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The man who bet against humanity — and lost

Paul Ehrlich predicted hundreds of millions would starve thanks to overpopulation. Here’s what actually happened.

On February 9, 1970, Johnny Carson did something that would be unthinkable for a late night host today, or really anyone on TV: He gave a full hour of The Tonight Show to a Stanford professor.

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But Paul Ehrlich, the author along with his wife Anne of the blockbuster book The Population Bomb, was charismatic, telegenic, and absolutely terrifying. He told Carson’s massive audience that hundreds of millions of people were about to starve to death. Nothing could stop it.

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Ehrlich’s first appearance on The Tonight Show demonstrates a lot of things, not least how much popular TV has changed. (I’m struggling to imagine Carson’s eventual successor Jimmy Fallon giving an hour to, say, CRISPR inventor Jennifer Doudna — and without even doing a lip sync battle.) But it also shows just how influential Ehrlich was.

The great population growth slowdown

He would go on The Tonight Show more than 20 times. The Population Bomb sold over 2 million copies and became one of the most popular science books of the 20th century. His work helped popularize a broader population-panic worldview that influenced policymakers in the US and abroad, including coercive family-planning policies in countries such as India and China. Ehrlich and his book fundamentally changed the world we live in today.

And yet Ehrlich, who died last week at 93, turned out to be spectacularly wrong, wrong in ways that had major consequences for humanity. But precisely because he was wrong and yet so influential, understanding why his views were so popular is necessary for understanding why doomsaying remains so seductive — and so dangerous.

The book that went off like a bomb

The Population Bomb, I suspect, was one of those of-the-moment books that was more owned than read. But you didn’t need to get far into it to grasp Ehrlich’s alarmist message. You just needed to read the opening lines: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

And the book was just part of his lifelong campaign. Ehrlich predicted that 65 million Americans would die of famine between 1980 and 1989. He told a British audience that by the year 2000, the United Kingdom would be “a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.” He said India — which was home to nearly 600 million people in 1970 — could never feed 200 million more people. He said US life expectancy........

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