Paul Ehrlich dies at 93 – A scientist who predicted a dire future for humanity in his e-book The Inhabitants Bomb – He received issues ‘so badly wrong’

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2026/03/16/paul-ehrlich-scientist-population-bomb-died-obituary/

He said western governments should end all food aid and argued for the forced sterilisation of Indian men with three or more children

Paul Ehrlich, who has died aged 93, was an entomologist specialising in butterflies, though he became better known as a campaigner for population control. In The Population Bomb (1968), Ehrlich predicted imminent catastrophe as a result of the human population growing faster than its ability to feed itself.

In the 1970s, he proclaimed, millions would starve to death as the weight of humanity bore down upon Earth’s resources. Six years later, in The End of Affluence, (1974, written with his wife Anne), Ehrlich increased his death-toll estimate suggesting that a billion or more people could die from starvation by the mid-1980s and that by 1985 the world would be in an era of scarcity.

When Thomas Malthus, writing An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, predicted war, pestilence and starvation as a result of overcrowding, the world’s population stood at less than one billion. By the time Ehrlich joined the fray, it was 3.6 billion. Now it is a little over eight billion. As it has turned out, Ehrlich’s population time bomb has failed to explode. Indeed, the death toll from famines has declined even as the world’s population has rocketed.

Ehrlich’s most notorious blunder was a bet he made with the libertarian economic theorist Julian Simon, who pointed out that if Ehrlich’s jeremiads were to be believed, then the price of key commodities would rise over time. Simon predicted that prices would fall instead and challenged Ehrlich to pick any commodity and any time span to illustrate his point.

In October 1980 Ehrlich bought $1,000 worth of five metals – tin, tungsten, copper, nickel and chrome – and agreed that if their combined value was lower in 1990, he would pay Simon the difference. Ten years later, Ehrlich sent Simon a cheque for $576.

In fact such was the decline in the price of the metals Ehrlich selected, Simon would have won even without taking inflation into account. Ehrlich later protested that he had been “goaded into making a bet on a matter of marginal environmental importance”, but prudently declined to take up Simon’s offer to repeat the wager with a stake of $20,000.

It was, perhaps, Ehrlich’s training as a zoologist that blinded him to the human realities. If there are 10 rabbits in a field cut off from the rest of the world, there will eventually be a Malthusian disaster when their numbers exceed the “carrying capacity” of the field. The same logic does not apply to human beings (or has not done so yet) because man is capable of using technology to create resources as well as to consume them.

Despite getting things so badly wrong, Ehrlich continued to be regarded as a guru by many people in the environmental movement, winning numerous prizes and remaining one of the most frequently cited “experts” in the field. It almost seemed that the faultier he proved to be as a prophet, the more honours were heaped upon him.