we're not going to be able to sustain this. So therefore each family can only have one child. Well, fast forward a few decades later, and if you told several generations you can only have one child, well, what happens to the population? Eventually you get dropped below ⁓ gist replacement level, which China has entered into. So now they have a shrinking population. And it's like, ⁓ uh-oh, now we have the reverse problem and we need a policy solution to incentivize people to have babies. And this is, that's an extreme example of it, but ⁓ demographic decline is a recurring. concern across many countries around the world. I think there are very few countries today that have fast growing populations anymore. And part of that is economic in origin. It's when you reach a certain level of prosperity, some of the pressures and incentives around having children change with that. But I guess the point that I would stress is whether you're trying to centrally plan a population reduction or centrally plan a population increase, The mistake is the central point.

Speaker 1

There's something about the state being the foreplay to try to get you and your mate to mate that just no pun intended rubs me the wrong way. There is something too when you look at the catastrophic predictions like this, it has scared generations of people from even wanting to try to have kids. there's a journalist named Lucy Biggers who writes for the free press. And she has a really interesting story because she was, she was right in the camp with, know, Greta Thunberg. There's actually pictures of her, you know, posing with her and stuff. And she was in the thick of it, of the environmentalist movement and was very much, there is global catastrophe on the horizon. We need to, we need to change things. We need a, we need a revolution. And thankfully she came around to it. She came around on her on her ideas and a big part of it was she became a mom and she was raising her, you know, her child and and looking at things and saying like, a lot of this stuff doesn't add up and we actually have it pretty good. And wow, thank God we have the technology that we have in order to not only survive and not just strive, but to do it in such comfort. And ⁓ she's right now, she's kind of like mopping up the mess that she was a part of making, you for the years of being in environmentalism. She's doing great work when it comes to that.

Speaker 2

That's the thing, there is a misinformation element. But you hear this with these apocalyptic claims, whether it's Ehrlich or ⁓ some of the climate alarmists or many other things. We had the COVID alarmists a few years ago. They always say, the science is settled. And Ehrlich was one of these original, well, the science is settled. I've done the math, population catastrophe is ahead of us. ⁓ Therefore, you have to listen to me whether you like it or not, because ⁓ I'm the expert, I'm the scientist, I know this stuff. Well, and then it turns out all of his predictions are wrong. And I liken him, you know, to go back to the COVID era. If you all remember this character out of the UK named Neil Ferguson, Dr. Lockdown.

Speaker 1

I didn't know him as Dr. Lockdown, but that's a great name.

Speaker 2

Yeah, Dr. Lockdown, and he was the guy that did all the models that predicted, you know, COVID catastrophe worldwide, and they're cited by Fauci and cited by all the governments to justify lockdowns. And I did a study of some of his academic work, because he had been around for 20 or 30 years as this like pandemic modeler. And going back to the 1990s, he was like the Paul Ehrlich of pandemics. He started with mad cow disease and he had all these crazy models that predicted like hundreds of thousands of deaths from mad cow disease, ⁓ sweeping the UK and how they had to take all these drastic actions to kill the cow population before this happened to avert the catastrophe that his model predicted. And, you know, I'm not gonna denigrate it's a terrible disease, but there were like 50 deaths in the end. His model is off by several orders of magnitude. But it's not like when that prediction failed, he changed his model and figured out what was wrong with it. He just took the same model and then a few years later, well, now we have to worry about mad sheep disease. And mad sheep is going to kill 100,000 people. And that prediction doesn't come true. And a few years later, well, now we have to worry about the bird flu and it's going to kill thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. That prediction doesn't come true.

Speaker 1

After the mad sheep prediction, I stopped wearing wool. was like, I'm like, my blanket is going to is going to strangle me in the middle of the night.

Speaker 2

you gotta move all over to synthetics nylon oil based fiber

Speaker 1

Which I hear is killing me also so they're like basically I need to move to a climate where I could just be naked and naked and safe You know, good. It seems like a lot of these figures no matter how wrong they are. They're never punished That's exactly to the credit of Paul Ehrlich. There was a wager that he made with Right, right. Can you explain what the the wager was?

Speaker 2

Yeah, Julian Simon, This is after he's been this population alarmist, resource depletion alarmist for about a decade. He's very famous. And Julian Simon, who's this economist, and this is about 1980, challenges him to a bet. And the bet that they both agree on is that they're going to make a prediction over a 10-year period. So from 1980 to 1990, they're going to construct a mutually agreed upon basket of, I think it was about five resources that Ehrlich had predicted were going to run out of and they're going to go into this downward spiral of resource depletion. And Simon basically says, you know, I'll bet you money with interest or whatever it turns out that in fact, The inflation adjusted price after 10 years of these resources isn't going to do what you do, what you claim it's going to do. In fact, it's probably going to end up going the other direction. So, Erlich takes the pessimistic side. Simon takes the optimistic side. And then in 1990, a decade after this bet has been made, Simon wins. Like a clear-cut case, and Erlich has to write him a check. Basically, just the way that the bet played out. So... Erlich, you know, to his credit, he's one of the few people, even though he's moving the goalposts, he did put his money on the line on that one bet. And it undermined his ⁓ basic claims. He lost the bet. But again, his reputation somehow doesn't take the hit that one would expect. If you're the guy that keeps making the wrong predictions and lose in very clear ways, rather, The New York Times thing kicks in and it's like, well, Erlich may have lost the bet, but that's because his time horizon was too premature. He should have bet 2040 instead of 1990.

Speaker 1

Here's a detail to that. It turns out Ehrlich, he lost the bet, but he had his wife cut the check to Simon, which when I heard that I'm like, ⁓ man, man, the cojones on this guy to do that. And with Ehrlich too, look, I'm a pretty superficial person, I guess. But I'm like, I don't know how someone could be that wrong all the time, but not be like a stud. Like, it would be one thing if he was like, you know, the most attractive man in the world and you're like, okay, he's so good looking, we're gonna allow this guy. Yeah, yeah, like he's a john ham looking guy. It's like, okay, let john ham talk about Armageddon coming because we you know, we such a good looking guy. But yeah, Ehrlich 93. I mean, he looked good for 93. But not a looker, not a model. And it's so wild. I found out that Ehrlich, he was on Johnny Carson, like,

Speaker 2

some other reason.

Speaker 1

over 20 times, which I can't. What are you guys talking about? And I'm just he must have had like what an what an act to be able to be on Johnny Carson that many times. What is a salesman? Yeah. I mean, that just goes to show what kind of appeal he had to the public, you know, because a lot of the people tuning in to watch Johnny Carson, they're not reading peer reviewed papers and they're taking Johnny Carson as a trusted man of late night.

Speaker 2

It just shows how old he is. Yeah. He's a salesman for his bad idea.

Speaker 1

possibly the greatest late night host ever. And if he's having this guy on, this guy must be telling the truth.

Speaker 2

Yeah, every channel had Anthony Fauci on. Therefore, Fauci must have been telling the truth. He was the expert. And who are you and me and a random person sitting in front of your TV set or your computer watching these guys on TV that are the actual experts? Who are we to question them on their authority, their expertise, even if they're wrong over and over and over again?

Speaker 1

I don't think there's been a more effective birth control than Paul Ehrlich, basically. He's been really good at his job. Yeah, it's scaring people.

Speaker 2

make a horror movie where Paul Erlich comes and visits you if you have too many children.

Speaker 1

And you know, I can understand why, you know, someone like Ehrlich would be reluctant to admit that he's wrong. There's a lot of people out there who are, you know, incredible egos, narcissists and all that. But what does it say about people, you know, the general public, us, you know, looking and saying like, hey, this guy predicted that the world was going to end basically, and he's been wrong. And yet you're still looking to him as, as an expert.

Speaker 2

Well, I think what it shows is that a lot of these apocalyptic type predictions, and you know, it's not a left right thing, I think it's a general aspect of the political world, people that make ⁓ apocalyptic predictions often have a policy solution that is in search of a problem to justify it. It's, ⁓ hey, we want to reorder the world economy because of environmental catastrophe. Therefore, we need to a reason to ⁓ elevate why we want to do this in the present day. apocalypse is really useful for this because the prediction, if it's always 10 years out, ⁓ it's unfalsifiable. It's like you can claim, well, If we don't act now, we aren't going to have an opportunity yet to act when it's too late, 10 years from now. So who are you to tell me no? ⁓ That risk is there. And we see this in environmental stuff. We also hear about like AI apocalypse and the robots, you know, we were talking about a few weeks ago in another episode. Fears about the robot uprising Terminator style. That's an unfalsifiable prediction. Yes, there were ethical concerns associated with AI, but If you're catering everything to these tale events, these apocalypses that are basically never certain to come out and play out the way that you do, ⁓ you can really scare up a lot of people to support extreme measures out of just basic risk aversion.

Speaker 1

And since we've been speaking so ill of Paul Ehrlich, I think we should just take a moment to speak ⁓ well of the dead. And I'd like everybody, if you haven't heard this name before, to pause this episode, go to your Google or any of your search engines and put in Norman E Borlaug, B-O-R-L-A-U-G. Talk about a person who had a profound positive impact on humanity. Thanks to Mr. Borlaug, millions and probably billions of people by this point have not died of starvation and have been very well fed because of the work that he did with crops and genetics.

Speaker 2

Yeah, he's one of the pioneers of remember these disease resistant crops, higher yield crops, using technology to make food more accessible. And to his credit, he did get recognized in his life. He won a Nobel Prize. He won all the honors and a claim that someone in that position deserves to win. But It's his innovations that basically break the Malthusian trap. There are what's not accounted for when you get into these population bomb style predictions. ⁓ And they're impossible to really see because we don't know what ingenuity will deliver in the future. ⁓ Our task is to make the conditions most amenable for that ingenuity to happen. And it can't happen if everything is just command and control and run from the top down ⁓ in pursuit of like trying to stave off this crazy apocalyptic theory that can never be falsified and never be proven.

Speaker 1

Well, ladies and gentlemen, if you're a listener of our program, you are definitely more Borlog than you are Ehrlich, and we appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Happy Hour Econ. We'll see you next week.