You’d think that, after the Industrial Revolution melted the Iron Law of Wages, 21st-century intellectuals wouldn’t issue calls for population control. Think again. Apparently unaware of Paul Ehrlich’s humiliation after population growth failed to precipitate global famine, Jane Goodall decided to torpedo her own reputation in a similarly Malthusian manner.

On a January 2020 panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, a clip of which has recently resurfaced on Twitter (I’m not calling it “X”), the chimp-whisperer averred:

We need to eat less meat. We need to stop land being used for cattle and growing grain for the billions of animals we keep in our intensive farms. And then, finally, we cannot, we cannot hide away from human population growth; because, you know, it underlies so many of the other problems — all these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if there were, if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.

Human beings are the problem, particularly those omnivorous ones: you (probably), me (definitely), and the vast majority of people.

Isn’t it odd that these supposed humanitarians want fewer human beings living poorer, more miserable lives for the benefit of animals and the anthropomorphized earth? Regardless, it’s absolutely refuted by the evidence: As economies transition from agrarian ones mired in subsistence-level poverty to developed ones, increases in productivity translate to greater real GDP (read: wealth, health, and happiness) per capita, even as populations grow. Our World in Data provides an illustrative graph of this phenomenon here.

Still, there are neo-Malthusians who remain unpersuaded by Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource (human ingenuity); they are concerned that, at some point, there will be too many mouths to feed given the finitude of Earth’s material resources. I direct them to the near- and below-replacement fertility rates of developed countries, as Our World in Data shows here.

Goodall is wrong: Human beings led lives of grueling poverty in the state of nature aptly described by Thomas Hobbes as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”