In 1968, two Stanford professors, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, wrote a book at the suggestion of the executive director of the Sierra Club, a prominent environmentalist organization. Titled *The Population Bomb*, the book warned that increasing birth rates—helped by the abundance of energy—would become a species-level crisis. Too many people would mean too little food, water, and land.
Chaos would erupt.
Doom would follow.
All of this would happen in the coming decades.
The book’s ideas were not new. They were a modern repackaging of the economics of Thomas Malthus, who warned that an increase in economic growth would inevitably lead to a higher population than natural resources could sustain.
What both Malthus and the Ehrlichs failed to foresee was the degree to which human ingenuity would lead to innovations that would meet growing human needs. The result is that even though the population is larger than ever, the world’s food production per capita has never been higher than in modern times.
But tragically, fallacious Malthusian ideas have had a real-life impact on government policy. For example, lingering concerns about the population bomb led to horrific population control programs in countries around the world. Most know about China’s one-child policy. Less known is that the Peruvian government used US foreign-aid money to sterilize indigenous women involuntarily. Other population control policies were implemented around the world
The failure of these predictions has not disgraced the Malthusian worldview, however. In fact, its advocates continue to be treated as respected leaders in their fields. In 2023, Paul Ehrlich appeared on 60 Minutes to offer new warnings of extinction, despite a fifty-plus-year track record of being wrong.
The unfortunate reality is that predictions of environmental doom are useful for those that desire power. The greater the threat, the more power is needed. As history has shown, the government grows in times of crisis and rarely ever shrinks once the emergency has passed.
Even as concerns about global cooling have transformed into worries about global warming, the underlying need for power remains: the government needs to regulate, tax, and enjoy generally greater control over the organization of society.
This does not mean, of course, that all warnings about pollution and other negative externalities are not justified. What it does mean is that politicizing science is extremely dangerous. Whether it’s climate change, foreign policy, or covid-19, the unfortunate reality is that those that argue for aggressive state intervention are often rewarded with increased government funding. We pay for it with taxes, higher prices, and a loss of liberty.
The incentives of institutional research matter. In today’s world, they are too often guided by politics, not science.
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