Saturday, January 27, 2018
Fifty Years on from Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb: So How Come We're Not All Dead, Yet?
We might want to remember that when we are presented with the next one...
At Breitbart.com, James Delingpole recently reminded us of this one:
"Well if Ehrlich is not embarrassed, he should be. His book sold over three million copies – presumably making him a very decent amount of money. It turned him into an academic rock star, helped win him numerous prizes (often with large sums of money attached) and may well have been responsible for winning him the post he still occupies aged 85 as Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University…
…And all for writing a book which is essentially junk. Not just junk but dangerous junk. It’s bad enough that it got its predictions – about a disastrous population collapse due to resource depletion – wrong. But far worse was the damage it did to public and political consciousness, doing much to generate the environmental hysteria we see gripping the world today.
In fact, The Population Bomb did the one thing which science books aren’t supposed to do: it actually made the people who read it more stupid."
