The Population Bomb

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2009)

This article may be inaccurate in or unbalanced towards certain viewpoints. Please improve the article by adding information on neglected viewpoints, or discuss the issue on the talk page. (October 2009)

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.^[1] The book has been criticized in recent decades for its alarmist tone and unfilled predictions. Erlich stands by the basic ideas in the book.

General description of the book

The Population Bomb was written at the suggestion of David Brower,^{[citation needed]} the executive director of the environmentalist Sierra Club, following an article Ehrlich wrote for the New Scientist magazine in December, 1967.^{[citation needed]} In that article, Ehrlich predicted that the world would experience famines sometime between 1970 and 1985 due to population growth outstripping resources.

Early editions of The Population Bomb began with the statement:

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...^{[citation needed]}

The book dealt not only with food shortage, but also with other kinds of crises caused by rapid population growth. A "population bomb", as defined in the book, required only three things: a rapid rate of change, a limit of some sort, and delays in perceiving the limit.^{[citation needed]}

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

I = P × A × T (where I = Environmental Impact, P = Population, A = Affluence, T = Technology)^{[clarification needed]}

Hence, Ehrlich argued, affluent technological nations have a greater per capita impact on the limited resources of the earth than do poorer nations.

The book sold over two million copies, raised the general awareness of population and environmental issues, and influenced 1960s and 1970s public policy.^{[citation needed]}.

Criticisms

Restatement of Malthusian Theory

The Population Bomb has been characterized by critics as primarily a repetition of the Malthusian catastrophe argument^{[citation needed]} that population growth will outpace agricultural growth unless controlled. Ehrlich assumes that the size of the population is going to rise exponentially, while available resources, in particular food, are already at their limits.^{[citation needed]} Critics even compare Erlich unfavorably to Malthus saying that although Thomas Malthus did not make a firm prediction of imminent catastrophe, Ehrlich warned of a potential massive disaster in the subsequent few years. In addition, critics state that unlike Malthus, Ehrlich did not see any means of avoiding the disaster entirely,^{[citation needed]} and proposed solutions that were much more radical than those discussed by Malthus such as starving whole countries that refused to implement population control measures.^{[citation needed]}

Incorrect formula used

An 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"),^[2][3] argued 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,^{[clarification needed]} Greiner argues that the theorized growth in population and subsequent scarcity of resources could not have occurred on Ehrlich’s time schedule.

Data actually seem to suggest linear, albeit very strong, population growth. Historical U.S. population growth was more linear than exponential. Nonetheless, it is still conceptually incorrect to claim that world population (or U.S. population) is growing linearly. The world population doubled from 3 billion in 1959 to 6 billion in 1999 and is expected to grow by another 3 billion by 2042 ^[4].

Faulty "predictions"

Ehrlich's critics claim that he made numerous predictions that did not come to pass in addition to his prediction of massive starvation of the 1970s and 1980s. Amongst other remarks, Ehrlich 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."^{[verification needed]} In the book's 1971 edition, the latter prediction was removed. In addition Ehrlich said: "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 (just one year after the Population Bomb), he stated 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.^{[5][verification needed]}

Some of the predictions came true, but the effects are mainly unfelt in the developed world, according to Ehrlich critics.^{[citation needed]} The world food production has grown exponentially at a rate much higher than population growth in both developed and developing countries,^{[citation needed]} 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 ^[6].

Famine has not been eliminated, but its root cause has been political instability, not global food shortage.^[7] 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.^{[citation needed]}

Specific critics

A 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. Of the repeated predictions of disaster, 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?"^{[citation needed]}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.

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.^{[citation needed]}

Ehrlich has also had 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.^{[8][verification needed]} The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg also disputes many of the claims in The Population Bomb.^{[citation needed]}

Ehrlich answers critics

In a 2004 Grist Magazine interview,^[9] Ehrlich acknowledged some specific predictions he had made, in the years around the time the 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 correct.

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

See also

Simon-Ehrlich wager
I PAT

External links

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

References and notes