Paul Ehrlich's wicked ideas about overpopulation caused massive suffering

National Post, 22 March 2026

His 1968 book, The Population Bomb, unintentionally became a racist tract of huge impact

A false idea spread abroad is much worse than a single person telling falsehoods. A wicked idea does greater evil than a wicked person. Wicked ideas can ruin the lives of millions.

Professor Paul Ehrlich was not in the conventional sense a wicked person, but his ideas certainly were. He was serially, sensationally and spectacularly wrong about the true causes of human suffering, and thus his remedies were worse than the supposed disease. Unrepentant after a long and celebrated career built on being wrong about everything, Ehrlich died at age 93 on March 13.

Author of The Population Bomb in 1968, it is hard to think of any popular thinker of his generation who was more influential. Generations of policy-makers were Ehrlich’s children, a strange outcome for someone passionately against having children — the babbling baby a threat to the health, welfare, even survival of the planet.

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich declared in the infamous opening words of his 1968 book. “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.”

Later editions of the book — which sold some three million copies — had to drop that opening prediction, as it turned out to be wrong, and wrong, and wrong again.

A 1970s reprint had a cute baby on the cover with the cheery tagline: “While you are reading these words, five people, mostly children, have died of starvation — and forty more babies have been born.”

Ehrlich feared with a fierce passion those babies, and inspired global population control programs for decades that sought to halt the dangerous tide of new life. Tides though are natural things, and seeking to halt them is not possible without violence to the environment, including the human environment.

Armed with Ehrlich’s absurdly incorrect theories and never-come-true predictions, western governments — Ehrlich’s fellow Americans enthusiastically so — tied development aid to forced sterilization programs, close to home, in Puerto Rico, and on the other side of the world, in India. It became the norm that foreign aid mandated population control programs, coercive ones if necessary.

The babies, it turned out, who most needed to never exist were black, or brown, or yellow. The Population Bomb unintentionally became a racist tract of massive impact. Fewer of them, please, to make life allegedly more comfortable for us.

Ehrlich and his population alarmism were so popular, so mainstream, so respectable, that he appeared some 20 times on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. What better way to relax and unwind than with the witty, clever musings of an expert bringing the welcome news that the world would be a better place if there were fewer people not like you in it?

How wrong was Ehrlich? Global population was about 3.5 billion in 1968; it is about eight billion now. The widespread famines Ehrlich always saw around the corner have disappeared over the horizon. The world is more populous and more prosperous than it was in 1968, and the gains made by the poorest nations have been the greatest.

Ehrlich was wrong on the facts because he was animated by a false idea. He understood the human person to be primarily, if not exclusively, a consumer. He refused to see that — as the old adage puts it — every mouth comes with two hands. Man produces and, if permitted by circumstances to do so, produces so much more than he consumes.

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