The “If Books Could Kill” podcast (a great media outlet choice) did an episode on The Population Bomb, a 1968 book by biology professor Paul Ehrlich about overpopulation and suggesting the world was doomed because we’d already exceeded the number of humans the planet could support. Whatever you may think about the merits of this general argument, rest assured that the increase of the global population from ~3.5 billion then to ~8 billion now, without the kind of widespread famine he predicted, suggest he may have missed the mark a bit. Wikipedia:
In The Population Bomb 's opening lines the authors state that nothing can prevent famines in which hundreds of millions of people will die during the 1970s (amended to 1970s and 1980s in later editions), and that there would be “a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Although many lives could be saved through dramatic action, it was already too late to prevent a substantial increase in the global death rate. However, in reality the global death rate has continued to decline substantially since then, from 13/1000 in 1965–74 to 10/1000 from 1985–1990. Meanwhile, the population of the world has more than doubled, while calories consumed/person have increased 24%.
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Famine has not been eliminated, but its root cause has been political instability, not global food shortage.[24] The Indian economist and Nobel Memorial Prize winner, Amartya Sen, has argued that nations with democracy and a free press have virtually never suffered from extended famines.[25] And while a 2010 UN report stated that 925 million of the world’s population of nearly seven billion people were in a constant state of hunger,[26] it also notes that the percentage of the world’s population who qualify as “undernourished” has fallen by more than half, from 33 percent to about 16 percent, since the Ehrlichs published The Population Bomb. [27]The Ehrlichs write: “I don’t see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.”[8] This view was widely held at the time, as another statement of his, later in the book: “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971.” In the book’s 1971 edition, the latter prediction was removed, as the food situation in India suddenly improved (see Green Revolution in India).
So anyway, the media’s been doing a lot of soul-searching in recent years, surely they know better than to give large platforms to a guy whose entire claim to fame in life is being completely and utterly wrong about the only idea he has…right?
RIGHT?
https://twitter.com/RottenInDenmark/status/1609779600841912320
https://twitter.com/60Minutes/status/1609715138919014402
https://twitter.com/RottenInDenmark/status/1609780107111206913
