Paul Ehrlich, the biologist and environmentalist who died last week, in 1968 wrote “The Population Bomb” forecasting mass starvation by the 1980s if global population, then 3.4 billion, was not brought under control. He has since been much mocked by anti-environmentalists, who point out correctly that global population has since soared to 8.3 billion, yet mass starvation has not ensued. Like Thomas Malthus in 1798, Ehrlich may have been right but too early, the most uncomfortable of all positions for a forecaster. His proposition is worth examining in more detail, because there is much that we enviro-sceptics can learn from it.

“The Population Bomb” was not ill-timed. The greatest rates of annual human population increase in history occurred between 1955 and 1975, when global population increased by 1.8% per year. As Ehrlich outlined, this imposed extraordinary costs on the global economy, especially in terms of education, infrastructure and housing, the provision for which in poor countries fell hopelessly short of their explosive population growth.

No amount of flim-flam can eliminate this reality; a population that is growing as quickly as that (let alone the 3%, 4% or 5% rates seen in many poor countries) will spend excessive amounts of its wealth merely to stand still in housing provision, and will produce a succeeding generation of uneducated louts whose most likely fate is involvement in terrorism or at best the illicit drug trade or prostitution.

Where Ehrlich went wrong was to identify food as the constraint that would first produce explosively unpleasant worldwide results. The same year Ehrlich published, Norman Borlaug’s (1914-2009) Green Revolution was officially christened — Borlaug’s Nobel Prize came two years later. Borlaug had begun applying high-yield seeds, modern artificial fertilizers and modern pesticides to agriculture in Mexico from 1944, building on techniques and seed varieties developed by Vice President Henry A. Wallace (1888-1965) and his company Pioneer Hi-Bred International. Within a few years Mexico had ceased to be a food importer for the first time since the fall of Porfirio Diaz in 1911; alas, its excessive population growth made it slip back into being an importer of staples in the 1990s globalization mania. In the 1960s, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Borlaug introduced his techniques to the Indian subcontinent, where they were equally successful and were thereafter spread worldwide. Global deaths by famine have fallen since 1980 to a small fraction of the 1960s level.

In this area, Ehrlich has been proved definitively wrong. The advances in agricultural technology have made the world more capable of feeding 8.3 billion people today than it was of feeding 3.4 billion people in 1968 – the average calorie intake worldwide today is considerably higher. In the same way, the Industrial Revolution, already well under way in England in 1798, proved Thomas Malthus’ predictions of starvation generally incorrect, since new techniques of production and transportation increased output sufficiently to make 3.4 billion people on average enjoy far higher standards of living in 1968 than the world’s population of 1 billion enjoyed when Malthus wrote.

The disadvantages of population growth, however, spread far beyond food availability. This column in 2013 looked at Egypt, a country that has been economically declining relative to the world ever since Cleopatra left, and compared its state in 1912, with 12 million people to that in 2012, with 85 million people (its population in 2026 is 116 million – even with good government under President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi its problems have got worse). Egypt was historically one of the world’s great granaries, but however good the agricultural technology, its thin fertile strip down the Nile is inadequate to feed its grossly excessive population, although it is still able to avoid famine through imports. In 2013, I suggested that Egypt represented the world’s 22nd century future; if we ignore Ehrlich’s wisdom it very well might do so.

Ehrlich’s solution to his “Population Bomb” was to reduce global population growth to zero as quickly as possible. This could be done by putting contraceptives in the drinking water, imposing Draconian taxes on large families, and sex-selective abortion. Food aid would be cut off to those Third World countries whose population growth was too rapid, and for example Indian males with three or more children would be sterilized.

Most of Ehrlich’s methods of bringing the problem under control involve a level of state meddling which governments are altogether unfit to undertake. To be fair, one program that has been spectacularly successful on a national basis was China’s “One Child Policy”, adopted in 1979 only a few years after Ehrlich wrote, and successful in stabilizing China’s excessive population growth after decades of Maoist profligacy. One possibility that Ehrlich did not suggest was distribution of free contraceptives in the Third World. Another alternative was a program suggested in this column (which agreed with Ehrlich’s overall view) whereby rich countries would fund old age pensions for poor ones, thus eliminating the need for them to have large families to guard against destitution in old age.

To determine the strength of Ehrlich’s contention outside the narrow area of food availability, let us suppose that by some magical process the world’s population had been stabilized at its 1968 level of 3.4 billion, with the proportions between different societies as they were then, without the massive differences in fertility since that date that have outlandishly increased Third World population. Then, the world would be different in the following ways:

• We would be approximately twice as rich. The incremental 4.9 billion population that would not have come into existence was disproportionately poor, uneducated and without much understanding of modern industrial culture. There would also be more resources available per capita, so the massive real rises in oil prices would not have occurred and real estate in the major conurbations would be much cheaper. With environmentalists less powerful (see below) average living standards would be approximately double what they are today, even if the availability of food was only modestly improved.
• Global environmental threats such as climate change would be correspondingly reduced. With only 40% of the population, even if they enjoy better living standards, we would burn only 40% of the amount of fossil fuels and emit only 40% of the pollution. The “Club of Rome” style catastrophist predictions on climate and elsewhere would be completely non-credible and would probably not have been made.
• Without environmentalists, we would have far fewer regulations, and consequently greater productivity growth. Regulations are a direct drag on growth, as the EU and UK have demonstrated over the last 20 years and the United States showed by its sharp decline in productivity growth since 1973, when the EPA began work. Without population growth, environmental constraints would be trivial and environmentalists, having no political credibility, would have to find another line of work.
• We would lose very little in scientific and cultural achievement, since the missing 4.9 billion people, without being totally bereft of such achievements, produce far less of them per capita. With a higher percentage of scientists working on intellectually productive work rather than wokery and more money to support the arts through higher living standards, the differences would not be noticeable. William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton appeared within a century in rural areas in a country with a population of less than 5 million; the population glut of today adds almost nothing to the world’s achievements.
• With global population only 3.4 billion, cities would be far more livable, with fewer homeless, far less congestion and traffic that moved at a reasonable speed. The benefits of this would be seen most clearly in the Third World countries where population has grown most rapidly; a world without slum-infested, gridlocked, crime-ridden unproductive replicas of today’s Lagos is a better world.

In 1971, Ehrlich predicted that by 2000 the United Kingdom would be “a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.” Again, he was early, but only by 25-30 years. Famously, in 1980 he bet with Julian Simon that five specified metals would rise in real value over the next decade; a 2022 study of that bet found that in 69 out of 102 possible 10-year bets between 1903 and 2015, he would have won – his mistake lay merely in making his bet at the 1980 peak of a commodities bubble.

If the world got back to the 1 billion population of Malthus’ time, with modern technology and robotics we could all live like 18th century country gentlemen, in beautiful Palladian houses surrounded by rolling parkland. By applying Ehrlich’s wisdom, this is a future we can strive for!

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)