Remembering the man who revived anti-humanism
Paul Ehrlich’s 'Population Bomb' shaped the modern politics of limits, degrowth, and technocratic management.
Paul Ehrlich, the scientist who warned the world about the dangers of overpopulation, died last week at the age of 93.
A biologist at Stanford University, Ehrlich became famous after publishing The Population Bomb in 1968. The book sold millions of copies and argued that rapid population growth would soon overwhelm the planet’s ability to feed itself. Ehrlich warned that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve in the 1970s as food supplies ran out.
The book reverberated with a generation of young people coming of age and about to enter the most productive years of their lives.
In hindsight, like so much that was predicted, his prognostications did not happen. But Ehrlich’s book helped revive a much older and darker idea: that human beings themselves are a fundamental threat to the planet.
Ehrlich’s thinking drew directly from the theory of Thomas Malthus, an economist who argued in 1798 that population inevitably grows faster than food supply. In the Malthusian view, famine, disease, and war are not tragedies so much as natural “checks” that bring humanity back into balance with the Earth’s limits.
Ehrlich modernized that argument for the 20th century. Instead of medieval agriculture running up against scarcity, it was industrial civilization colliding with planetary boundaries. Either way, the implication was stark: humanity itself had become a destabilizing force within the Earth’s system.
This shift in perspective had profound consequences. If the central problem facing the planet is not a specific policy or economic structure but human numbers and human activity, then the logical solutions begin to look very different. Rather than empowering human ingenuity and growth, the goal becomes limiting them.
Ehrlich himself openly supported aggressive population control measures. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he suggested policies such as taxes on children and stronger state intervention to limit fertility.
“There’s not the slightest question that if we don’t get the population under control with voluntary means that, in the not-too-distant future, the government will simply tell you how many children you can have and throw you in jail if you have too many,” he said in a 1970 television interview, which has gone viral since his death.
Soon after, governments around the world began experimenting with mass sterilization campaigns and birth restrictions, most famously China’s one-child policy (which the country did not rescind until 2016, recognizing the insanity of an aging population without replacement). The United States and the United Nations funded fertility reduction programs in the developing world, and Bretton Woods institutions linked economic aid to population reduction.
The idea that humanity might need to be managed, restrained, or reduced had entered mainstream policy thinking, and these ideas quickly merged with a growing systems-based approach to environmental problems.
In 1972, the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, a report that used early computer models to argue that exponential economic and population growth would eventually exceed the Earth’s capacity. The report — another hugely influential book on an impressionable younger generation — framed the global economy as a complex system approaching physical limits. Managing that system, the authors suggested, would require coordinated planning at a global scale.
This marked the beginning of a shift that continues today: environmental challenges are increasingly framed not just as scientific problems but as governance problems requiring technocratic management.
The mentality has been so pervasive that it has successfully altered public sentiment around having a family. Just last month, the New York Times ran a front page story headlined: ‘The Birthrate Is Plunging. Why Some Say That’s a Good Thing.’
Some of the letters in response show just how influential Ehrlich’s narrative continues to be:
“We are living in what scientists call a sixth mass extinction. In that context, a gradual decline in birthrates — especially when driven by education, opportunity and access to contraception — may not be a crisis. It may be a stabilizing force.” — Mary Beth Fielder, Los Angeles
“If we are truly headed toward a future in which A.I. and robots can do everything from coding to elder care, then perhaps a declining birthrate should be viewed as a relief rather than a catastrophe?” — Frank Rimalovski, Maplewood, N.J.
“What is more selfish? Restraining an urge to reproduce or having children for self-actualization on an earth already beyond its carrying capacity?” — Gordon Garmaise, Montreal
It’s unclear if any New York Times readers sent in letters with an opposing point of view. One reader of the Wall Street Journal did, however, share his viewpoint back in 2023:
”I was a college student when I read Mr. Ehrlich’s ‘The Population Bomb.’ I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later the population has increased to eight billion without dire consequences. I was gullible and stupid.” — Kenneth Emde, Woodbury, Minnesota.
That quiet regret is the most honest epitaph for Ehrlich’s legacy. Even though the famines never came, the planet did not collapse, and food production outpaced every Malthusian nightmare, the idea that people are the problem still lives on in newsrooms, policy circles, and the quiet decisions of millions who now view children as a luxury the Earth can’t afford.
That kind of thinking doesn’t save the planet, it just shrinks our future. We’re living Erlich’s legacy right now.
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Is speaks poorly of popular culture that Paul Erlich's and similarly low-IQ, inhumane prescriptions are so influential. It happened earlier with Thomas Malthus, whom you mentioned. The lives of Malthus, Karl Marx, Carl Menger and Lysander Spooner overlapped in the 19th Century. That the ideas of Malthus and Marx carried more weight than those of their intellectual and ethical betters, Menger and Spooner, is in hindsight a warning of what would follow in the 20th Century.
Will the 21st Century be a generally smarter and more ethically humane period for mainstream society? So far, no. But it's early.
I don't really fault his ideas. They are very appropriate in most cases. The problem with humans is that they can make technological advances that will change the basic assumptions.
Growing up at that time, seeing images of famine was a regular occurance in the news. There was a large number of failures in agriculture caused by many things. Once those things were targeted, we created a new problem: Overabundance of food.
The current problems seem much bigger although really, they are much more trivial. Look at vaccines. Yes, there were problems with the Covid vaccine policies. New technology really wasn't ready for widespread use. But we have whole generations that have grown complacent by the advances. We don't see the crippling effects of Polio. We don't see the birth defects and other effects of Measles and Rubella. Many of the diseases that were veratable death sentences are now often just inconveniences if contracted at all.