The Population Bomb

The Population Bomb

Author	Paul R. Ehrlich
Language	English
Subject	Population
Publisher	Ballantine Books
Publication date	1968
Publication place	United States
Pages	201

The Population Bomb was a best-selling book written by Paul R. Ehrlich in 1968. It warned of the mass starvation of humans in 1970's and 1980s due to overpopulation and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. The book also popularized the previously coined term, population bomb.

General

The book has been characterized by critics as primarily a repetition of the Malthusian catastrophe argument that population growth will outpace agricultural growth unless controlled. Ehrlich assumes that the size of the population is going to rise exponentially, but that available resources, in particular food, are already at their limits. Although Thomas Malthus did not make a firm prediction of imminent catastrophe, Ehrlich warned of a potential massive disaster in the subsequent few years. Unlike Malthus, Ehrlich did not see any means of avoiding the disaster entirely.The solutions for limiting its scope that he discussed, including starving whole countries that refused to implement population control measures, were much more radical than those discussed by Malthus.

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s 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...

The book deals not only with food shortage, but also with other kinds of crises caused by rapid population growth, expressing the possibility of disaster in broader terms. A "population bomb", as defined in the book, requires only three things:

• A rapid rate of change
• A limit of some sort
• Delays in perceiving the limit

Some of the predictions came true, but the effects are mainly unfelt in the developed world. The world food production grows exponentially at a rate much higher than the population growth, in both developed and developing countries, partially due to the efforts of Norman Borlaug's "Green Revolution" of the 1960s. The food per capita level is the highest in history, and, according to a Russian textbook published in 2006, population growth rates have significantly slowed, especially in the developed world .

Famine has not been eliminated, but its root cause has been political instability, not global food shortage. The Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen, has argued that nations with democracy and a free press have virtually never suffered from extended famines.

Ehrlich's theory influenced 1960s and 1970s public policy,. However, a post-analysis by Keith Greiner published in 1994 in the magazine Chance, (a non technical, non peer reviewed publication of the American Statistical Association that is "intended to entertain as well as inform"), Ehrlich's projections could not possibly have held the scrutiny of time. According to Greiner, that is because Ehrlich applied the financial compound interest formula to population growth. Using two sets of assumptions based on the Ehrlich theory, Greiner argues that the theorized growth in population and subsequent scarcity of resources could not have occurred on Ehrlich’s time schedule.

The Population Bomb sold many copies and raised the general awareness of population and environmental issues. It was written at the suggestion of David Brower, at the time the executive director of the environmentalist Sierra Club, following an article Ehrlich wrote for the New Scientist magazine in December, 1967. In that article, Ehrlich predicted that the world would experience famines sometime between 1970 and 1985 due to population growth outstripping resources. Amongst other remarks, Ehrlich also stated that "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980," and "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." These predictions did not come to pass. In the book's 1971 edition, the latter prediction had been removed. An oft-cited cause of these famine aversions is the "Green Revolution", as it was called by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1968 Another oft-cited cause was the sharp drop in the fertility rate which occurred in the developed world during the 1960s and 1970s.

I = PAT

Main article: I PAT

Also worth noting is Ehrlich's introduction of the Impact formula:

I = P × A × T (where I = Environmental Impact, P = Population, A = Affluence, T = Technology)

Hence, Ehrlich argues, affluent technological nations have a greater per capita impact than poorer nations.

Criticisms

Critics have compared Ehrlich to Thomas Malthus for his multiple predictions of famine and economic catastrophe. The leading critic of Ehrlich was Julian Lincoln Simon, a Cornucopian economist] and libertarian theorist who authored the book The Ultimate Resource, in which he argued that a larger population is a benefit, not a cost. To test their two contrasting views on resources, in 1980, Ehrlich and Simon entered into a wager over how the price of metals would move during the 1980s. Ehrlich predicted that the price would increase as metals became more scarce in the Earth's crust, while Simon insisted the price of metals had fallen throughout human history and would continue to do so. Ehrlich lost the bet. Such was the decline in the price of the five metals Ehrlich selected that Simon would have won even without taking inflation into account.

In Ehrlich's books, it seems to some that many predictions are made, for example, The Population Bomb begins "[t]he battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death," while in The End of Affluence, Ehrlich stated, "One general prediction can be made with confidence: the cost of feeding yourself and your family will continue to increase. There may be minor fluctuations in food prices, but the overall trend will be up". In a magazine article published in 1969 titled "Eco-Catastrophe", Ehrlich predicted that the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 years by 1980 because of pesticide usage, and the nation's population would drop to 22.6 million by 1999. Criticizing Ehrlich on similar grounds as Simon was Ronald Bailey, a leader in the wise use movement, who wrote a book in 1993 entitled Eco-Scam where he blasted the views of Ehrlich, Lester Brown, Carl Sagan and other environmental theorists. Of the repeated theorizing, Simon complained "As soon as one predicted disaster doesn't occur, the doomsayers skip to another... why don't [they] see that, in the aggregate, things are getting better? Why do they always think we're at a turning point -- or at the end of the road?"

In his book Betrayal of Science and Reason, Ehrlich discussed these earlier predictions of his and re-affirmed his stances on population and resource issues.

Ehrlich also has critics on the political left. These include author Betsy Hartmann, who contends in her 1987 book Reproductive Rights and Wrongs", that Ehrlich and other environmentalists who focus on population control are misanthropic, and anti-feminist.

Demographers have criticized the book; chiefly Phillip Longman, who in his 2004 book The Empty Cradle argues that the "baby boom" of the 1950s was an aberration unlikely to be repeated and that population decline in an urbanized society is by nature hard to prevent because children in such a society are an economic liability children.

The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg also disputes many of the claims in The Population Bomb.

Ehrlich answers critics

In a 2004 Grist Magazine interview, Ehrlich acknowledged some specific predictions he had made, in the years around the time his Population Bomb was published, that had not come to pass. However, as to a number of his fundamental ideas and assertions he maintained that facts and science proved them valid.

In answer to the question: "Were your predictions in The Population Bomb right?", Erlich responded:

Anne and I have always followed U.N. population projections as modified by the Population Reference Bureau -- so we never made "predictions," even though idiots think we have. When I wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, there were 3.5 billion people. Since then we've added another 2.8 billion -- many more than the total population (2 billion) when I was born in 1932. If that's not a population explosion, what is? My basic claims (and those of the many scientific colleagues who reviewed my work) were that population growth was a major problem. Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists' warning to humanity in the same year. My view has become depressingly mainline!

External links

• Paul R Erlich and Anne H. Erlich. The Population Bomb Revisited, Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development, (2009) I(3)