Paul Erlich is Dead, his Environmentalism is (still) refuted

Environmentalist Paul Erlich alarmed the world back in 1968 predicting a "population explosion" which forecast “the greatest cataclysm in the history of man” -- food shortages escalating hunger and starvation “into famines of unbelievable proportions.”

In the obituary for the 93-year-old doom-monger, who died this week, the New York Times called his predictions "premature." But they weren't even wrong. They didn't happen, and they never will. (See above for how cataclysmically wrong the catastrophiser really was.)

Some of his other failed and frankly nasty predictions:

• "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."
• "In ten years [this was 1970] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish."
• "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."
• “Sometime in the next 15 years the end will come, and by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
• “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun."
• “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”
• "We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."

Yet despite being wrong about everything, the failed forecaster made a million and was showered with awards.

He never recanted.

Doom sells. Sadly. Still.

He was a gambler. A few years back, I wrote about a famous bet, for which this is the winning cheque:

Several decades ago, gloom-monger Paul Erlich and techno-optimist Julian Simon had a bet.

Erlich was certain resources were running out and humanity was doomed. Simon asserted they weren't and wouldn't be. The bet was that, by the end of that decade, a basket of resources chosen by Erlich would cost more to buy — more, said Erlich, because by then those resources would be running out. Less, said Simon in reponse. (Simon, you see, was confident that the ultimate resource, from which all others derive, is the human mind — a machine for turning shit into useful stuff.) 

Simon won. 

Resources weren't running out. 

They still aren't.

The "Simon Abundance Index" (SAI, below),which measures the relative abundance of resources since that bet, now stands at 609.4. Meaning that in 2023, the Earth was 509.4 percent more abundant in 2023 than it was in 1980!

How astonishing is that! World population since 1980 has almost doubled; while resources produced by human beings have multiplied by more than five times!! 

Turns out that as global population increases, that "virtually all resources became more abundant. How on earth (literally) is that possible?"

Unlike Erlich and the sundry other doom-sayers who litter the planet today, Simon recognised that without the knowledge of how to use them, raw materials have no economic value whatsoever. They are just so much stuff. What transforms a raw material into a resource is knowledge — knowledge of how that stuff might satisfy a human need, and how to place it in a causal connection to satisfy that need. (The great Carl Menger explained this process way back in 1870!) And since new knowledge is potentially limitless, so too are resources.

 Infinite, because the ultimate resource is the human mind.

In this sense, as George Reisman puts it, environmentalism is refuted.

The Simon Abundance Index: 1980-2023 (1980=100)

Marian Tupy points out some interesting parallels with other catastrophisers:

1. Malthus published his book on English overpopulation and overconsumption in 1798. Thereafter, the population of England rose, and the prices of wheat fell relative to wages.
2. Marx published 'Das Kapital' in 1867, arguing that workers' wages would be squeezed to zero by capitalist competition (based on a much-debated and probably incorrect "Engels' Pause"). Thereafter, English wages skyrocketed.
3. Ehrlich published his book about coming global famines in 1968. Thereafter, global famines collapsed, and standards of living across much of the world rose.

Forget these failed forecasters. Sign up to Tupy's Human Progress agenda instead.

RELATED:

“In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis.”

“The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills.
    "It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists. In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis. There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science.”

~ Dr. John F. Clauser, recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, from the statement of his appointment to the CO2 Coalition's board of directors [hat tip former NZ Minister of Energy Barry Brill, who chairs NZ's Climate Science Coalition]

We are now seven billon and growing!

Today, or tomorrow (or perhaps even yesterday or next week) the world can celebrate the arrival of the seven billionth human being to our present population.

This is not something about which to rend your clothes and run howling into the street—it is something about which to hooray and huzzah and to celebrate! Especially so, since for most of human history, for around one-hundred thousand years, the human population saw very little change, very few riches, and for virtually all that time it was sparse and ill fed and dirt poor.

For most of human history, the so-called Malthusian Trap remained in place, in which increasing populations tend to outstrip the food supply and the human population remained cold, dark, wet, ill and few and far between.

Not so now, for the most part. It is only since the Industrial Revolution,* that blessed moment human affairs that the Reverend Malthus barely noticed and the Greens still bewail, that increased innovation could finally begin to breed greater productivity and increasing human health and welfare—and with that, human population itself could take off and begin for the first time to flourish.

At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the numbers of human beings on the planet began to skyrocket, and so (in the places it has been allowed to take hold) it has continued ever since.

We are now seven billon and growing! Take that, Reverend Malthus!

Naturally, this news has occasioned great wailing and gnashing of teeth among contemporary Malthusians, who can be heard to wail everything from “if we keep breeding we’re all gonna die” to “if we keep breeding we’re going to take over the whole planet!”

Fortunately, as long as human remain free to invent and produce there is little danger of the former; and as long as the earth’s surface remains the approximate size that it is, and folk are left free to go there, there are still plenty of places for people to put themselves.

Because as you can see, even if all the world’s seven billion people lived in one enormous city in the US, then depending on the density of the city this is how big that city would be:

See: even at 7 billion there’s plenty of room to go around, and still plenty left over for farmland and wilderness. So quit worrying about there being enough room for everyone, and start realising instead that human fecundity depends on human freedom.

That’s the way to beat the Malthusian Trap—as we have been since we learned how.

* * * * *

* Summarises Benjamin Marks in 'The Malthusian Trap, “it is possible to take seriously the warnings of the pessimists, but as George Reisman and Ludwig von Mises point out, "it comes true only under socialism"” – i.e., only under a system in which private property is banned, production is strangled and the tragedy of the commons remains in effect – i.e., under a system of (non) production where the human mind is not able to read price signals and opportunities, and unable to adapt their own resources to suit.”