Birth rates are falling, but Paul Ehrlich, who famously coined the term ‘the population bomb,’ is unmoved by the data.
T he U.N.’s big biennial World Population Prospects is out with news that contradicts nearly 60 years of progressive orthodoxy. The real planetary threat is not too many people but too few: a looming drop in the birth rate that will usher in a long period of economic decline.
The WPP predicts that the global population will peak in the mid-2080s at around 10.3 billion before gradually shrinking to about 10.2 billion by the end of the century. But that’s the best-case scenario. Citing demographers working outside the centripetal force of the U.N., The Atlantic’s Marc Novikoff concludes: “Humanity won’t start to shrink in 2084. It will start to shrink in 2055, if not sooner. If the birth rate continues to drop around the world at its current pace, economic growth and workers’ retirement prospects will go the way of those projections: adjusting every few years to a smaller, sadder, poorer future.”
Upon hearing these findings, Stanford researcher Paul Ehrlich, the self-declared “loudmouth” and a father of the modern environmental movement, ought to have dropped to his knees and begged forgiveness. Since the 1968 publication of his best-selling The Population Bomb, Ehrlich has told anyone with eyes and/or ears that the planet will buckle under the strain of unbridled human procreation.
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he wrote in the book’s opening. “In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
That didn’t happen in the 1970s, of course. And it hasn’t happened since. Agricultural efficiencies and global trade have lifted billions out of poverty. Prosperity and urbanization have naturally slowed growth; humans sometimes choose smaller families. But as each decade since has swept by like the pages of a calendar in an old-timey movie, Ehrlich has maintained he was right then and he’s right now.
When asked by the New York Times in 2015 about his alarming but inaccurate predictions, he said: “My language would be even more apocalyptic today. The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is to me exactly the same kind of idea as, everybody ought to be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”
Ehrlich’s Ph.D. is in entomology — the man studied butterflies. He’s still at Stanford, listed as emeritus professor of human population studies, but he’s more famous for his off-campus activism. During a tour last year to promote his memoir, the nonagenarian insisted, “There is not the slightest question that [the current global population of] 8 billion is too many,” he said, arguing that “we” ought to be “thinking about ways to humanely reduce that number” to around two billion.
In his early days, Ehrlich insisted that mere volunteerism could do the job. “No intelligent, patriotic American family should have more than two children, and preferably only one,” Ehrlich told WOI-TV in 1970. Rising birth rates were a “fatal disease — it’s called overpopulation.”
When appeals to reason and patriotism didn’t work, his policy recommendations became more coercive. He recommended applying World War II–style rationing to the problem he identified — here in the good old U.S.A., for sure, he wrote, but everywhere else that could be reached by American wealth and power too. “We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail,” he told an interviewer. “Programs which combine ecologically sound agricultural development and population control must be established and supported in underdeveloped countries.”
Among other intellectuals, he helped shape the global strategies of the U.S. government, its USAID program, Planned Parenthood and — ironically, you might say — the United Nations itself.
Only when confronted by the rise of identity politics did Ehrlich moderate his claims. Even then, he changed the melody but not the underlying dark, minor chords. When progressives blasted his thesis as racist — because the highest birth rates are always in the poorest and most agrarian societies — Ehrlich offered a distinction: Population wasn’t the problem, he claimed — affluence was. That shift pacified critics while letting Ehrlich dodge facts fatal to his thesis.
But when asked why he didn’t eschew modern conveniences in his own life, the shameless prevaricator told an interviewer, “I wish I knew the answer. We’re all creatures of our culture. . . . I certainly live a style that uses probably ten times more energy than I would have to live a reasonable life.”
A Product of His Time (Bomb)
It’s noteworthy that sales of The Population Bomb exploded only when Ehrlich appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in February 1970.
“Johnny Carson, the comedian-host, was leery of serious guests like university professors because he feared they would be pompous, dull and opaque,” wrote Charles C. Mann in the Smithsonian magazine in 2018. “Ehrlich proved to be affable, witty and blunt. Thousands of letters poured in after his appearance, astonishing the network. The Population Bomb shot up the best-seller lists. Carson invited Ehrlich back in April, just before the first Earth Day. For more than an hour he spoke about population and ecology, about birth control and sterilization, to an audience of tens of millions. After that, Ehrlich returned to the show many times.”
The future is unwritten, of course; projections of population decline may also prove misleading. That allows Ehrlich to sustain himself on the claim that the end is still near, just over time’s horizon line if we’re wise enough to see what he sees. Speaking to The Guardian in 2018, he was still at it. Thanks to babies — especially those hateable kids in the First World — total civilizational collapse “is a near certainty in the next few decades, and the risk is increasing continually as long as perpetual growth of the human enterprise remains the goal of economic and political systems. As I’ve said many times, ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell.’”
It’s the Cure That Kills
Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease, they say. And new evidence of population decline will come as good news to people who hate crowded subway trains or Christmas shopping or who maybe just despise humans generally. But a declining birth rate spells trouble for major world economies and culture. See, young workers provide the cash that funds the social programs — including that best of social programs, the organic human family — that support old people and others who cannot (or simply will not) work.
The demographers’ Exhibit A has long been Japan, a country in which there’ve been more deaths than births, a rising “dependency ratio” — the rising number of non-working people (N) over the number of working people (W) — along with labor shortages and concerns about long-term economic stagnation.
But Japan is not alone. Fueled by Ehrlichian alarmism, India’s Indira Gandhi introduced forced sterilizations in the 1970s, rounding up some 11 million men for compulsory vasectomies. That was among the reasons voters tossed her out of office in 1977. China’s 1980s one-child policy led to a national horror show in which female babies were aborted, murdered at birth, or abandoned in favor of a statist Sophie’s choice in which families attempted to save just one male child. It worked. Then, facing a population bust, China in 2016 adopted a brand-new two-child policy. That didn’t encourage family growth. In 2021, as official panic set in, Beijing introduced a new three‑child policy. Just 90 days later, the government threw in the baby-making towel, removing all birth limits.
The problem of population decline is all over modern economies — in Italy, Japan, China, and South Korea, where the birth rate is just 0.75 percent, about a third of the 2.1 replacement rate. The U.S. has not escaped the trend. Since the Great Recession, fertility rates in the U.S. have “continued to fall and have remained below replacement level,” National Review’s editors wrote in April. NR’s assessment of the consequences is unimprovable, applying as much to any other country as to the U.S.:
These numbers, replicated throughout the developed world and much of the rest of it, call into question the sustainability of our cultures and nations: of modern life itself. Risks to nations’ GDP, pension finances, and military strength are obvious; the effects on their creativity and vitality are less measurable but no less real. The compounding effect of lower fertility over generations means that we can already expect the future to be lonelier for many people, who have much smaller and thinner family trees. The increasing suicide rates of the elderly in rapidly aging Japan and South Korea are an ominous sign. Clearly, the normal course of human life and the passing of generations benefit the entire human family.
Progressives continue to struggle with population decline, torn between the anti-human instincts of radical environmentalists, progressive identitarians, and anti-capitalists who, along with Ehrlich, believe that “affluence,” unlike poverty, apparently, is a threat to human flourishing. The award for most poignant — because most conflicted — response to the new U.N. report belongs to National Public Radio. Its recent story begins with the tale of two crazy kids who married and moved to Los Angeles. Sarah and Ben Brewington “expected their next life step would be having kids. It just seemed like the natural thing to do.” They delayed until finally deciding that, as they move through their middle 30s, the idea of creating a family is “a resounding no. It’s not something I’m interested in or want,” Sarah said. Ben agreed: “This life we’re building together didn’t need this other element in it. I don’t feel guilty at all about it now to say I don’t want kids.”
That’s when NPR’s reporters stepped in to pivot to the story’s broader theme, recounting Ehrlich’s once-fashionable “population bomb,” the U.N.’s report of a population bust and the well-documented evidence of coincidental economic decline. The reporters went on to suggest that solutions will likely include more government subsidies, “from affordable housing and health care to day care and paid family leave,” the things “families need in order to make their lives easier.”
NPR did not consider that the opposite might be true — that government programs have made being alive, never mind raising children, increasingly expensive. In California, where the birthrate is among the lowest in the nation, the cost of living is also the highest in the nation, driven by such highly regulated but essential industries as home building, insurance, health care, energy. Taxes are among the nation’s very highest. All of that is anti-family. So is the fact that Californians pay more for public education than almost all other states and yet produce the nation’s most baleful results. State lawmakers have undermined the rights of parents over their own children, making the state a kind of co-parent in family life. In that relationship, in matters of gender identity, vaccines, abortion, school curriculum, and more, the state is increasingly in the power position. The right of parents to work flexibly as freelancers — as truck drivers, programmers, photographers, translators, writers, Pilates instructors, and wedding planners, for instance — is under assault by union-backed lawmakers who regard independent contractors as a threat to the One Big Fist of organized labor.
And of course, there’s the widespread cultural fear, not limited to California but embedded here like an invasive plant species, of anything conservative. Indeed, the NPR story concludes with the possibility that all of this talk of demographic decline is merely the pointy end of the authoritarian spear — “a threat to women.” A South Carolina woman told NPR, “She is suspicious of right-wing political leaders’ motives.” “I think they just want to use women to have babies,” she said, “and maybe that would also distract the mothers, or the mothers-to-be, from pursuing other things in life, maybe other career goals.”
Coincidentally, last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom made that same claim while touring South Carolina, the likely first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential primary. “What we’re experiencing is America in reverse,” he told one audience. Republicans are “trying to bring us back to a pre-1960s world on voting rights — you know it well. Civil rights, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights and not just access to abortion, but also access to simple reproductive care, contraception. . . . It’s a moment that few of us could have imagined.”
In fact, recalling the story of Paul Ehrlich — his strategic alarmism, the lies and mischaracterizations, and especially the classic California optimism about the necessary role of government in meticulously planning the lives of individual people — we’ve seen this act before. We don’t need to “imagine.” We know these kinds of “moments” too well.